2,289 research outputs found
In-home and remote use of robotic body surrogates by people with profound motor deficits
By controlling robots comparable to the human body, people with profound
motor deficits could potentially perform a variety of physical tasks for
themselves, improving their quality of life. The extent to which this is
achievable has been unclear due to the lack of suitable interfaces by which to
control robotic body surrogates and a dearth of studies involving substantial
numbers of people with profound motor deficits. We developed a novel, web-based
augmented reality interface that enables people with profound motor deficits to
remotely control a PR2 mobile manipulator from Willow Garage, which is a
human-scale, wheeled robot with two arms. We then conducted two studies to
investigate the use of robotic body surrogates. In the first study, 15 novice
users with profound motor deficits from across the United States controlled a
PR2 in Atlanta, GA to perform a modified Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) and a
simulated self-care task. Participants achieved clinically meaningful
improvements on the ARAT and 12 of 15 participants (80%) successfully completed
the simulated self-care task. Participants agreed that the robotic system was
easy to use, was useful, and would provide a meaningful improvement in their
lives. In the second study, one expert user with profound motor deficits had
free use of a PR2 in his home for seven days. He performed a variety of
self-care and household tasks, and also used the robot in novel ways. Taking
both studies together, our results suggest that people with profound motor
deficits can improve their quality of life using robotic body surrogates, and
that they can gain benefit with only low-level robot autonomy and without
invasive interfaces. However, methods to reduce the rate of errors and increase
operational speed merit further investigation.Comment: 43 Pages, 13 Figure
Visual Estimation of Fingertip Pressure on Diverse Surfaces using Easily Captured Data
People often use their hands to make contact with the world and apply
pressure. Machine perception of this important human activity could be widely
applied. Prior research has shown that deep models can estimate hand pressure
based on a single RGB image. Yet, evaluations have been limited to controlled
settings, since performance relies on training data with high-resolution
pressure measurements that are difficult to obtain. We present a novel approach
that enables diverse data to be captured with only an RGB camera and a
cooperative participant. Our key insight is that people can be prompted to
perform actions that correspond with categorical labels describing contact
pressure (contact labels), and that the resulting weakly labeled data can be
used to train models that perform well under varied conditions. We demonstrate
the effectiveness of our approach by training on a novel dataset with 51
participants making fingertip contact with instrumented and uninstrumented
objects. Our network, ContactLabelNet, dramatically outperforms prior work,
performs well under diverse conditions, and matched or exceeded the performance
of human annotators
Multimodal learning for dyslexic musicians: Practical applications for adults
Dyslexia affects 15 to 20% of the population according to the International Dyslexia Association. Multimodal media, such as smartphones and tablets, which are capable of presenting varied modes of information (for example, visual, aural, and kinetic), have been shown to aid learning in dyslexic children. Music has been identified as a useful multisensory tool to help educators improve literacy skills in children. However, little research has been done on the impact of dyslexia on a child or adult’s ability to learn and perform music. Few studies have been undertaken that focus solely on dyslexia’s effect on musical ability in children; even fewer address dyslexia in adult musicians. This study summarises the techniques and suggestions in the literature used by both professional dyslexic musicians and educators of dyslexic children. It is hoped that this summary can inform the creation of a resource that assist musicians and their educators to use in tackling the challenges dyslexia can pose in learning and performing music. A proposed customisable music reading application is described in detail. This application would utilise the multimodal nature of tablet computers and smartphones to suit the learning styles of dyslexic musicians
SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks
The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying
cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to
offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management
costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework,
communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services,
providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services
function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC
services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner.
According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can
indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication
systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic
ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in
a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service
provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density
of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging
Telecommunications Technologie
Computer hardware and software for robotic control
The KSC has implemented an integrated system that coordinates state-of-the-art robotic subsystems. It is a sensor based real-time robotic control system performing operations beyond the capability of an off-the-shelf robot. The integrated system provides real-time closed loop adaptive path control of position and orientation of all six axes of a large robot; enables the implementation of a highly configurable, expandable testbed for sensor system development; and makes several smart distributed control subsystems (robot arm controller, process controller, graphics display, and vision tracking) appear as intelligent peripherals to a supervisory computer coordinating the overall systems
Transcultural engagement with Polish memory of the Holocaust while watching Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau
Kornblumenblau (Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despite Kornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewing Kornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber
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