Personalization framework for adaptive robotic feeding assistance

The final publication is available at link.springer.comThe deployment of robots at home must involve robots with pre-defined skills and the capability of personalizing their behavior by non-expert users. A framework to tackle this personalization is presented and applied to an automatic feeding task. The personalization involves the caregiver providing several examples of feeding using Learning-by- Demostration, and a ProMP formalism to compute an overall trajectory and the variance along the path. Experiments show the validity of the approach in generating different feeding motions to adapt to user’s preferences, automatically extracting the relevant task parameters. The importance of the nature of the demonstrations is also assessed, and two training strategies are compared. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Towards In-Transit Analytics for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, or Digital Manufacturing, is a vision of inter-connected services to facilitate innovation in the manufacturing sector. A fundamental requirement of innovation is the ability to be able to visualise manufacturing data, in order to discover new insight for increased competitive advantage. This article describes the enabling technologies that facilitate In-Transit Analytics, which is a necessary precursor for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) visualisation.Comment: 8 pages, 10th IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings-2017), Exeter, UK, 201

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

My boy builds coffins. Future memories of your loved ones

The research is focus on the concept of storytelling associated with product design, trying to investigate new ways of designing and a possible future scenario related to the concept of death. MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS is a gravestone made using a combination of cremation’s ashes and resin. It is composed by a series of holes in which the user can stitch a text, in order to remember the loved one. The stitching need of a particular yarn produced in Switzerland using some parts of human body. Project also provides another version which uses LED lights instead of the yarn. The LEDs - thanks to an inductive coupling - will light when It will be posed in the hole. The gravestone can be placed where you want, as if it would create a little altar staff at home. In this way, there is a real connection between the user and the dearly departed

Fab Lab Amersfoort, De War: an innovation history

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