Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Applied magnetic : its rapid revolution.

A magnet in general is material that produced, or is operated by means of magnetism. The way materials respond at microscopic level to an applied magnetic field is known as magnetism. The magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of magnetism in producing force so that different poles will attract to each other while similar poles will repel each other. The source of magnetism can be found in a permanent magnet and a conductor that is applied by an electric current. This means that the electrical energy can be converted to the magnetic energy without any medium of transmission. Such relationship makes magnetics capable of producing mechanical energy from an electrical energy such as motors, solenoids and actuators. Vice versa, electrical energy can also be produced from the mechanical energy. The use of electromagnetic principle is more superior compared with other automation principles such as hydraulics since it is cleaner and easier to be controlled for a fast response. The revolution of this field has innovated commercial products such as pumps. compressors, fans, blenders. cutters, drillers, crushers, printers, rollers, etc. Thus, electromagnetics has emerged in a new era where everyone is talking about efficiency and energy consumption plus being environmental friendly and less costly innovations