AR-Enhanced Human-Robot-Interaction - Methodologies, Algorithms, Tools

By using Augmented Reality in Human-Robot-Interaction scenariospropose it is possible to improve training, programming, maintenance and process monitoring. AR Enhanced Human Robot Interaction means it is possible to conduct activities not only in a training facility with physical robot(s) but also in a complete virtual environment. By using virtual environments only a computer and possibly Head Mounting Display is required. This will reduce the bottlenecks for with overbooked physical training facilities. Physical environment for the activities with robot(s) will still be required, however using also virtual environments will increase flexibility and human operator can focus on training more complicated tasks. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.Partially funded by FP7 EU project LIAA (http://www.project- leanautomation.eu/

Medical image computing and computer-aided medical interventions applied to soft tissues. Work in progress in urology

Until recently, Computer-Aided Medical Interventions (CAMI) and Medical Robotics have focused on rigid and non deformable anatomical structures. Nowadays, special attention is paid to soft tissues, raising complex issues due to their mobility and deformation. Mini-invasive digestive surgery was probably one of the first fields where soft tissues were handled through the development of simulators, tracking of anatomical structures and specific assistance robots. However, other clinical domains, for instance urology, are concerned. Indeed, laparoscopic surgery, new tumour destruction techniques (e.g. HIFU, radiofrequency, or cryoablation), increasingly early detection of cancer, and use of interventional and diagnostic imaging modalities, recently opened new challenges to the urologist and scientists involved in CAMI. This resulted in the last five years in a very significant increase of research and developments of computer-aided urology systems. In this paper, we propose a description of the main problems related to computer-aided diagnostic and therapy of soft tissues and give a survey of the different types of assistance offered to the urologist: robotization, image fusion, surgical navigation. Both research projects and operational industrial systems are discussed

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

Modeling, Stability Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid Docking Simulator

A hybrid docking simulator is a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator that includes a hardware element within a numerical simulation loop. One of the goals of performing a HIL simulation at the European Proximity Operation Simulator (EPOS) is the verification and validation of the docking phase in an on-orbit servicing mission.....Comment: 30 papge

Human-robot coexistence and interaction in open industrial cells

Recent research results on human\u2013robot interaction and collaborative robotics are leaving behind the traditional paradigm of robots living in a separated space inside safety cages, allowing humans and robot to work together for completing an increasing number of complex industrial tasks. In this context, safety of the human operator is a main concern. In this paper, we present a framework for ensuring human safety in a robotic cell that allows human\u2013robot coexistence and dependable interaction. The framework is based on a layered control architecture that exploits an effective algorithm for online monitoring of relative human\u2013robot distance using depth sensors. This method allows to modify in real time the robot behavior depending on the user position, without limiting the operative robot workspace in a too conservative way. In order to guarantee redundancy and diversity at the safety level, additional certified laser scanners monitor human\u2013robot proximity in the cell and safe communication protocols and logical units are used for the smooth integration with an industrial software for safe low-level robot control. The implemented concept includes a smart human-machine interface to support in-process collaborative activities and for a contactless interaction with gesture recognition of operator commands. Coexistence and interaction are illustrated and tested in an industrial cell, in which a robot moves a tool that measures the quality of a polished metallic part while the operator performs a close evaluation of the same workpiece

TOWARD INTELLIGENT WELDING BY BUILDING ITS DIGITAL TWIN

To meet the increasing requirements for production on individualization, efficiency and quality, traditional manufacturing processes are evolving to smart manufacturing with the support from the information technology advancements including cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), big industrial data, and artificial intelligence (AI). The pre-requirement for integrating with these advanced information technologies is to digitalize manufacturing processes such that they can be analyzed, controlled, and interacted with other digitalized components. Digital twin is developed as a general framework to do that by building the digital replicas for the physical entities. This work takes welding manufacturing as the case study to accelerate its transition to intelligent welding by building its digital twin and contributes to digital twin in the following two aspects (1) increasing the information analysis and reasoning ability by integrating deep learning; (2) enhancing the human user operative ability to physical welding manufacturing via digital twins by integrating human-robot interaction (HRI). Firstly, a digital twin of pulsed gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW-P) is developed by integrating deep learning to offer the strong feature extraction and analysis ability. In such a system, the direct information including weld pool images, arc images, welding current and arc voltage is collected by cameras and arc sensors. The undirect information determining the welding quality, i.e., weld joint top-side bead width (TSBW) and back-side bead width (BSBW), is computed by a traditional image processing method and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) respectively. Based on that, the weld joint geometrical size is controlled to meet the quality requirement in various welding conditions. In the meantime, this developed digital twin is visualized to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) to human users for their effective and intuitive perception to physical welding processes. Secondly, in order to enhance the human operative ability to the physical welding processes via digital twins, HRI is integrated taking virtual reality (VR) as the interface which could transmit the information bidirectionally i.e., transmitting the human commends to welding robots and visualizing the digital twin to human users. Six welders, skilled and unskilled, tested this system by completing the same welding job but demonstrate different patterns and resulted welding qualities. To differentiate their skill levels (skilled or unskilled) from their demonstrated operations, a data-driven approach, FFT-PCA-SVM as a combination of fast Fourier transform (FFT), principal component analysis (PCA), and support vector machine (SVM) is developed and demonstrates the 94.44% classification accuracy. The robots can also work as an assistant to help the human welders to complete the welding tasks by recognizing and executing the intended welding operations. This is done by a developed human intention recognition algorithm based on hidden Markov model (HMM) and the welding experiments show that developed robot-assisted welding can help to improve welding quality. To further take the advantages of the robots i.e., movement accuracy and stability, the role of the robot upgrades to be a collaborator from an assistant to complete a subtask independently i.e., torch weaving and automatic seam tracking in weaving GTAW. The other subtask i.e., welding torch moving along the weld seam is completed by the human users who can adjust the travel speed to control the heat input and ensure the good welding quality. By doing that, the advantages of humans (intelligence) and robots (accuracy and stability) are combined together under this human-robot collaboration framework. The developed digital twin for welding manufacturing helps to promote the next-generation intelligent welding and can be applied in other similar manufacturing processes easily after small modifications including painting, spraying and additive manufacturing

Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to bacteria, could simultaneously monitor entire populations of cells individually in vivo. This paper reviews plausible capabilities for microscopic robots and the physical constraints due to operation in fluids at low Reynolds number, diffusion-limited sensing and thermal noise from Brownian motion. Simple distributed controls are then presented in the context of prototypical biomedical tasks, which require control decisions on millisecond time scales. The resulting behaviors illustrate trade-offs among speed, accuracy and resource use. A specific example is monitoring for patterns of chemicals in a flowing fluid released at chemically distinctive sites. Information collected from a large number of such devices allows estimating properties of cell-sized chemical sources in a macroscopic volume. The microscopic devices moving with the fluid flow in small blood vessels can detect chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. We find the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample

Towards the integration of enterprise software: The business manufacturing intelligence

Nowadays, the Information Communication Technology has pervaded literally the companies. In the company circulates an huge amount of information but too much information doesn’t provide any added value. The overload of information exceeds individual processing capacity and slowdowns decision making operations. We must transform the enormous quantity of information in useful knowledge taking in consideration that information becomes obsolete quickly in condition of dynamic market. Companies process this information by specific software for managing, efficiently and effectively, the business processes. In this paper we analyse the myriad of acronyms of software that is used in enterprises with the changes that occurred over the time, from production to decision making until to convergence in an intelligent modular enterprise software, that we named Business Manufacturing Intelligence (BMI), that will manage and support the enterprise in the futurebusiness manufacturing intelligence, enterprise resource planning; business intelligence; management software; automation software; decision making software