A Whole-Body Pose Taxonomy for Loco-Manipulation Tasks

Exploiting interaction with the environment is a promising and powerful way to enhance stability of humanoid robots and robustness while executing locomotion and manipulation tasks. Recently some works have started to show advances in this direction considering humanoid locomotion with multi-contacts, but to be able to fully develop such abilities in a more autonomous way, we need to first understand and classify the variety of possible poses a humanoid robot can achieve to balance. To this end, we propose the adaptation of a successful idea widely used in the field of robot grasping to the field of humanoid balance with multi-contacts: a whole-body pose taxonomy classifying the set of whole-body robot configurations that use the environment to enhance stability. We have revised criteria of classification used to develop grasping taxonomies, focusing on structuring and simplifying the large number of possible poses the human body can adopt. We propose a taxonomy with 46 poses, containing three main categories, considering number and type of supports as well as possible transitions between poses. The taxonomy induces a classification of motion primitives based on the pose used for support, and a set of rules to store and generate new motions. We present preliminary results that apply known segmentation techniques to motion data from the KIT whole-body motion database. Using motion capture data with multi-contacts, we can identify support poses providing a segmentation that can distinguish between locomotion and manipulation parts of an action.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 1 table with full page figure that appears in landscape page, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System

(WP 2010-08) Neuroeconomics: Constructing Identity

This paper asks whether neuroeconomics will make instrumental use of neuroscience to adjudicate existing disputes in economics or be more seriously informed by neuroscience in ways that might transform economics. The paper pursues the question by asking how neuroscience constructs an understanding of individuals as whole persons. The body of the paper is devoted to examining two approaches: Don Ross’s neurocellular approach to neuroeconomics and Joseph Dumit’s cultural anthropological science organization approach. The accounts are used to identify boundaries on single individual explanations. With that space Andy Clark’s external scaffolding view and Nathaniel Wilcox’s socially distributed cognition view are employed

Giant Resonances based on Unitarily Transformed Two-Nucleon plus Phenomenological Three-Nucleon Interactions

We investigate giant resonances of spherical nuclei on the basis of the Argonne V18 potential after unitary transformation within the Similarity Renormalization Group or the Unitary Correlation Operator Method supplemented by a phenomenological three-body contact interaction. Such Hamiltonians can provide a good description of ground-state energies and radii within Hartree-Fock plus low-order many-body perturbation theory. The standard Random Phase Approximation is applied here to calculate the isoscalar monopole, isovector dipole, and isoscalar quadrupole excitation modes of the 40Ca, 90Zr, and 208Pb nuclei. Thanks to the inclusion of the three-nucleon interaction and despite the minimal optimization effort, a reasonable agreement with experimental centroid energies of all three modes has been achieved. The role and scope of the Hartree-Fock reference state in RPA methods are discussed.Comment: v2: 11 pages, incl. 3 figures; extended discussion and outlook; to appear in J.Phys.