Occupational health and safety in a robot blended workplace

Abban már nincs semmi újdonság, hogy a modern munkahelyeken robotokat használnak és ezek a munkavállalókkal együtt végzik a munkát. Míg azonban ezeket a gépeket eleinte csak egyszerű feladatok ellátására építették, mára a mesterséges intelligencia már oda jutott, hogy a robotok bizonyos értelemben „gondolkodni” is tudnak. Ebben a cikkben ismertetjük a robotok és intelligens gépek jelenlegi használatát, felvázoljuk a robotika széles körű alkalmazásának jövőképét és azt, hogy mindez milyen következményekkel jár a munkahelyi biztonságra és egészségvédelemre. Szisztematikusan mutatjuk be a robotok három fő generációját (ipari robotok, szolgáltató robotok és kollaboratív robotok), a velük kapcsolatos specifikus munkahelyi kockázatokat és a jelenleg ismert munkabiztonsági standardokat. A történelmi tapasztalatok azt mutatják, hogy az új technológiák az új előnyök mellett új költségekkel, lehetőségekkel és veszélyekkel is járnak. A robotok új kihívásokat jelentenek a munkavédelem és a munkaügyi egészség modernizálása számára. Utalás történik arra, hogy a világ számos helyén folynak kísérletek a robotok és az emberek közötti munkavégzés biztonsági standardjainak a kidolgozására. Válaszolva a bevezetésben feltett kérdésre, kijelenthető, hogy a robotok alkalmazása – középtávon biztosan – nemhogy megszüntetné a munkavédelem és a munkaegészségügy iránti igényt, sőt egyre újabb megoldandó feladatok elé állítja

Opinions and Outlooks on Morphological Computation

Morphological Computation is based on the observation that biological systems seem to carry out relevant computations with their morphology (physical body) in order to successfully interact with their environments. This can be observed in a whole range of systems and at many different scales. It has been studied in animals – e.g., while running, the functionality of coping with impact and slight unevenness in the ground is "delivered" by the shape of the legs and the damped elasticity of the muscle-tendon system – and plants, but it has also been observed at the cellular and even at the molecular level – as seen, for example, in spontaneous self-assembly. The concept of morphological computation has served as an inspirational resource to build bio-inspired robots, design novel approaches for support systems in health care, implement computation with natural systems, but also in art and architecture. As a consequence, the field is highly interdisciplinary, which is also nicely reflected in the wide range of authors that are featured in this e-book. We have contributions from robotics, mechanical engineering, health, architecture, biology, philosophy, and others

Program and Abstracts from the Celebration of Student Scholarship, 2017

Program and Abstracts from the Celebration of Student Scholarship on April 26, 2017

What is science for? The Lighthill report on artificial intelligence reinterpreted

This paper uses a case study of a 1970s controversy in artificial-intelligence (AI) research to explore how scientists understand the relationships between research and practical applications. It is part of a project that seeks to map such relationships in order to enable better policy recommendations to be grounded empirically through historical evidence. In 1972 the mathematician James Lighthill submitted a report, published in 1973, on the state of artificial-intelligence research under way in the United Kingdom. The criticisms made in the report have been held to be a major cause behind the dramatic slowing down (subsequently called an ‘AI winter’) of such research. This paper has two aims, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to inquire into the causes, motivations and content of the Lighthill report. I argue that behind James Lighthill's criticisms of a central part of artificial intelligence was a principle he held throughout his career – that the best research was tightly coupled to practical problem solving. I also show that the Science Research Council provided a preliminary steer to the direction of this apparently independent report. The broader aim of the paper is to map some of the ways that scientists (and in Lighthill's case, a mathematician) have articulated and justified relationships between research and practical, real-world problems, an issue previously identified as central to historical analysis of modern science. The paper therefore offers some deepened historical case studies of the processes identified in Agar's ‘working-worlds’ model

06031 Abstracts Collection -- Organic Computing -- Controlled Emergence

Organic Computing has emerged recently as a challenging vision for future information processing systems, based on the insight that we will soon be surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems equipped with sensors and actuators to be aware of their environment, to communicate freely, and to organize themselves in order to perform the actions and services required. Organic Computing Systems will adapt dynamically to the current conditions of its environment, they will be self-organizing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware. From 15.01.06 to 20.01.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06031 ``Organic Computing -- Controlled Emergence\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. The seminar was characterized by the very constructive search for common ground between engineering and natural sciences, between informatics on the one hand and biology, neuroscience, and chemistry on the other. The common denominator was the objective to build practically usable self-organizing and emergent systems or their components. An indicator for the practical orientation of the seminar was the large number of OC application systems, envisioned or already under implementation, such as the Internet, robotics, wireless sensor networks, traffic control, computer vision, organic systems on chip, an adaptive and self-organizing room with intelligent sensors or reconfigurable guiding systems for smart office buildings. The application orientation was also apparent by the large number of methods and tools presented during the seminar, which might be used as building blocks for OC systems, such as an evolutionary design methodology, OC architectures, especially several implementations of observer/controller structures, measures and measurement tools for emergence and complexity, assertion-based methods to control self-organization, wrappings, a software methodology to build reflective systems, and components for OC middleware. Organic Computing is clearly oriented towards applications but is augmented at the same time by more theoretical bio-inspired and nature-inspired work, such as chemical computing, theory of complex systems and non-linear dynamics, control mechanisms in insect swarms, homeostatic mechanisms in the brain, a quantitative approach to robustness, abstraction and instantiation as a central metaphor for understanding complex systems. Compared to its beginnings, Organic Computing is coming of age. The OC vision is increasingly padded with meaningful applications and usable tools, but the path towards full OC systems is still complex. There is progress in a more scientific understanding of emergent processes. In the future, we must understand more clearly how to open the configuration space of technical systems for on-line modification. Finally, we must make sure that the human user remains in full control while allowing the systems to optimize

Computing multi-scale organizations built through assembly

The ability to generate and control assembling structures built over many orders of magnitude is an unsolved challenge of engineering and science. Many of the presumed transformational benefits of nanotechnology and robotics are based directly on this capability. There are still significant theoretical difficulties associated with building such systems, though technology is rapidly ensuring that the tools needed are becoming available in chemical, electronic, and robotic domains. In this thesis a simulated, general-purpose computational prototype is developed which is capable of unlimited assembly and controlled by external input, as well as an additional prototype which, in structures, can emulate any other computing device. These devices are entirely finite-state and distributed in operation. Because of these properties and the unique ability to form unlimited size structures of unlimited computational power, the prototypes represent a novel and useful blueprint on which to base scalable assembly in other domains. A new assembling model of Computational Organization and Regulation over Assembly Levels (CORAL) is also introduced, providing the necessary framework for this investigation. The strict constraints of the CORAL model allow only an assembling unit of a single type, distributed control, and ensure that units cannot be reprogrammed - all reprogramming is done via assembly. Multiple units are instead structured into aggregate computational devices using a procedural or developmental approach. Well-defined comparison of computational power between levels of organization is ensured by the structure of the model. By eliminating ambiguity, the CORAL model provides a pragmatic answer to open questions regarding a framework for hierarchical organization. Finally, a comparison between the designed prototypes and units evolved using evolutionary algorithms is presented as a platform for further research into novel scalable assembly. Evolved units are capable of recursive pairing ability under the control of a signal, a primitive form of unlimited assembly, and do so via symmetry-breaking operations at each step. Heuristic evidence for a required minimal threshold of complexity is provided by the results, and challenges and limitations of the approach are identified for future evolutionary studies

MRsensing: environmental monitoring and context recognition with cooperative mobile robots in catastrophic incidents

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores, apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de CoimbraMulti-sensor information fusion theory concerns the environmental perception activities to combine data from multiple sensory resources. Humans, as any other animals, gather information from the environment around them using different biological sensors. Combining them allows structuring the decisions and actions when interacting with the environment. Under disaster conditions, effective mult-robot information sensor fusion can yield a better situation awareness to support the collective decision-making. Mobile robots can gather information from the environment by combining data from different sensors as a way to organize decisions and augment human perception. The is especially useful to retrieve contextual environmental information in catastrophic incidents where human perception may be limited (e.g., lack of visibility). To that end, this work proposes a specific configuration of sensors assembled in a mobile robot, which can be used as a proof of concept to measure important environmental variables in an urban search and rescue (USAR) mission, such as toxic gas density, temperature gradient and smoke particles density. This data is processed through a support vector machine classifier with the purpose of detecting relevant contexts in the course of the mission. The outcome provided by the experiments conducted with TraxBot and Pioneer-3DX robots under the Robot Operating System framework opens the door for new multi-robot applications on USAR scenarios. This work was developed within the CHOPIN research project1 which aims at exploiting the cooperation between human and robotic teams in catastrophic accidents.O tema da fusão sensorial abrange a perceção ambiental para combinar dados de vários recursos naturais. Os seres humanos, como todos os outros animais, recolhem informações do seu redor, utilizando diferentes sensores biológicos. Combinando-se informação dos diferentes sensores é possível estruturar decisões e ações ao interagir com o meio ambiente. Sob condições de desastres, a fusão sensorial de informação eficaz proveniente de múltiplos robôs pode levar a um melhor reconhecimento da situação para a tomada de decisão coletiva. Os robôs móveis podem extrair informações do ambiente através da combinação de dados de diferentes sensores, como forma de organizar as decisões e aumentar a perceção humana. Isto é especialmente útil para obter informações de contexto ambientais em cenários de catástrofe, onde a perceção humana pode ser limitada (por exemplo, a falta de visibilidade). Para este fim, este trabalho propõe uma configuração específica de sensores aplicados num robô móvel, que pode ser usado como prova de conceito para medir variáveis ambientais importantes em missões de busca e salvamento urbano (USAR), tais como a densidade do gás tóxico, gradiente de temperatura e densidade de partículas de fumo. Esta informação é processada através de uma máquina de vetores de suporte com a finalidade de classificar contextos relevantes no decorrer da missão. O resultado fornecido pelas experiências realizadas com os robôs TraxBot e Pioneer 3DX usando a arquitetura Robot Operating System abre a porta para novas aplicações com múltiplos robôs em cenários USAR

Artificial Intelligence in Modern Society

Artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly into diverse areas in modern society. AI can be used in several areas such as research in the medical field or creating innovative technology, for instance, autonomous vehicles. Artificial intelligence is used in the medical field to improve the accuracy of programs used for detecting health conditions. AI technology is also used in programs such as Netflix or Spotify. This type of AI will monitor a user’s habits and make recommendations based on their recent activity. Banks use AI systems to monitor activity on members’ accounts to check for identity theft, approve loans and maintain online security. Systems like these can even be found in call centers. These programs analyze a caller’s voice in real time to provide information to the call center which helps them build a faster rapport with the caller. The purpose of this research paper is to explain how artificial intelligence is creating advanced technologies in various fields of study which will create a more efficient society