Integrated circuit interface for artificial skins

Artificial sensitive skins are intended to emulate the human skin to improve the skills of robots and machinery in complex unstructured environments. They are basically smart arrays of pressure sensors. As in the case of artificial retinas, one problem to solve is the management of the huge amount of information that such arrays provide, especially if this information should be used by a central processing unit to implement some control algorithms. An approach to manage such information is to increment the signal processing performed close to the sensor in order to extract the useful information and reduce the errors caused by long wires. This paper proposes the use of voltage to frequency converters to implement a quite straightforward analog to digital conversion as front end interface to digital circuitry in a smart tactile sensor. The circuitry commonly implemented to read out the information from a piezoresistive tactile sensor can be modified to turn it into an array of voltage to frequency converters. This is carried out in this paper, where the feasibility of the idea is shown through simulations and its performance is discussed.Gobierno de España TEC2006-12376-C02-01, TEC2006-1572

A National Research Agenda for Virtual Reality: Report by the National Research Council Committee on VR R&D

In 1992, at the request of a consortium of federal agencies, the National Research Council established a committee to "recommand a national research and development agenda in the area of virtual reality" to set U.S. government R&D funding priorities for virtual reality (VR) for the next decade...

An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Interactivity And Humor In E-Commerce

This paper studies the effects of two website attributes that online businesses often employ in product presentations - the use of interactive product demos and product-related humor - on user perceptions of site entertainment and informativeness, which research has shown may significantly influence a visitor’s overall attitude toward an online vendor. Through a 2x2 factorial design, this experimental study finds that the use of interactive product demos helps deliver a message in a more informative and entertaining way, while humor has some marginal effects on perceived entertainment.  Findings suggest that more direct product experience is essential in presenting a complete product picture and providing a more enjoyable experience to online shoppers

Telepresence control of a dual-arm dexterous robot

Telepresence is an approach to teleoperation that provides egocentric, intuitive interactions between an operator and a remote environment. This approach takes advantage of the natural cognitive and sensory-motor skills of an on-orbit crew and effectively transfers them to a slave robot. A dual-arm dexterous robot operating under telepresence control has been developed and is being evaluated. Preliminary evaluation revealed several important observations that suggest the directions of future enhancement

Capture and recreation of higher order 3D sound fields via reciprocity

Presented at the 10th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2004)We propose a unified and simple approach for capturing and recreating 3D sound fields by exploring the reciprocity principle that is satisfied between the two processes. Our approach makes the system easy to build, and practical. Using this approach, we can capture the 3D sound field by a spherical microphone array and recreate it using a spherical loudspeaker array, and ensure that the recreated sound field matches the recorded field up to a high order of spherical harmonics. A design example and simulation results are presented. For some regular or semi-regular microphone layouts, we design an efficient parallel implementation of the multi-directional spherical beamformer by using the rotational symmetries of the beampattern and of the spherical microphone array. This can be implemented in either software or hardware. A simple design example is presented to demonstrate the idea. It can be easily adapted for other regular or semi-regular layouts of microphones

Coordinated control of a dual-arm dexterous robot using full immersion telepresence and virtual reality

Telepresence is an approach to teleoperation that provides egocentric, intuitive interactions between an operator and a remote environment. This approach takes advantage of the natural cognitive and sensory motor skills of an on-board crew and effectively transfers them to a slave robot. A dual alarm dexterous robot operating under telepresence control has been developed and initial evaluations of the system performing candidate EVA, IVA and planetary geological tasks were conducted. The results of our evaluation showed that telepresence control is very effective in transferring the operator's skills to the slave robot. However, the results also showed that, due to the kinematic and dynamics inconsistencies between the operator and the robot, a limited amount of intelligent automation is also required to carry out some to the tasks. Therefore, several enhancements have been made to the original system to increase the automated capabilities of the control system without losing the benefits of telepresence