Factors that affect classification performance in EEG based brain-computer interfaces

In this paper, some of the factors that affect classification performance of EEG based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) is studied. Study is specified on P300 speller system which is also an EEG based BCI system. P300 is a physiological signal that represents a response of brain to a given stimulus which occurs right 300ms after the stimulus onset. When this signal occurs, it changes the continuous EEG some micro volts. Since this is not a very distinguished change, some other physiological signals (movement of muscles and heart, blinking or other neural activities) may distort this signal. In order to understand if there is really a P300 component in the signal, consecutive P300 epochs are averaged over trials. In this study, we have been tried two different multi channel data handling methods with two different frequency windows. Resulted data have been classified using Support Vector Machines (SVM). It has been shown that proposed method has a better classification performance

Robots: ethical by design

Among ethicists and engineers within robotics there is an ongoing discussion as to whether ethical robots are possible or even desirable. We answer both of these questions in the positive, based on an extensive literature study of existing arguments. Our contribution consists in bringing together and reinterpreting pieces of information from a variety of sources. One of the conclusions drawn is that artifactual morality must come in degrees and depend on the level of agency, autonomy and intelligence of the machine. Moral concerns for agents such as intelligent search machines are relatively simple, while highly intelligent and autonomous artifacts with significant impact and complex modes of agency must be equipped with more advanced ethical capabilities. Systems like cognitive robots are being developed that are expected to become part of our everyday lives in future decades. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that their behaviour is adequate. In an analogy with artificial intelligence, which is the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require intelligence in humans, artificial morality is considered to be the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require morality in humans. The capacity for artificial (artifactual) morality, such as artifactual agency, artifactual responsibility, artificial intentions, artificial (synthetic) emotions, etc., come in varying degrees and depend on the type of agent. As an illustration, we address the assurance of safety in modern High Reliability Organizations through responsibility distribution. In the same way that the concept of agency is generalized in the case of artificial agents, the concept of moral agency, includin

Planning and Sequencing Through Multimodal Interaction for Robot Programming [Elektronisk resurs]

Over the past few decades the use of industrial robots has increased the efficiency as well as the competitiveness of several sectors. Despite this fact, in many cases robot automation investments are considered to be technically challenging. In addition, for most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) this process is associated with high costs. Due to their continuously changing product lines, reprogramming costs are likely to exceed installation costs by a large margin. Furthermore, traditional programming methods of industrial robots are too complex for most technicians or manufacturing engineers, and thus assistance from a robot programming expert is often needed. The hypothesis is that in order to make the use of industrial robots more common within the SME sector, the robots should be reprogrammable by technicians or manufacturing engineers rather than robot programming experts. In this thesis, a novel system for task-level programming is proposed. The user interacts with an industrial robot by giving instructions in a structured natural language and by selecting objects through an augmented reality interface. The proposed system consists of two parts: (i) a multimodal framework that provides a natural language interface for the user to interact in which the framework performs modality fusion and semantic analysis, (ii) a symbolic planner, POPStar, to create a time-efficient plan based on the user's instructions. The ultimate goal of this work in this thesis is to bring robot programming to a stage where it is as easy as working together with a colleague.This thesis mainly addresses two issues. The first issue is a general framework for designing and developing multimodal interfaces. The general framework proposed in this thesis is designed to perform natural language understanding, multimodal integration and semantic analysis with an incremental pipeline. The framework also includes a novel multimodal grammar language, which is used for multimodal presentation and semantic meaning generation. Such a framework helps us to make interaction with a robot easier and more natural. The proposed language architecture makes it possible to manipulate, pick or place objects in a scene through high-level commands. Interaction with simple voice commands and gestures enables the manufacturing engineer to focus on the task itself, rather than the programming issues of the robot. The second issue addressed is due to inherent characteristics of communication with the use of natural language; instructions given by a user are often vague and may require other actions to be taken before the conditions for applying the user's instructions are met. In order to solve this problem a symbolic planner, POPStar, based on a partial order planner (POP) is proposed. The system takes landmarks extracted from user instructions as input, and creates a sequence of actions to operate the robotic cell with minimal makespan. The proposed planner takes advantage of the partial order capabilities of POP to execute actions in parallel and employs a best-first search algorithm to seek the series of actions that lead to a minimal makespan. The proposed planner can also handle robots with multiple grippers, parallel machines as well as scheduling for multiple product types.</p

Robots: ethical by design

Among ethicists and engineers within robotics there is an ongoing discussion as to whether ethical robots are possible or even desirable. We answer both of these questions in the positive, based on an extensive literature study of existing arguments. Our contribution consists in bringing together and reinterpreting pieces of information from a variety of sources. One of the conclusions drawn is that artifactual morality must come in degrees and depend on the level of agency, autonomy and intelligence of the machine. Moral concerns for agents such as intelligent search machines are relatively simple, while highly intelligent and autonomous artifacts with significant impact and complex modes of agency must be equipped with more advanced ethical capabilities. Systems like cognitive robots are being developed that are expected to become part of our everyday lives in future decades. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that their behaviour is adequate. In an analogy with artificial intelligence, which is the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require intelligence in humans, artificial morality is considered to be the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require morality in humans. The capacity for artificial (artifactual) morality, such as artifactual agency, artifactual responsibility, artificial intentions, artificial (synthetic) emotions, etc., come in varying degrees and depend on the type of agent. As an illustration, we address the assurance of safety in modern High Reliability Organizations through responsibility distribution. In the same way that the concept of agency is generalized in the case of artificial agents, the concept of moral agency, including responsibility, is generalized too. We propose to look at artificial moral agents as having functional responsibilities within a network of distributed responsibilities in a socio-technological system. This does not take away the responsibilities of the other stakeholders in the system, but facilitates an understanding and regulation of such networks. It should be pointed out that the process of development must assume an evolutionary form with a number of iterations because the emergent properties of artifacts must be tested in real world situations with agents of increasing intelligence and moral competence. We see this paper as a contribution to the macro-level Requirement Engineering through discussion and analysis of general requirements for design of ethical robots