From Human Perception and Action Recognition to Causal Understanding of Human-Robot Interaction in Industrial Environments

Human-robot collaboration is migrating from lightweight robots in laboratory environments to industrial applications, where heavy tasks and powerful robots are more common. In this scenario, a reliable perception of the humans involved in the process and related intentions and behaviors is fundamental. This paper presents two projects investigating the use of robots in relevant industrial scenarios, providing an overview of how industrial human-robot collaborative tasks can be successfully addressed

Flexible and reconfigurable robotic inspection in manufacturing

Having a generic and flexible software infrastructure for inspection robots is the main goal of the SPIRIT project. SPIRIT is a EU funded project whose main tangible result is a software framework that includes an offline and an inline framework. The offline part is used for simulating the robotic workcell and configure the whole inspection task, e.g. select the robot and the inspection sensor and finally compute robot trajectory. The inline part instead is responsible for reproducing the simulated task on the real robot, it also includes innovative features like local and global re-planning, real-time data mapping for backprojecting sensor information on the 3D CAD model of the inspected part. In the project four different demonstrators have been developed, they all belongs to different industrial settings, i.e. automotive, aerospace and manufacture industry. Such high level of diversity demonstrates how the SPIRIT framework is general and flexible enough to be used in heterogeneous environments without prototyping and developing the entire workcell from scratch each time

Physicians’ religious/spiritual characteristics and their behavior regarding religiosity and spirituality in clinical practice A meta-analysis of individual participant data

Background: Religiosity and/or spirituality (R/S) of physicians have been reported to inform behavior regarding religiosity and spirituality in clinical practice (R/S-B). Our aim was to study this association. Methods: Building upon a large international data pool of physician values we performed network and systematic literature searches using Google Scholar, Web of Science, Embase, Medline, and PsycInfo. Measures for R/S and R/S-B were selected for comparability with existing research. We performed a two-stage IPDMA using R/S coefficients from sample-wise multiple regression analyses as summary measures. We controlled for age, gender, and medical specialty. An additional sub-analysis compared psychiatrists to non-psychiatrists. Results: We found 11 eligible surveys from 8 countries (n = 3159). We found a positive association between R/S and R/S-B with an overall R/S coefficient of 0.65 (0.48–0.83). All samples revealed a positive association between R/S and R/S-B. Only 2 out of the 11 samples differed from the overall confidence interval. Psychiatrists had a higher degree of R/S-B, but associations with R/S did not differ compared to non-psychiatrists. Conclusions: We confirmed a significant association between R/S and R/S-B in this study. Despite large cultural differences between samples, coefficients remained almost constant when controlling for confounders, indicating a cultural independent effect of R/S on R/S-B, which to our knowledge has not been documented before. Such interaction can constitute both facilitators and barriers for high quality health care and should be considered in all aspects of patient and relationship-centered medicine. Abbreviations: IPDMA = individual participant data meta-analysis, NERSH = network for research in spirituality and health, R/S = religiosity and/or spirituality, R/S-B = self-reported behavior regarding R/S in clinical practice, RSMPP = religion and spirituality in medicine: physicians’ perspectives (questionnaire)