Design of a Humanoid Robot Eye

This chapter addresses the design of a robot eye featuring the mechanics and motion characteristics of a human one. In particular the goal is to provide guidelines for the implementation of a tendon driven robot capable to emulate saccadic motions. In the first part of this chapter the physiological and mechanical characteristics of the eyeplant1 in humans and primates will be reviewed. Then, the fundamental motion strategies used by humans during saccadic motions will be discussed, and the mathematical formulation of the relevant Listing\u2019s Law and Half-Angle Rule, which specify the geometric and kinematic characteristics of ocular saccadic motions, will be introduced

Chapter Large Scale Capacitive Skin for Robots

Communications engineering / telecommunication

A proxy-tactile reactive control for robots moving in clutter

— Robots performing tasks in challenging environments must be supported by control or planning algorithms that exploit sensor feedback to effectively plan the robot’s actions. In this paper, we propose a reactive control law that simultaneously utilizes proximity and tactile feedback to perform a pick-and-place task in an unknown and cluttered environment. Specifically, the presented solution leverages proximity sensing obtained from distributed Time of Flight (ToF) sensors to avoid collision when this does not interfere with the pick-and-place task. Safety is guaranteed by a higher-priority task using tactile feedback that reduces contact forces when a collision occurs. Additionally, we compare the effectiveness of this control scheme with a collision detection and reaction scheme based solely on tactile sensing. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the collisions with the environment and the task execution time of the pick-and-place operation

Combining ontologies and workflows to design formal protocols for biological laboratories

Background Laboratory protocols in life sciences tend to be written in natural language, with negative consequences on repeatability, distribution and automation of scientific experiments. Formalization of knowledge is becoming popular in science. In the case of laboratory protocols two levels of formalization are needed: one for the entities and individuals operations involved in protocols and another one for the procedures, which can be manually or automatically executed. This study aims to combine ontologies and workflows for protocol formalization. Results A laboratory domain specific ontology and the COW (Combining Ontologies with Workflows) software tool were developed to formalize workflows built on ontologies. A method was specifically set up to support the design of structured protocols for biological laboratory experiments. The workflows were enhanced with ontological concepts taken from the developed domain specific ontology. The experimental protocols represented as workflows are saved in two linked files using two standard interchange languages (i.e. XPDL for workflows and OWL for ontologies). A distribution package of COW including installation procedure, ontology and workflow examples, is freely available from http://www.bmr-genomics.it/farm/cow webcite. Conclusions Using COW, a laboratory protocol may be directly defined by wet-lab scientists without writing code, which will keep the resulting protocol's specifications clear and easy to read and maintain

Skinning a Robot: Design Methodologies for Large-Scale Robot Skin

Providing a robot with large-scale tactile sensing capabilities requires the use of design tools bridging the gap between user requirements and technical solutions. Given a set of functional requirements (e.g., minimum spatial sensitivity or minimum detectable force), two prerequisites must be considered: (i) the capability of the chosen tactile technology to satisfy these requirements from a technical standpoint; (ii) the ability of the customisation process to find a trade-off among different design parameters, such as (in case of robot skins based on the capacitive principle) dielectric thickness, diameter of sensing points, or weight. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) the description of the possibilities offered by a design toolbox for large-scale robot skin based on Finite Element Analysis and optimisation principles, which provides a designer with insights and alternative choices to obtain a given tactile performance according to the scenario at hand; (ii) a discussion about the intrinsic limitations in simulating robot skin

Apps and Web mapping: innovative tools to promote slow tourism along Via Regina

Overlooking the West coast of Lake Como in Northern Italy, Via Regina has represented a fundamental European trade and pilgrim route since the ancient Roman times. The dense system of paths departing from it and spanning the beautiful mountainous region at the border between Italy and Switzerland makes this area an awesome destination for slow tourism activities, which consist of sustainable forms of transportation, appreciation of nature and (re)discovery of the local history and culture. In the frame of the Interreg project “The Paths of Regina – Crossborder paths linked to Via Regina”, which involves Italian and Swiss universities, cultural associations, local agencies and administrations, this work aims at valorizing slow tourism in the Via Regina region through the creation of open source Web Mapping applications leveraging also the modern fields of crowdsourcing and virtual globes

TRAIT (TRAnscript Integrated Table): a knowledgebase of human skeletal muscle transcripts.

Abstract Summary: TRAIT is a knowledgebase integrating information on transcripts with related data from genome, proteins, ortholog genes and diseases. It was initially built as a system to manage an EST-based gene discovery project on human skeletal muscle, which yielded over 4500 independent sequence clusters. Transcripts are annotated using automatic as well as manual procedures, linking known transcripts to public databases and unknown transcripts to tables of predicted features. Data are stored in a MySQL database. Complex queries are automatically built by means of a user-friendly web interface that allows the concurrent selection of many fields such as ontology, expression level, map position and protein domains. The results are parsed by the system and returned in a ranked order, in respect to the number of satisfied criteria. Availability: http://muscle.cribi.unipd.it and http://muscle.cribi.unipd.it/features/querystrait.html Contact: [email protected]; [email protected] * To whom correspondence should be addressed

Promoting slow tourism through FOSS4G Web Mapping: an Italian-Swiss case study

Slow tourism defines a sustainable way of experiencing a territory based on environmentally-friendly forms of transportation, the appreciation of nature and the rediscovery of local cultural traditions. Advancements in geo-information technology have opened new possibilities for promoting this practice. A slow tourism ongoing project focused on the cross-border area between Italy and Switzerland is presented. Several FOSS4G-based Web Mapping applications are developed which address different users and feature different functionalities. The applications include: a mobile app allowing tourists to report Points of Interest (POIs) along the paths; a mobile app enabling professionals to survey new paths; a traditional 2D Web viewer providing access to and interaction with the project data; an application offering a virtual tour along the paths; and a virtual-globe based 3D viewer with participative functionalities