Vehicle concept exploration and avionics architecture design for a fast package delivery system

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2000.Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage .Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-97).Fast Package Delivery was explored as a possible commercial application of advanced reusable launch vehicle technologies. The market was divided into two distinct segments: an on-demand charter service for urgent deliveries, and a scheduled service similar to today's overnight delivery services. System reliability is a strong driver for both cases. For the on-demand case, vehicle speed is of critical importance. In order to provide on-demand service, only one customer may be served per vehicle flight. Since the price a customer will pay is highly sensitive to vehicle speed, the optimal vehicle concept was determined to be a Mach 6 hypersonic aircraft. Due to the small payload weight (200 lb) the overall vehicle size and cost are highly sensitive to equipment weight. Therefore substantial savings could be realized if the aircraft were unmanned. Flight operations would most likely be autonomous during cruise, but remotely piloted during launch and landing. Scheduled service, due to its much larger projected payload (6000 lb), is less sensitive to the weight of onboard equipment, and would not need to be unmanned. Packages from many customers would be carried at once, enabling lower prices to be charged to each customer. Lower prices mean that lower vehicle speeds would be acceptable to the customers, and so the optimal vehicle concept for scheduled service was found to be a Mach 2-3 supersonic transport. Unfortunately, due to the inherent unreliability of experimental technologies, Fast Package Delivery does not appear to be a feasible application at this time. However, once supersonic and reusable launch vehicle technologies begin to mature, Fast Package Delivery should be considered as a realistic business prospect. This paper presents the market analysis, system requirements development, vehicle concept selection, and avionics considerations for a Fast Package Delivery system.by Dylan F. Glas.M.Eng

Persistence of the uncanny valley: the influence of repeated interactions and a robot's attitude on its perception

Zlotowski J, Sumioka H, Nishio S, Glas DF, Bartneck C, Ishiguro H. Persistence of the uncanny valley: the influence of repeated interactions and a robot's attitude on its perception. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015;6:883

Laser Tracking of Human Body Motion Using Adaptive Shape Modeling

In this paper we present a method for determining body orientation and pose information from laser scanner data using particle filtering with an adaptive modeling algorithm. A parametric human shape model is recursively updated to fit observed data after each resampling step of the particle filter. This updated model is then used in the likelihood estimation step for the following iteration. This method has been implemented and tested by using a network of laser range finders to observe human subjects in a variety of interactions. We present results illustrating that our method can closely track torso and arm movements even with noisy and incomplete sensor data, and we show examples of body language primitives that can be observed from this orientation and positioning information. I

Field Trial for Simultaneous Teleoperation of Mobile Social Robots

Simultaneous teleoperation of mobile, social robots presents unique challenges, combining the real-time demands of conversation with the prioritized scheduling of navigational tasks. We have developed a system in which a single operator can effectively control four mobile robots performing both conversation and navigation. We compare the teleoperation requirements for mobile, social robots with those of traditional robot systems, and we identify metrics for evaluating task difficulty and operator performance for teleoperation of mobile social robots. As a proof of concept, we present an integrated priority model combining real-time conversational demands and non-real-time navigational demands for operator attention, and in a pioneering study, we apply the model and metrics in a demonstration of our multi-robot system through real-world field trials in a shopping arcade. fresh reassessment of the fundamental requirements and priorities for teleoperation of mobile, social robotic systems. For traditional robotic systems, significant progress has been made in the formulization of concepts such as fan-out, interaction time, neglect time, and interaction efficiency [2, 18, 25] to model the number of robots that can be controlled simultaneously for tasks such as search and navigation

Simultaneous teleoperation of multiple social robots

Teleoperation of multiple robots has been studied extensively for applications such as robot navigation; however, this concept has never been applied to the field of social robots. To explore the unique challenges posed by the remote operation of multiple social robots, we have implemented a system in which a single operator simultaneously controls up to four robots, all engaging in communication interactions with users. We present a user interface designed for operating a single robot while monitoring several others in the background, then we propose methods for characterizing task difficulty and introduce a technique for improving multiple-robot performance by reducing the number of conflicts between robots demanding the operator’s attention. Finally, we demonstrate the success of our system in laboratory trials based on real-world interactions

An Interaction Design Framework for Social Robots

Abstract—We present a novel design framework enabling the development of social robotics applications by cross-disciplinary teams of programmers and interaction designers. By combining a modular back-end software architecture with an easy-to-use graphical interface for developing interaction sequences, this system enables programmers and designers to work in parallel to develop robot applications and tune the subtle details of social behaviors. In this paper, we describe the structure of our design framework, and we present an experimental evaluation of our system showing that it increases the effectiveness of programmerdesigner teams developing social robot applications. Keywords-human-robot interaction; software development; social robotics; programming interfaces; I