The persistent myths of ‘Soft Power’

The difference between the upcoming U.S. presidential election and previous iterations is that Republicans no longer have the upper on foreign policy. Their self-proclaimed monopoly on national security expertise hand and belief in a muscular international posture collapsed with John McCain’s presidential bid. We can now have honest foreign policy debates on how to actually handle real-world challenges like nuclear proliferation, the rise of China, terrorism, failed states rather than assuming a priori which side would be better at tackling them

Could Mayors rule the world?

Leading U.S. political scientist Benjamin Barber visited LSE on Wednesday for a seminar to discuss the framing ideas for his current book project titled If Mayors Ruled the World

The World Economic Forum: An anatomy of multi-stakeholder global policy-making.

A growing literature speaks to how non-state actors (both corporations and civil society) increasingly play roles in global governance such as lobbying inter-state deliberations or filling governance gaps in the provision of public goods. Far less analysis, however, has been devoted to how such actors attempt to supply new and original global policy processes altogether. How does a non-state actor acquire sufficient authority to become an anchor of global governance. Over the past forty years, the World Economic Forum (WEF), a business-funded and business membership non-profit foundation, has also gradually emerged as a standing site of multi-stakeholder interactions and negotiations. It convenes diverse actors through its various summits, facilitates joint initiatives among them, and attempts to shape procedural and substantive norms at the global level. Does the WEF's role as a bridge among state and non-state actors make it a legitimate site of multi-stakeholder global policymaking. What does the WEF story tell us about the conditions under which organizations can serve to anchor global policy processes within a multi-actor world society. This dissertation provides an anatomy of the WEF and account of how its functions have evolved in its first four decades. It argues that as the WEF has transitioned from a primarily business-driven management forum into a fuller multi-stakeholder vehicle, it has acquired sufficient recognition and authority to become a unique non-state hub of global policy processes. It attempts to demonstrate this through a detailed analysis of how the WEF's roles have expanded to encompass various convening, facilitation, and norm entrepreneurship activities. It also examines whether the WEF's evolving mission statements and business models have empowered it to adapt to its multiple constituents' priorities while affording it increasing neutrality among them and independence from any one of them. Can the WEF (and similar multi-stakeholder bodies) move beyond being considered supplements to the existing inter-governmental organizations which anchor the international society of states towards being the main legitimate sites for world society interactions. This analysis contributes to the empirical literature on new global governance instruments as well as pluralist accounts of the evolving global policy architecture

Data-driven Grip Force Variation in Robot-Human Handovers

Handovers frequently occur in our social environments, making it imperative for a collaborative robotic system to master the skill of handover. In this work, we aim to investigate the relationship between the grip force variation for a human giver and the sensed interaction force-torque in human-human handovers, utilizing a data-driven approach. A Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network was trained to use the interaction force-torque in a handover to predict the human grip force variation in advance. Further, we propose to utilize the trained network to cause human-like grip force variation for a robotic giver.Comment: Contributed to "Advances in Close Proximity Human-Robot Collaboration" Workshop in 2022 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2022

A Multimodal Data Set of Human Handovers with Design Implications for Human-Robot Handovers

Handovers are basic yet sophisticated motor tasks performed seamlessly by humans. They are among the most common activities in our daily lives and social environments. This makes mastering the art of handovers critical for a social and collaborative robot. In this work, we present an experimental study that involved human-human handovers by 13 pairs, i.e., 26 participants. We record and explore multiple features of handovers amongst humans aimed at inspiring handovers amongst humans and robots. With this work, we further create and publish a novel data set of 8672 handovers, bringing together human motion and the forces involved. We further analyze the effect of object weight and the role of visual sensory input in human-human handovers, as well as possible design implications for robots. As a proof of concept, the data set was used for creating a human-inspired data-driven strategy for robotic grip release in handovers, which was demonstrated to result in better robot to human handovers.Comment: The data set of human-human handovers can be found at: https://github.com/paragkhanna1/datase

User Study Exploring the Role of Explanation of Failures by Robots in Human Robot Collaboration Tasks

Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can cause such failures to repeat. This makes the ability to failure explanation very important for a robot. In this work, we describe a user study that incorporated different robotic failures in a human-robot collaboration (HRC) task aimed at filling a shelf. We included different types of failures and repeated occurrences of such failures in a prolonged interaction between humans and robots. The failure resolution involved human intervention in form of human-robot bidirectional handovers. Through such studies, we aim to test different explanation types and explanation progression in the interaction and record humans.Comment: Contributed to the: "The Imperfectly Relatable Robot: An interdisciplinary workshop on the role of failure in HRI", ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction HRI 2023. Video can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/hri-failure-ws/teaser-video

Prototype of a tensegrity manipulator to mimic bird necks

International audienceThis paper deals with the building of a 2D tensegrity mechanism. The considered mechanism is derived from the Snelson's X-shape mechanism and is used as an elementary part of the bird neck modelling. Indeed, an n-dof manipulator can be obtained by stacking in series n X-shape mechanisms. This paper explains the design and building process of a 1-dof prototype, both on hardware and software aspects, and will be used further to have experimental results on the dynamic modelling, control laws and ac-tuation strategy.Une structure de tenségrité est un assemblage d'éléments en compression (barres) et d'éléments en traction (câbles, ressorts) maintenus ensemble en équilibre [1],[2]. La tenségrité est connue en architecture et en art depuis plus d'un siècle [3] et est adaptée à la modélisation des organismes vivants [4]. Les mé-canismes de tenségrité ont été étudiés plus récemment pour leurs propriétés prometteuses en robotique telles que la faible inertie, la souplesse naturelle et la capacité de déploiement [5]. Un mécanisme de tenségrité est obtenu lorsqu'un ou plusieurs éléments sont actionnés. Ces travaux s'inscrivent dans le cadre du projet AVINECK, auquel participent des biologistes et des roboticiens dans le but principal de modéliser et de concevoir des cous d'oiseaux. En conséquence, une classe de manipulateurs de tenségrité planaire composée d'un assemblage en série de plusieurs mécanismes en X de Snelson [6], c'est-à-dire des mécanismes à quatre barres croisées avec des ressorts sur leurs côtés latéraux, a été choisie comme candidat approprié pour un modèle préliminaire plan d'un cou d'oiseau. Le prototype consiste en un mecanisme en X de Snelson. Les barres sont assemblées selon différents plans pour éviter les collisions internes. Le manipulateur est entraîné par des câbles parallèles aux res-sorts et traversant les axes grâce à des perçages. Chaque câble est attaché à un tambour. Le manipulateur est actionné par deux câbles, ce qui en fait un mécanisme antagoniste, dont on peut contrôler la raideur. Les pièces structurelles (barres, supports, tambours) sont imprimées en 3D en ABS. Chaque liaison pivot entre les barres et les axes est construite avec deux roulements qui assurent un centrage long, et toutes les pièces sont arrêtées axialement avec des colliers d'arbre. Nous avons décidé d'avoir une lon-gueur de barre transversale de 100 mm et une longueur de barre supérieure de 50 mm. Ces dimensions sont adaptées à plusieurs jeux de ressorts disponibles, c'est-à-dire que les ressorts considérés sont tou-jours en tension et ne sont pas trop étendus pour toutes les positions accessibles du manipulateur. Une fois la longueur et la raideur du ressort définies, le modèle statique est calculé afin d'obtenir la force d'entrée maximale pour les câbles. Cette force doit être suffisante pour actionner le mécanisme dans un grand espace de travail et pour résister aux chargements externes. La force appliquée par les câbles est directement liée au rayon du tambour et au couple du moteur. Le rayon du tambour influe également sur la vitesse de translation du câble. Un compromis est fait pour avoir des efforts et vitesses de câbles suffisants. Deux variateurs interagissent avec un microprocesseur sur lequel est programmé la loi de commande. Chaque moteur est équipé d'un codeur pour connaître la position réelle du mécanisme. Le bon compor-tement du mécanisme est assuré par une commande dynamique

Conflict, cooperation or competition in the Caspian Sea region:A critical review of the New Great Game paradigm

This article critically reviews the New Great Game image of the Caspian Sea region and the assumptions, concepts, and mechanisms (revolving around actors, aims, and motivations) this image is based on. More specifically, this review essay answers the following questions: How does the academic literature interpret the impact of competition between great powers on social, political and economic developments in the Caspian Sea region? Which actors are presented as the dominant players? The essay also introduces the existing criticism of the New Great Game concept and alternatives to it that have already been put forward. By identifying the gaps and limits of existing scholarship, this article offers new avenues for alternative theoretical and empirical interpretations. More specifically, this article argues that the New Great Game literature promotes unsystematic and shallow discussion as it ignores and misunderstands historical, material, political, economic, and normative differences in the Caspian Sea region. Within this discussion, actors, interests, identities, social contexts, and principles are taken to be fixed, i.e. not prone to change or to any sort of adjustmen