Multi-thread impact on the performance of Monte Carlo based algorithms for self-localization of robots using RGBD sensors

Abstract—Using information from RGBD sensors requires huge amount of processing. To use these sensors improves the robustness of algorithms for object perception, self-localization and, in general, all the capabilities to be performed by a robot to improve its autonomy. In most cases, these algorithms are not computationally feasible using single-thread implementations. This paper describes two multi thread strategies proposed for self localize a mobile robot in a known environment using information from a RGBD sensor. The experiments will show the benefits obtained when different numbers of threads are compared, using different approaches: a pool of threads and creation/destruction scheme. The work has been carried out on a Kobuki mobile robot in the environment of the RoCKiN competition, similar to RoboCup@hom

Diabetes mellitus insulinodependiente en ancianos

Tesis Univ. Complutense de Madrid, 1995La diabetes mellitus en ancianos es una entidad frecuente e insuficientemente estudiada. Objetivos: determinar la prevalencia y delimitar el grupo en tratamiento insulínico. Estudiar si en la dm-id del anciano subyace un mecanismo patogénico insulinopénico y si presenta características específicas en relación a otras edades. Se estudian 98 ancianos diabéticos. Grupo de estudio constituido por 15 ancianos dm-id de inicio posterior a los 65 años. Grupos controles: normal dm-nid; dm-id inicio previo a los 65 años; dm-id no ancianos. Conclusiones: 1) Prevalencia de dm en la población geriátrica estudiada del 17.4%. 2) Prevalencia que indica un importante factor de riesgo social. 3) El tiempo de evolución hasta necesidad de insulina más rápido que en el fracaso secundario de sulfonilureas en el adulto. 4) Los resultados corresponden a una dm-id de evolución lenta. 5) Existencia de reserva pancreática escasa 6) Importancia de determinar péptido C.Fac. de MedicinaTRUEpu

Evolution of a Cognitive Architecture for Social Robots: Integrating Behaviors and Symbolic Knowledge

[EN] This paper presents the evolution of a robotic architecture intended for controlling autonomous social robots. The first instance of this architecture was originally designed according to behavior-based principles. The building blocks of this architecture were behaviors designed as a finite state machine and organized in an ethological inspired way. However, the need of managing explicit symbolic knowledge in human–robot interaction required the integration of planning capabilities into the architecture and a symbolic representation of the environment and the internal state of the robot. A major contribution of this paper is the description of the working memory that integrates these two approaches. This working memory has been implemented as a distributed graph. Another contribution is the use of behavior trees instead of state machine for implementing the behavior-based part of the architecture. This late version of the architecture has been tested in robotic competitions (RoboCup or European Robotics League, among others), whose performance is also discussed in this paper.SIEuropean Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 732410.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidade

Social Navigation in a Cognitive Architecture Using Dynamic Proxemic Zones

[EN] Robots have begun to populate the everyday environments of human beings. These social robots must perform their tasks without disturbing the people with whom they share their environment. This paper proposes a navigation algorithm for robots that is acceptable to people. Robots will detect the personal areas of humans, to carry out their tasks, generating navigation routes that have less impact on human activities. The main novelty of this work is that the robot will perceive the moods of people to adjust the size of proxemic areas. This work will contribute to making the presence of robots in human-populated environments more acceptable. As a result, we have integrated this approach into a cognitive architecture designed to perform tasks in human-populated environments. The paper provides quantitative experimental results in two scenarios: controlled, including social navigation metrics in comparison with a traditional navigation method, and non-controlled, in robotic competitions where different studies of social robotics are measured.SIGobierno de España (TIN2016-76515-R grant for the COMBAHO project, supported with Feder funds )Comunidad de Madrid (RoboCity2030-DIH-CM (S2018/NMT-4331)

Benchmark Dataset for Evaluation of Range-Based People Tracker Classifiers in Mobile Robots

[EN] Tracking people has many applications, such as security or safe use of robots. Many onboard systems are based on Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors. Tracking peoples' legs using only information from a 2D LIDAR scanner in a mobile robot is a challenging problem because many legs can be present in an indoor environment, there are frequent occlusions and self-occlusions, many items in the environment such as table legs or columns could resemble legs as a result of the limited information provided by two-dimensional LIDAR usually mounted at knee height in mobile robots, etc. On the other hand, LIDAR sensors are affordable in terms of the acquisition price and processing requirements. In this article, we present a new dataset.Data actually contained in the dataset allow evaluating two people trackers, both neural network-based: leg detector (LD), a widely used solution by the Robot Operating System (ROS) community; and a people-tracker tool developed by the Robotics Group at the University of Leon, known as PeTra.S

Tracking People in a Mobile Robot From 2D LIDAR Scans Using Full Convolutional Neural Networks for Security in Cluttered Environments

[EN] Tracking people has many applications, such as security or safe use of robots. Many onboard systems are based on Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors. Tracking peoples' legs using only information from a 2D LIDAR scanner in a mobile robot is a challenging problem because many legs can be present in an indoor environment, there are frequent occlusions and self-occlusions, many items in the environment such as table legs or columns could resemble legs as a result of the limited information provided by two-dimensional LIDAR usually mounted at knee height in mobile robots, etc. On the other hand, LIDAR sensors are affordable in terms of the acquisition price and processing requirements. In this article, we describe a tool named PeTra based on an off-line trained full Convolutional Neural Network capable of tracking pairs of legs in a cluttered environment. We describe the characteristics of the system proposed and evaluate its accuracy using a dataset from a public repository. Results show that PeTra provides better accuracy than Leg Detector (LD), the standard solution for Robot Operating System (ROS)-based robots.SIJunta de Castilla y León (LE028P17)Instituto Nacional de Cibersegurida

Aproximación al estudio de la entonación aragonesa

Se comienza con unas explicaciones preliminares acerca del grupo investigador aragonés en el proyecto AMPER y se ofrece un panorama general de la situación lingüística de una región en la que, además del castellano, lengua materna de la mayor parte de sus habitantes, se hablan otras variedades lingüísticas aragonesas y catalanas, cuestión que deberá ser tenida en cuenta en el desarrollo de las investigaciones. Se recuerda, a continuación, que las particularidades entonativas de Aragón –reiteradamente destacadas– apenas han sido objeto de un análisis instrumental que pueda dar cuenta de los parámetros físicos que determinan uno de los rasgos que, en todos los niveles socioculturales, mejor caracteriza el habla de los aragoneses y que ofrece, además, notables diferencias entre unas zonas y otras. El estudio concluye con el análisis, como primera muestra, de la modalidad enunciativa e interrogativa de tres frases sin expansión, con la estructura S+V+O, en las que el acento inicial e intermedio son siempre paroxítonos, mientras que el acento final puede ser oxítono, paroxítono o proparoxítono; la informante es mujer, procedente de un medio urbano (Zaragoza), tiene 39 años y carece de estudios superiores. De las curvas obtenidas se desprende que "provisionalmente" que no existe una diferencia fundamental en la curva de entonación de los enunciados declarativos en el español de Zaragoza con respecto al español peninsular estándar. Lo más reseñable, en cuanto a las diferencias, es la mayor elevación del tono en el final del SN sujeto y, en relación a lo tradicionalmente afirmado, un mayor descenso del F0 en el tonema.The paper begins with preliminary explanations about the research group involved in the AMPER project at the University of Zaragoza and with an overview of the linguistic situation in a region where Castillian is the native language of most of the inhabitants, though other Aragonese and Catalan linguistics varieties are also spoken, a factor to be taken into account in the course of the project. The intonation patterns peculiar to Aragón, so frequently commented on by experts, have barely been subjected to instrumental analysis with a view to determining the physical parameters that go to make up what in socio-cultural terms are seen as the most recognizable aspect of Aragonese speech, and which vary considerably from one area to another. The study concludes with a preliminary analysis of the declarative and interrogative modality of three phrases without postmodification, with an S+V+O structure, in which the initial and intermediate accents are always paroxitone, whereas the final accent may be oxitone, paroxitone or proparoxitone. The informant is a woman with an urban background (Zaragoza), 39 years old and without higher studies. A provisional conclusion from a study of the resulting intonation curves would be that there is no fundamental difference between the declaratory statement curve to be found in the Spanish of Zaragoza and that of standard peninsular Spanish. The most noteworthy differences would be the greater elevation of the tone at the end of the nominal phrase subject and, in relation to what has traditionally been thought to be the case, a greater fall of the F0 in the toneme.Se comienza con unas explicaciones preliminares acerca del grupo investigador aragonés en el proyecto AMPER y se ofrece un panorama general de la situación lingüística de una región en la que, además del castellano, lengua materna de la mayor parte de sus habitantes, se hablan otras variedades lingüísticas aragonesas y catalanas, cuestión que deberá ser tenida en cuenta en el desarrollo de las investigaciones. Se recuerda, a continuación, que las particularidades entonativas de Aragón –reiteradamente destacadas– apenas han sido objeto de un análisis instrumental que pueda dar cuenta de los parámetros físicos que determinan uno de los rasgos que, en todos los niveles socioculturales, mejor caracteriza el habla de los aragoneses y que ofrece, además, notables diferencias entre unas zonas y otras. El estudio concluye con el análisis, como primera muestra, de la modalidad enunciativa e interrogativa de tres frases sin expansión, con la estructura S+V+O, en las que el acento inicial e intermedio son siempre paroxítonos, mientras que el acento final puede ser oxítono, paroxítono o proparoxítono; la informante es mujer, procedente de un medio urbano (Zaragoza), tiene 39 años y carece de estudios superiores. De las curvas obtenidas se desprende que "provisionalmente" que no existe una diferencia fundamental en la curva de entonación de los enunciados declarativos en el español de Zaragoza con respecto al español peninsular estándar. Lo más reseñable, en cuanto a las diferencias, es la mayor elevación del tono en el final del SN sujeto y, en relación a lo tradicionalmente afirmado, un mayor descenso del F0 en el tonema

An Acceptance Test for Assistive Robots

[EN] Socially assistive robots have been used in the care of elderly or dependent people, particularly with patients suffering from neurological diseases, like autism and dementia. There are some proposals, but there are no standardized mechanisms for assessing a particular robot’s suitability for specific therapy. This paper reports the evaluation of an acceptance test for assistive robots applied to people with dementia. The proposed test focuses on evaluating the suitability of a robot during therapy sessions. The test measures the rejection of the robot by the patient based on observational data. This test would recommend what kind of robot and what functionalities can be used in therapy. The novelty of this approach is the formalization of a specific validation process that only considers the reaction of the person to whom the robot is applied, and may be used more effectively than existing tests, which may not be adequate for evaluating assistance robots. The test’s feasibility was tested by applying it to a set of dementia patients in a specialized care facility.SICentro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación : Proyecto DIA4RA (Desarrollo de Inteligencia Artificial para Robótica Asistencial

Cybersecurity in Autonomous Systems: Evaluating the performance of hardening ROS

As robotic systems spread, cybersecurity emerges as major concern. Currently most research autonomous systems are built using the ROS framework, along with other commercial software. ROS is a distributed framework where nodes publish information that other nodes consume. This model simplifies data communication but poses a major threat because a malicious process could easily interfere the communications, read private messages or even supersede nodes. In this paper we propose that ROS communications should be encrypted. We also measure how encryption affects its performance.We have used 3DES cyphering algorithm and we have evaluated the performance of the system, both from the computing and the communications point of view. Preliminary results show that symmetric ciphers using private keys impose significant delay

Client-Server Approach for Managing Visual Attention, Integrated in a Cognitive Architecture for a Social Robot

[EN] This paper proposes a novel system for managing visual attention in social robots. This system is based on a client/server approach that allows integration with a cognitive architecture controlling the robot. The core of this architecture is a distributed knowledge graph, in which the perceptual needs are expressed by the presence of arcs to stimuli that need to be perceived. The attention server sends motion commands to the actuators of the robot, while the attention clients send requests through the common knowledge representation. The common knowledge graph is shared by all levels of the architecture. This system has been implemented on ROS and tested on a social robot to verify the validity of the approach and was used to solve the tests proposed in RoboCup @ Home and SciROc robotic competitions. The tests have been used to quantitatively compare the proposal to traditional visual attention mechanismsSIMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidade