Collaborative and Cooperative Robotics Applications using Visual Perception

The objective of this Thesis is to develop novel integrated strategies for collaborative and cooperative robotic applications. Commonly, industrial robots operate in structured environments and in work-cell separated from human operators. Nowadays, collaborative robots have the capacity of sharing the workspace and collaborate with humans or other robots to perform complex tasks. These robots often operate in an unstructured environment, whereby they need sensors and algorithms to get information about environment changes. Advanced vision and control techniques have been analyzed to evaluate their performance and their applicability to industrial tasks. Then, some selected techniques have been applied for the first time to an industrial context. A Peg-in-Hole task has been chosen as first case study, since it has been extensively studied but still remains challenging: it requires accuracy both in the determination of the hole poses and in the robot positioning. Two solutions have been developed and tested. Experimental results have been discussed to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Grasping partially known objects in unstructured environments is one of the most challenging issues in robotics. It is a complex task and requires to address multiple subproblems, in order to be accomplished, including object localization and grasp pose detection. Also for this class of issues some vision techniques have been analyzed. One of these has been adapted to be used in industrial scenarios. Moreover, as a second case study, a robot-to-robot object handover task in a partially structured environment and in the absence of explicit communication between the robots has been developed and validated. Finally, the two case studies have been integrated in two real industrial setups to demonstrate the applicability of the strategies to solving industrial problems

Ontological Matchmaking in Recommender Systems

The electronic marketplace offers great potential for the recommendation of supplies. In the so called recommender systems, it is crucial to apply matchmaking strategies that faithfully satisfy the predicates specified in the demand, and take into account as much as possible the user preferences. We focus on real-life ontology-driven matchmaking scenarios and identify a number of challenges, being inspired by such scenarios. A key challenge is that of presenting the results to the users in an understandable and clear-cut fashion in order to facilitate the analysis of the results. Indeed, such scenarios evoke the opportunity to rank and group the results according to specific criteria. A further challenge consists of presenting the results to the user in an asynchronous fashion, i.e. the 'push' mode, along with the 'pull' mode, in which the user explicitly issues a query, and displays the results. Moreover, an important issue to consider in real-life cases is the possibility of submitting a query to multiple providers, and collecting the various results. We have designed and implemented an ontology-based matchmaking system that suitably addresses the above challenges. We have conducted a comprehensive experimental study, in order to investigate the usability of the system, the performance and the effectiveness of the matchmaking strategies with real ontological datasets.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure

Slurs, truth-value judgements, and context sensitivity

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) claim that the English language contains a basic and limited set of context-sensitive expressions, as only expressions within this set pass the truth-related tests that they propose to single out context-sensitive from context-insensitive words. In this paper I argue that racial and ethnic slurs also pass Cappelen and Lepore’s context sensitivity tests and that, as a result, slurs should also be seen as context-sensitive expressions in a truth-related sense

Why Does Aristotle Make so Much Sense? A Philosophical Analysis of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill’s Moral Theories

Throughout my experience as a student of philosophy these past four years, the philosophy that has interested me the most has been that which gives us something to take back to daily life or the ‘real world’ with us. As a result, I\u27ve been strongly drawn to ethics and pulled into the debate between the three main schools of ethics — virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism, with a strong affinity for virtue ethics, especially the ideas of Aristotle. The question that I am exploring in this paper is if there is something unique about Aristotle’s virtue ethics compared to the seminal philosophers of the other two schools of ethics -- John Stuart Mill for utilitarian consequentialism and Immanuel Kant for deontology -- such that my intuition is explained. By the end of this paper I intend to convince the reader that there is in fact something special about Aristotle’s virtue ethics as an approach to ethics that the other two ethical theories fail to capture. In Chapter One I will examine how these three theories treat morality and self interest through what I call the problem of convergence. In Chapter Two of this paper I will discuss Pierre Hadot’s concept of philosophy as a way of life, and in Chapter Three, I will discuss the works of Gilbert Ryle on the subject of morality as caring

Managing Risk of Ski Resorts with Snow Options

The main problem for the tourism businesses which operate in ski resorts is that their revenue are strictly connected to the cumulative snowfall level. The uncertainty about the snowfall due the climate changing has made this type of business highly risky, for this reason few or no investments are made every year to improve the resorts, the slopes or the lifts; continuing in this way, the resort in few years will face to a loss in competitiveness, thus less tourists, less revenue and less business.The present work purposes to show a possible hedging strategy against the financial problems due to the scarcity of snow: the weather derivatives.Due to the fact that in Italy there are many ski resorts situated at an altitude from 1300m to 2000m, we focus our analysis on Andalo, in Italian Alps and we obtain the estimated prices of a put snow option by applying three different methods proposed in literature.We suggest, finally, the ideal prices for Paganella lift operator in Andalo, showing how the use of weather derivatives may be very helpful in the risk management for ski resort related to snow scarcity events.The main problem for the tourism businesses which operate in ski resorts is that their revenue are strictly connected to the cumulative snowfall level. The uncertainty about the snowfall due the climate changing has made this type of business highly risky, for this reason few or no investments are made every year to improve the resorts, the slopes or the lifts; continuing in this way, the resort in few years will face to a loss in competitiveness, thus less tourists, less revenue and less business.The present work purposes to show a possible hedging strategy against the financial problems due to the scarcity of snow: the weather derivatives.Due to the fact that in Italy there are many ski resorts situated at an altitude from 1300m to 2000m, we focus our analysis on Andalo, in Italian Alps and we obtain the estimated prices of a put snow option by applying three different methods proposed in literature.We suggest, finally, the ideal prices for Paganella lift operator in Andalo, showing how the use of weather derivatives may be very helpful in the risk management for ski resort related to snow scarcity events

Analisi della vulnerabilita? sismica ed ipotesi di miglioramento strutturale di un edificio in cemento armato, adibito a palestra scolastica, sito nel comune di Borgo San Lorenzo (FI).

Con la presente tesi si intende svolgere un'analisi di vulnerabilità sismica della palestra della scuola secondaria di I grado "Giovanni della Casa", sita nel comune di Borgo San Lorenzo (FI). Il fabbricato è stato dapprima sottoposto a rilievo geometrico e strutturale, e, successivamente, ad analisi nei confronti dei carichi statici e sismici, come previsto dalla normativa attualmente vigente (NTC 2008). Il risultato di questa analisi ha consentito di mettere in luce le criticità dell’edificio, per le quali sono state avanzate alcune proposte di intervento

Investigating the perceptions of academic dishonesty among special educators

The purposes of this study were: (a) to investigate the perceptions of academic dishonesty among special education faculty and students particularly related to the subtleties or gray areas that surround issues of academic dishonesty, (b) to determine how to decrease incidences of academic dishonesty, and (c) to find potential solutions to the problem of academic dishonesty. The participants in this study were special education full-time and adjunct faculty and special education undergraduate and graduate students. Data were collected using the Faculty Perspectives Survey and the Student Perspectives Survey. These surveys measured opinions regarding what constitutes cheating in traditional and online courses, deterrents to cheating, and sanctions for cheating; There was a statistically significant difference among faculty and students with regard to what constitutes cheating in online environments. Students believed that collaborating on assignments and submitting the same paper twice was not cheating. Faculty believed these acts were cheating. There was a statistically significant difference among faculty and students with regard to what constitutes cheating in traditional environments. Students believed that submitting the same paper twice during the same and consecutive semesters was not cheating. Faculty believed it was cheating. There was no statistical significance among full-time and adjunct faculty with regard to what constitutes cheating in online or traditional classes. There was no statistical significance among undergraduate and graduate students with regard to what constitutes cheating in online and traditional classes, deterrents to cheating, and sanctions for cheating. There was a statistical difference among faculty and students with regard to deterrents to cheating. Students believed honor codes are deterrents to cheating in traditional classes. Faculty did not view honor codes as deterrents to cheating. There was no statistical significance between faculty and students with regard to sanctions for cheating

Probing neural language models for understanding of words of estimative probability

Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical probability levels to WEP. For example, highly likely corresponds to a median chance of 0.90+-0.08 in Fagen-Ulmschneider (2015)'s survey. In this work, we measure the ability of neural language processing models to capture the consensual probability level associated to each WEP. Firstly, we use the UNLI dataset (Chen et al., 2020) which associates premises and hypotheses with their perceived joint probability p, to construct prompts, e.g. "[PREMISE]. [WEP], [HYPOTHESIS]." and assess whether language models can predict whether the WEP consensual probability level is close to p. Secondly, we construct a dataset of WEP-based probabilistic reasoning, to test whether language models can reason with WEP compositions. When prompted "[EVENTA] is likely. [EVENTB] is impossible.", a causal language model should not express that [EVENTA&B] is likely. We show that both tasks are unsolved by off-the-shelf English language models, but that fine-tuning leads to transferable improvement