Speech-Gesture Mapping and Engagement Evaluation in Human Robot Interaction

A robot needs contextual awareness, effective speech production and complementing non-verbal gestures for successful communication in society. In this paper, we present our end-to-end system that tries to enhance the effectiveness of non-verbal gestures. For achieving this, we identified prominently used gestures in performances by TED speakers and mapped them to their corresponding speech context and modulated speech based upon the attention of the listener. The proposed method utilized Convolutional Pose Machine [4] to detect the human gesture. Dominant gestures of TED speakers were used for learning the gesture-to-speech mapping. The speeches by them were used for training the model. We also evaluated the engagement of the robot with people by conducting a social survey. The effectiveness of the performance was monitored by the robot and it self-improvised its speech pattern on the basis of the attention level of the audience, which was calculated using visual feedback from the camera. The effectiveness of interaction as well as the decisions made during improvisation was further evaluated based on the head-pose detection and interaction survey.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, Under review in IRC 201

Teachers’ authority; a reflection in the context of contemporary Indian society

Teachers’ authority, which I argue is a multidimensional concept, is undergoing transition under the current educational policy changes in India. These changes that are a result of economic, political and civil society intervention are changing the way education and its aims are being perceived within the country. Whereas some of these changes are reflected in a shift from the traditional authority of teachers that was expressed in archaic practices like corporal punishment, there are other changes which, on the one hand neglect the cultural-social position of the teachers with roots in religious practices of the country, while on the other hand impose a child-centered notion of the teacher as a facilitator. This neglect is articulated in the voices and actions of the teachers in the various interviews conducted among Social Science teachers in Government schools in India. At the same time, the imposition of a facilitating role on teachers is ill suited to the current educational context in schools, given the availability of cell phones and other technologies to students. In such a scenario, the teachers’ authority has not been reduced but rather finds a renewed focus and importance. Dispensing with traditional notions of authority has resulted in discontent and loss of faith among teachers towards new policies, which fail to acknowledge teachers’ voices. Thus, in the current transitional phase where new policies have successfully initiated an alternative discourse of education, i.e. moving away from examoriented education, reducing teachers to facilitators is unhelpful due to the social realities that teachers face, highlighting the need for some form of teacher's authority

Understanding Different Stakeholders of Sustainable Product and Service Based Systems using Genetic Algorithm for Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract To have a sustainable product or service, product and service systems must equally satisfy all the three stakeholders of sustainability: people, planet and profit generated by the companies. However, if often not the case; this interest of the planet as a stakeholder is often ignored by the other stakeholders. Government tax incentives could act as an enabler to mitigate this difference. In this work, this issue is explored and presented through the development of a strategy to optimize the needs of various stakeholders in selecting the right solution satisfying the needs of users. We develop equations to express the three Ps of sustainability so as to find out appropriate government incentives, as tax that could be left on people and product manufacturing companies to make products and services more sustainable. The multi-objective problem is formulated as an optimization problem and solved using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms (MOGA)

Unified Modeling of Unconventional Modular and Reconfigurable Manipulation System

Customization of manipulator configurations using modularity and reconfigurability aspects is receiving much attention. Modules presented so far in literature deals with the conventional and standard configurations. This paper presents the 3D printable, light-weight and unconventional modules: MOIRs' Mark-2, to develop any custom `n'-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) serial manipulator even with the non-parallel and non-perpendicular jointed configuration. These unconventional designs of modular configurations seek an easy adaptable solution for both modular assembly and software interfaces for automatic modeling and control. A strategy of assembling the modules, automatic and unified modeling of the modular and reconfigurable manipulators with unconventional parameters is proposed in this paper using the proposed 4 modular units. A reconfigurable software architecture is presented for the automatic generation of kinematic and dynamic models and configuration files, through which, a designer can design, validate using visualization, plan and execute the motion of the developed configuration as required. The framework developed is based upon an open source platform called as Robot Operating System (ROS), which acts as a digital twin for the modular configurations. For the experimental demonstration, a 3D printed modular library is developed and an unconventional configuration is assembled, using the proposed modules followed by automatic modeling and control, for a single cell of the vertical farm setup

Modelling and simulation of basic robotic configurations using D–H parameters based adaptive modules

Selection of a suitable robotic manipulator, out of the available conventional configurations, is one way to employ a robot. However, with the increasing applications of robotic assistance, the concept of task-oriented customised design for prescribed working locations in a given environment, has got attention of several researchers. One of the challenges in this direction is the realisation of specific designs, involving unconventional values of robotic parameters. This paper discusses the D–H parameters based adaptive modules, which can be adjusted according to the given values of robotic parameters. The modules are available in three types with similar architecture. The details of this basic length unit, adaptive twist unit and extended length unit are discussed. Focus of the work is to validate the adaptability of the proposed architecture through the modelling, simulation and development of standard configuration

Service Arms with Unconventional Robotic Parameters for Intricate Workstations: Optimal Number and Dimensional Synthesis

A task-oriented design strategy is presented in this paper for service manipulators. The tasks are normally defined in the form of working locations where the end-effector can work while avoiding the obstacles. To acquire feasible solutions in cluttered environments, the robotic parameters (D-H parameters) are allowed to take unconventional values. This enhances the solution space and it is observed that, by inducing this flexibility, the required number of degrees of freedom for fulfilling a given task can be reduced. A bilevel optimization problem is formulated with the outer layer utilizing the binary search method for minimizing the number of degrees of freedom. To enlarge the applicability domain of the proposed strategy, the upper limit of the number of joints is kept more than six. These allowable redundant joints would help in providing solution for intricate workcells. For each iteration of the upper level, a constrained nonlinear problem is solved for dimensional synthesis of the manipulator. The methodology is demonstrated through a case study of a realistic environment of a cluttered server room. A 7-link service arm, synthesized using the proposed method, is able to fulfill two different tasks effectively

A unified approach for performance analysis of randomly generated robotic morphologies

An attempt is presented towards a unified approach to compute kinematic performance of planar manipulators with the links connected in series, in loops and in combinations of both. The motivation of this work lies in the fact that serially connected links are normally selected for large manipulability and parallel manipulators are utilized for better stiffness. To acquire a topology suitable for a given task, the topological parameters can be considered variables in a manipulator design problems. However, since the complete kinematic model changes with each small change in the basic structure, a unified approach is important to work upon. A case of five-bar mechanism consisting of 2-degrees-of-freedom (dof) system is considered to demonstrate the proposed approach for performance analysis

Kinematic modeling of a 7-degree of freedom spatial hybrid manipulator for medical surgery

The prime objective of this work is to deal with the kinematics of spatial hybrid manipulators. In this direction, in 1955, Denavit and Hartenberg proposed a consistent and concise method, known as D-H parameters method, to deal with kinematics of open serial chains. From literature review, it is found that D-H parameter method is widely used to model manipulators consisting of lower pairs. However, the method leads to ambiguities when applied to closed-loop, tree-like and hybrid manipulators. Furthermore, in the dearth of any direct method to model closed-loop, tree-like and hybrid manipulators, revisions of this method have been proposed from time-to-time by different researchers. One such kind of revision using the concept of dummy frames has successfully been proposed and implemented by the authors on spatial hybrid manipulators. In that work, authors have addressed the orientational inconsistency of the D-H parameter method, restricted to body-attached frames only. In the current work, the condition of body-attached frames is relaxed and spatial frame attachment is considered to derive the kinematic model of a 7-degree of freedom spatial hybrid robotic arm, along with the development of closed-loop constraints. The validation of the new kinematic model has been performed with the help of a prototype of this 7-degree of freedom arm, which is being developed at Council of Scientific & Industrial Research-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation Chandigarh to aid the surgeon during a medical surgical task. Furthermore, the developed kinematic model is used to develop the first column of the Jacobian matrix, which helps in providing the estimate of the tip velocity of the 7-degree of freedom manipulator when the first joint velocity is known