The impact of faith on relational thought

Paper presented at the conf Faith, freedom and the academy: the idea of the university in the 21st century, Univ of Prince Edward Island, O 1-3 2004

Real-Time Support of Haptic Interaction by Means of Sampling-Based Path Planning

Haptic feedback enables the support of a human during the interaction with an environment. A variety of concepts have been developed to achieve an effective haptic support of the user in specific scenarios, e.g. Virtual Fixtures. However, most of these methods do not enable an adaptive support of the motion from a user within a (real or virtual) environment, which would be desirable in many situations. Especially when dynamical obstacles are involved or when the desired motion of the human is not known beforehand, an online computation of this support is essential, which should be based on a fast and effective determination of feasible motions.In contrast to other methods, sampling-based path planning is applicable to arbitrary interaction scenarios and enables to find a solution if it exists at all. Thus, it seems to be ideally suited for a generic framework that is able to deal with various kinematics, as e.g. a virtual prototyping test bed for the haptic evaluation of mechanisms requires. At such a test bed, the path planner could directly be coupled to the haptic rendering of a virtual scene to assist a user in approaching a target.This motivated the development of SamPP, a sampling-based path planning library with implementations of the most important algorithms. It can be used for nearly arbitrary rigid robots and environments. By performing numerous benchmarks, we prove the effectiveness and efficiency of SamPP. It is shown that a single-threaded version of the path planning can be used for real-time support of the haptic interaction at a novel actuated car door.Furthermore, we enhance the path planning performance for unknown or dynamical environments significantly by the OR-Parallelization of different path planning queries. This Generalized OR-Parallelization is a novel concept that to the best knowledge of the authors has not been proposed beforehand. We show that for the case of dynamic environments the likelihood of a fast path planning result is higher with our approach. Thus, even in dynamic or unknown environments, a real-time support of haptic interaction can be achieved. Finally, we highlight four promising research directions to exploit the concept of Generalized OR-Parallelization: 1) Combination of PRMs and RRTs to achieve a synergy of the advantages of both concepts, 2) concurrent use of different parameter sets of path planning algorithms, 3) online adaptation of these parameter sets and 4) online adaptation of the types and numbers of parallel executed path planning programs

Multi-Focal Visual Servoing Strategies

Multi-focal vision provides two or more vision devices with different fields of view and measurement accuracies. A main advantage of this concept is a flexible allocation of these sensor resources accounting for the current situational and task performance requirements. Particularly, vision devices with large fields of view and low accuracies can be use

Does Contingent Reward Leadership Enhance or Diminish Team Creativity?

Although prior research has shown that contingent reward transactional leadership is, on average, nearly as highly related to team outcomes as is transformational leadership, few studies have examined the mechanisms whereby and the conditions under which contingent reward leadership is related to team creativity. Drawing on social exchange theory, we argue that contingent reward leadership can enhance team knowledge sharing and, in turn, team creative performance because it specifies effort-reward contingencies for knowledge sharing and because it motivates team members to reciprocate for consistence and transparent treatment their leader exhibits towards them. Moreover, we propose that this relationship is moderated by leader unpredictability, which can undermine the otherwise positive effects of contingent reward leadership. In a two-source, lagged design (three-wave) field study with data from 70 organizational teams, we found a conditional indirect (moderated mediation) effect of contingent reward leadership on team creative performance through team knowledge sharing. This conditional indirect effect was positive when leader unpredictability was low, and negative when leader unpredictability was high. Our research suggests that consistent and predictable contingent reward leadership can be an effective tool for leaders to foster creativity in teams