Guiado gestual de un robot humanoide mediante un sensor "kinect"

Castellano: Este proyecto trata sobre el desarrollo de una aplicación para mover los brazos de un robot humanoide (Bioloid) que imite al usuario de la aplicación gracias a un "skeleton tracking" proporcionado por una librería que hace uso del sensor "Kinect". El movimiento de los brazos está basado en la posición de las manos del usuario, a partir de esta posición se implementa la cinemática inversa de los brazos del robot para conseguir que el elemento terminal (la mano) del robot esté en la misma posición relativa a su estructura que la mano del usuario en relación a su cuerpo

Code for Success: Software Development for Robotics Competitions

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Robotics technologies have the potential to change the way we live for the better by reducing the difficulty of, helping with, or completely automating tasks. Robotics competitions such as RoboCup aim to push the field forward while providing an environment for participants to acquire important skills and knowledge. Most participants in these competitions are university teams with members from different backgrounds and levels of expertise, using different types of robots. These diverse teams must develop large and complex software stacks to accomplish their respective competitions’ objectives. This thesis aims to improve the software development process for these teams in regards to the development experience and competition outcomes. This will help push forward the robotics field and, consequently, our quality of life. The available literature about software development methodologies for non-professional teams in robotics competitions is currently limited. The objectives of this thesis include enlarging the available knowledge in this domain and creating a practical set of guidelines that improve the software development experience and outcomes for robotics competitions. In order to do this, the software development methodology of the UTS Unleashed! team was analyzed over three consecutive years of participation in the RoboCup@Home Social Standard Platform League from the point of view of the development lead. Additionally, expert feedback was gathered to analyze, discuss, and compare the software development methodology of other teams and experts in the RoboCup League. The research methodologies used in this thesis are Action Research, to explore UTS Unleashed!’s case study, and Grounded Theory, to analyze expert feedback gathered from a workshop and survey of members of the RoboCup community. To the author’s knowledge, this thesis presents the first longitudinal case study on a competitive team participating over multiple years in a robotics competition. Moreover, with the team under study achieving victory in their third year of participation. Furthermore, it is the first work showcasing expert feedback on a RoboCup teams’ software development process from the RoboCup community. This thesis concludes with a set of guidelines for software development practices for teams participating in robotic competitions. These guidelines offer insights and advice to improve competition team software development experiences and outcomes

Evaluating the use of robots to enlarge AAL services

We introduce robots as a tools to enhance Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services. Robots are a unique opportunity to create new systems to cooperate in reaching better living conditions. Robots offer the possibility of richer interaction with humans, and can perform actions to actively change the environment. The current state-of-art includes skills in various areas, including advanced interaction (natural language, visual attention, object recognition, intention learning), navigation (map learning, obstacle avoidance), manipulation (grasping, use of tools), and cognitive architectures to handle highly unpredictable environments. From our experience in several robotics projects and principally in the RoboCup@Home competition, a new set of evaluation methods is proposed to assess the maturity of the required skills. Such comparison should ideally enable the abstraction from the particular robotic platform and concentrate on the easy comparison of skills. The validity of that low-level skills can be then scaled to more complex tasks, that are composed by several skills. Our conclusion is that effective evaluation methods can be designed with the objective of enabling robots to enlarge AAL services.This research was partly supported by the PATRICIA project (TIN2012-38416-C03-01), MANIPlus project (201350E102), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and European Found for Regional Development (FEDER).Peer Reviewe

I want someone who hasn't anyone to love

Gift of Dr. Mary Jane Esplen.Piano vocal 1st ten. 2nd ten. bari bass [instrumentation]My girl just shook me [first line]I want someone who hasn't anyone to love [first line of chorus]E flat [key]Moderato [tempo]Popular song [form/genre]Portrait of woman wearing hat [illustration]EH Pfeiffer [graphic artist]Publisher's advertisement on back cover [note]Male quartette on inside back cover [note

Multi-target & multi-detector people tracker for mobile robots

People tracking is a key perception skill for mobile robots designed to share environments with human beings. It allows the robot to keep track of people around them, which is fundamental for two main reasons: safety and social interaction. This paper presents the work done on people tracking with the REEM robot after two years of paticipation at the RoboCup@home challenge. The main contribution of the paper is the tracker part, which is designed to be multi-target and to fuse heterogeneous detections from a variety of sensors, each one yielding different rates, field of views and quality performance. The paper carefully describes the tracker approach, based on multi-target particle filtering, as well as data association step, based on a probabilistic multi-hypothesis tree. Quantitative evaluations of real datasets using CLEAR MOT metrics are provided, comparing different sensor/detector set-ups and different data association approaches.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Monitoring and evaluating the impact of national school-based deworming in Kenya: study design and baseline results.

BACKGROUND: An increasing number of countries in Africa and elsewhere are developing national plans for the control of neglected tropical diseases. A key component of such plans is school-based deworming (SBD) for the control of soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) and schistosomiasis. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of national programmes is essential to ensure they are achieving their stated aims and to evaluate when to reduce the frequency of treatment or when to halt it altogether. The article describes the M&E design of the Kenya national SBD programme and presents results from the baseline survey conducted in early 2012. METHODS: The M&E design involves a stratified series of pre- and post-intervention, repeat cross-sectional surveys in a representative sample of 200 schools (over 20,000 children) across Kenya. Schools were sampled based on previous knowledge of STH endemicity and were proportional to population size. Stool (and where relevant urine) samples were obtained for microscopic examination and in a subset of schools; finger-prick blood samples were collected to estimate haemoglobin concentration. Descriptive and spatial analyses were conducted. The evaluation measured both prevalence and intensity of infection. RESULTS: Overall, 32.4% of children were infected with at least one STH species, with Ascaris lumbricoides as the most common species detected. The overall prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni was 2.1%, while in the Coast Province the prevalence of S. haematobium was 14.8%. There was marked geographical variation in the prevalence of species infection at school, district and province levels. The prevalence of hookworm infection was highest in Western Province (25.1%), while A. lumbricoides and T. trichiura prevalence was highest in the Rift Valley (27.1% and 11.9%). The lowest prevalence was observed in the Rift Valley for hookworm (3.5%), in the Coast for A. lumbricoides (1.0%), and in Nyanza for T. trichiura (3.6%). The prevalence of S. mansoni was most common in Western Province (4.1%). CONCLUSIONS: The current findings are consistent with the known spatial ecology of STH and schistosome infections and provide an important empirical basis on which to evaluate the impact of regular mass treatment through the school system in Kenya

Guiado gestual de un robot humanoide mediante un sensor "kinect"

Castellano: Este proyecto trata sobre el desarrollo de una aplicación para mover los brazos de un robot humanoide (Bioloid) que imite al usuario de la aplicación gracias a un "skeleton tracking" proporcionado por una librería que hace uso del sensor "Kinect". El movimiento de los brazos está basado en la posición de las manos del usuario, a partir de esta posición se implementa la cinemática inversa de los brazos del robot para conseguir que el elemento terminal (la mano) del robot esté en la misma posición relativa a su estructura que la mano del usuario en relación a su cuerpo

Guiado gestual de un robot humanoide mediante un sensor "kinect"

Castellano: Este proyecto trata sobre el desarrollo de una aplicación para mover los brazos de un robot humanoide (Bioloid) que imite al usuario de la aplicación gracias a un "skeleton tracking" proporcionado por una librería que hace uso del sensor "Kinect". El movimiento de los brazos está basado en la posición de las manos del usuario, a partir de esta posición se implementa la cinemática inversa de los brazos del robot para conseguir que el elemento terminal (la mano) del robot esté en la misma posición relativa a su estructura que la mano del usuario en relación a su cuerpo

Gesture learning and execution in a humanoid robot via dynamic movement primitives

A system for learning and executing gestures in a humanoid robot has been developed and implemented in this work. Gestures are represented via the use of dynamical movement primitives on the robotic platform REEM. Since agnostic knowledge is considered when designing trajectories, our approach can be easily extended to other robots. Implemented work involves recording of gestures using three different procedures, from the Own robot, with the help of a user, and from external devices. Next, the dynamic movement primitives representing the motions are generated to describe trajectories that will finally be executed on the real humanoid robot. Several experiments are provided illustrating how knowledge is acquired by the robot, represented in the form of dynamical systems, generalized and reproduced from different starting conditions

Multi-target & multi-detector people tracker for mobile robots

People tracking is a key perception skill for mobile robots designed to share environments with human beings. It allows the robot to keep track of people around them, which is fundamental for two main reasons: safety and social interaction. This paper presents the work done on people tracking with the REEM robot after two years of paticipation at the RoboCup@home challenge. The main contribution of the paper is the tracker part, which is designed to be multi-target and to fuse heterogeneous detections from a variety of sensors, each one yielding different rates, field of views and quality performance. The paper carefully describes the tracker approach, based on multi-target particle filtering, as well as data association step, based on a probabilistic multi-hypothesis tree. Quantitative evaluations of real datasets using CLEAR MOT metrics are provided, comparing different sensor/detector set-ups and different data association approaches.Peer Reviewe