Joyful Adventures and Frightening Places–Designing Emotion-Inducing Virtual Environments

Virtual environments (VEs) can evoke and support emotions, as experienced when playing emotionally arousing games. We theoretically approach the design of fear and joy evoking VEs based on a literature review of empirical studies on virtual and real environments as well as video games’ reviews and content analyses. We define the design space and identify central design elements that evoke specific positive and negative emotions. Based on that, we derive and present guidelines for emotion-inducing VE design with respect to design themes, colors and textures, and lighting configurations. To validate our guidelines in two user studies, we 1) expose participants to 360° videos of VEs designed following the individual guidelines and 2) immerse them in a neutral, positive and negative emotion-inducing VEs combining all respective guidelines in Virtual Reality. The results support our theoretically derived guidelines by revealing significant differences in terms of fear and joy induction

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Swarm Grammars - A New Approach to Dynamic Growth

In this paper we present a new approach to dynamically breed artificial structures. By embedding swarm agents into the framework of formal grammars we build a bridge between symbol-based production systems and threedimensional, real-time construction procedures that are driven by moving, reactive, autonomous agents. In a small number of simulations we focus on the swarm agent abilities to coordinate with one another, and to respond to the environment. First results allow for a cautious, yet optimistic look at possible fields of application and future work.We are currently acquiring citations for the work deposited into this collection. We recognize the distribution rights of this item may have been assigned to another entity, other than the author(s) of the work.If you can provide the citation for this work or you think you own the distribution rights to this work please contact the Institutional Repository Administrator at [email protected]

Welcome to the Jungle - Robots Entering the Realm of Animals

In this paper we summarize different experiments and projects that focus on animal-robot interaction. Based on the given examples, a general classification method is derived. A further class of applications in the field of animal-robot interaction is added and illustratively outlined.We are currently acquiring citations for the work deposited into this collection. We recognize the distribution rights of this item may have been assigned to another entity, other than the author(s) of the work.If you can provide the citation for this work or you think you own the distribution rights to this work please contact the Institutional Repository Administrator at [email protected]

Swarm grammars: modeling computational development through highly dynamic complex processes

Bibliography: p. 147-167Some pages are in colou

Interactive simulation of developmental biological models (joint presentation with Andreas Knote)

Interactive simulations put the "human in the loop", i.e. they make it possible for the human modeller or analyst to change parameters and immediately see the effects, to explore the model's dynamics in novel directions, to quickly gain an intuition about the most beneficial questions to ask next. Due to the field's importance and the need communicated to us by experts in the field, we are committed to realising according interactive simulations in the domain of developmental biology. In this joint presentation, we first summarise the challenges developmental biologists laid out for us in terms of data integration, model building, simulation and optimisation. Second, we present our efforts addressing them. In particular, we elaborate on various computational approaches that we have integrated to meet the specified requirements -- from visual programming over importing and editing annotated volumetric data to efficient, GPU-based simulation and effective methods of visualisation and interaction. For honing these aspects, we have devised a virtual cell model that runs at realtime speeds and realises some of the basic morphogenetic interactions, including morphogen-based signalling, adhesion, proliferation, and growth. We present an according prototype that serves as a basis to gain feedback from developmental biologists and experts in developmental models.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of WuerzburgResearche

An organic computing approach to self-organizing robot ensembles

Similar to the Autonomous Computing initiative, which has mainly been advancing techniques for self-optimization focusing on computing systems and infrastructures, Organic Computing (OC) has been driving the development of system design concepts and algorithms for self-adaptive systems at large. Examples of application domains include, for instance, traffic management and control, cloud services, communication protocols, and robotic systems. Such an OC system typically consists of a potentially large set of autonomous and self-managed entities, where each entity acts with a local decision horizon. By means of cooperation of the individual entities, the behavior of the entire ensemble system is derived. In this article, we present our work on how autonomous, adaptive robot ensembles can benefit from OC technology. Our elaborations are aligned with the different layers of an observer/controller framework, which provides the foundation for the individuals’ adaptivity at system design-level. Relying on an extended Learning Classifier System (XCS) in combination with adequate simulation techniques, this basic system design empowers robot individuals to improve their individual and collaborative performances, e.g., by means of adapting to changing goals and conditions. Not only for the sake of generalizability but also because of its enormous transformative potential, we stage our research in the domain of robot ensembles that are typically comprised of several quad-rotors and that organize themselves to fulfill spatial tasks such as maintenance of building facades or the collaborative search for mobile targets. Our elaborations detail the architectural concept, provide examples of individual self-optimization as well as of the optimization of collaborative efforts, and we show how the user can control the ensembles at multiple levels of abstraction. We conclude with a summary of our approach and an outlook on possible future steps