The available versions of the Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) Mental Rotations Test (MRT) have physically deteriorated because only copies of copies are available. We report results from a redrawn version of the MRT and for alternate versions of the test. Males perform better than females, and students drawn from the physical sciences perform better than students drawn from the social sciences and humanities, confirming other reports with the original version of the MRT. Subjects find it very hard to perform the MRT when stimuli require rotation along both the top/bottom axis and the left/right axis. The magnitude of effect sizes for sex (which account, on average, for some 20% of the variance) does not increase with increasing difficulty of the task. Minimal strategy effects were observed and females did not perform differently during the menstrual period as opposed to the days between the menstrual periods. Practice effects are dramatic, confirming other reports with the original MRT, and can also be shown to be powerful in a transfer for practice paradigm, where test and retest involve different versions of the MRT. Main effects of handedness on MRT performance were not found.

A redrawn Vandenverg and Kuse mental rotations test : different versions and factors that affect performance

This book provides an in-depth description of event-based systems, covering topics ranging from local event matching and distributed event forwarding algorithms, through a practical discussion of software engineering issues raised by the event-based style, to state-of-the-art research in event-based systems like composite event detection and security. The authors offer a comprehensive overview, and show the power of event-based architectures in modern system design, encouraging professionals to exploit this technique in next generation large-scale distributed applications like information dissemination, network monitoring, enterprise application integration, or mobile systems.

/pdf/distributed-event-based-systems-33fttbtql7.pdf

Distributed event-based systems

Task-parameterized models of movements aim at automatically adapting movements to new situations encountered by a robot. The task parameters can, for example, take the form of positions of objects in the environment or landmark points that the robot should pass through. This tutorial aims at reviewing existing approaches for task-adaptive motion encoding. It then narrows down the scope to the special case of task parameters that take the form of frames of reference, coordinate systems or basis functions, which are most commonly encountered in service robotics. Each section of the paper is accompanied by source codes designed as simple didactic examples implemented in Matlab with a full compatibility with GNU Octave, closely following the notation and equations of the article. It also presents ongoing work and further challenges that remain to be addressed, with examples provided in simulation and on a real robot (transfer of manipulation behaviors to the Baxter bimanual robot). The repository for the accompanying source codes is available at http://www.idiap.ch/software/pbdlib/.

A tutorial on task-parameterized movement learning and retrieval

A review of verbal and non-verbal human-robot interactive communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion.

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

This paper presents the Robotics Service Bus (RSB), a new message-oriented, event-driven middleware based on a logically unified bus with hierarchical structure. Major goals for the development of RSB were openness and scalability in order to integrate diverse components in the context of robotics and intelligent systems. This includes the ability to operate on embedded platforms as well as desktop computers, reduction of framework lock-in, and the integration with other middlewares. We describe the design of the RSB middleware and explain how it meets requirements which lead to a scalable and open middleware concept. These requirements are based on several application scenarios which are used to verify the applicability of RSB. Furthermore, we relate RSB to other middlewares in the robotics domain.

/pdf/a-middleware-for-collaborative-research-in-experimental-25dqp4ylir.pdf

A middleware for collaborative research in experimental robotics

The recent advent of compliant and kinematically redundant robots poses new research challenges for human-robot interaction. While these robots provide a great degree of flexibility for the realization of complex applications, the flexibility gained generates the need for additional modeling steps and definition of criteria for redundancy resolution constraining the robot's movement generation. The explicit modeling of such criteria usually require experts to adapt the robot's movement generation subsystem. A typical way of dealing with this configuration challenge is to utilize kinesthetic teaching by guiding the robot to implicitly model the specific constraints in task and configuration space. We argue that current programming-by-demonstration approaches are not efficient for kinesthetic teaching of redundant robots and show that typical teach-in procedures are too complex for novice users. In order to enable non-experts to master the configuration and programming of a redundant robot in the presence of non-trivial constraints such as confined spaces, we propose a new interaction scheme combining kinesthetic teaching and learning within an integrated system architecture. We evaluated this approach in a user study with 49 industrial workers at HARTING, a medium-sized manufacturing company. The results show that the interaction concepts implemented on a KUKA Lightweight Robot IV are easy to handle for novice users, demonstrate the feasibility of kinesthetic teaching for implicit constraint modeling in configuration space, and yield significantly improved performance for the teach-in of trajectories in task space.

A user study on kinesthetic teaching of redundant robots in task and configuration space

The design, simulation and programming of robotics systems is challenging as expertise from multiple domains needs to be integrated conceptually and technically. Domain-specific modeling promises an efficient and flexible concept for developing robotics applications that copes with this challenge. It allows to raise the level of abstraction through the use of specific concepts that are closer to the respective domain concerns and easier to understand and validate. Furthermore, it focuses on increasing the level of automation, e.g. through code generation, to bridge the gap between the modeling and the implementation levels and to improve the efficiency and quality of the software development process. Within this contribution, we survey the literature available on domain-specific (modeling) languages in robotics required to realize a state-of-the-art real-world example from the [email protected] competition. We classify 41 publications in the field as reference for potential DSL users. Furthermore, we analyze these contributions from a DSL-engineering viewpoint and discuss quantitative and qualitative aspects such as the methods and tools used for DSL implementation as well as their documentation status and platform integration. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for discussion in the robotics programming and simulation community based on the insights gained with this survey.

/pdf/a-survey-on-domain-specific-languages-in-robotics-53lso1yl41.pdf

A Survey on Domain-Specific Languages in Robotics

The development of advanced robotic systems is challenging as expertise from multiple domains needs to be integrated conceptually and technically. Model-driven engineering promises an efficient and flexible approach for developing robotics applications that copes with this challenge. Domain-specific modeling allows to describe robotics concerns with concepts and notations closer to the respective problem domain. This raises the level of abstraction and results in models that are easier to understand and validate. Furthermore, model-driven engineering allows to increase the level of automation, e.g. through code generation, and to bridge the gap between modeling and implementation. The anticipated results are improved efficiency and quality of the robotics systems engineering process. Within this contribution, we survey the available literature on domain-specific modeling and languages that target core robotics concerns. In total 137 publications were identified that comply with a set of defined criteria, which we consider essential for contributions in this field. With the presented survey, we provide an overview on the state-of-the-art of domain-specific modeling approaches in robotics. The surveyed publications are investigated from the perspective of users and developers of model-based approaches in robotics along a set of quantitative and qualitative research questions. The presented quantitative analysis clearly indicates the rising popularity of applying domain-specific modeling approaches to robotics in the academic community. Beyond this statistical analysis, we map the selected publications to a defined set of robotics subdomains and typical development phases in robotic systems engineering as reference for potential users. Furthermore, we analyze these contributions from a language engineering viewpoint and discuss aspects such as the methods and tools used for their implementation as well as their documentation status, platform integration, typical use cases and the evaluation strategies used for validation of the proposed approaches. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for discussion in the model-driven engineering and robotics community based on the insights gained in this survey.

/pdf/a-survey-on-domain-specific-modeling-and-languages-in-499on6nb4q.pdf

A Survey on Domain-specific Modeling and Languages in Robotics

Distributed processing and memory structures are very important aspects of cognitive vision systems. Both issues not only require sophisticated conceptual designs but also pose problems of software and systems engineering. In this paper, we describe a general XML based solution to these problems. Practical experiences are reported to underline its suitability.

Sebastian Wrede

Papers

A middleware for collaborative research in experimental robotics

A user study on kinesthetic teaching of redundant robots in task and configuration space

A Survey on Domain-Specific Languages in Robotics

A Survey on Domain-specific Modeling and Languages in Robotics

An XML based framework for cognitive vision architectures