Augmented reality applications in design and manufacturing

Open Dynamics Engine を用いたスノーボードロボットシミュレータの開発

Wireless Sensor Networks and Multi-UAV systems for natural disaster management

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the world and the relationships among humans as the learning capabilities of machines have allowed for a new means of communication between humans and machines. In the field of health, there is much interest in new technologies that help to improve and automate services in hospitals. This article aims to explore the literature related to conversational agents applied to health care, searching for definitions, patterns, methods, architectures, and data types. Furthermore, this work identifies an agent application taxonomy, current challenges, and research gaps. In this work, we use a systematic literature review approach. We guide and refine this study and the research questions by applying Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and Context (PICOC) criteria. The present study investigated approximately 4145 articles involving conversational agents in health published over the last ten years. In this context, we finally selected 40 articles based on their approaches and objectives as related to our main subject. As a result, we developed a taxonomy, identified the main challenges in the field, and defined the main types of dialog and contexts related to conversational agents in health. These results contributed to discussions regarding conversational health agents, and highlighted some research gaps for future study.

Survey of conversational agents in health

In this letter, we propose a framework for task allocation in human-robot collaborative assembly planning. Our framework distinguishes between two main layers of abstraction and allocation. In the higher layer, we use an abstract world model, incorporating a multiagent human-robot team approach in order to describe the collaborative assembly planning problem. From this, nominal co-ordinated skill sequences for every agent are produced. In order to be able to treat humans and robots as agents of the same form, we move relevant differences/peculiarities into distinct cost functions. The layer beneath handles the concrete skill execution. On atomic level, skills are composed of complex hierarchical and concurrent hybrid state machines, which in turn co-ordinate the real-time behavior of the robot. Their careful design allows to cope with unpredictable events also on decisional level without having to explicitly plan for them, instead one may rely also on manually designed skills. Such events are likely to happen in dynamic and potentially partially known environments, which is especially true in case of human presence.

A Hierarchical Human-Robot Interaction-Planning Framework for Task Allocation in Collaborative Industrial Assembly Processes

This paper presents a concept of a smart working environment designed to allow true joint-actions of humans and industrial robots. The proposed system perceives its environment with multiple sensor modalities and acts in it with an industrial robot manipulator to assemble capital goods together with a human worker. In combination with the reactive behavior of the robot, safe collaboration between the human and the robot is possible. Furthermore, the system anticipates human behavior, based on knowledge databases and decision processes, ensuring an effective collaboration between the human and robot. As a proof of concept, we introduce a use case where an arm is assembled and mounted on a robotpsilas body.

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Joint-action for humans and industrial robots for assembly tasks

This paper introduces the design and development of a new robotic system to assist surgeons performing ophthalmic surgeries. The robot itself is very compact and similar to an average human hand in size. Its primary application is intraocular micromanipulation in order to overcome the existing challenges in treatment of diseases like Retinal Vein Occlusion (RVO). The novel hybrid mechanism designed for this robot allows microscale motions and is stable in the presence of vibrations common in operation room (OR). The robotic system can be easily integrated into standard operation rooms and does not require modification of conventional surgical tools. This compact microsurgical system is suitable for mounting on the patient's head and thereby, solves the problem of patient motion. The compatibility of the robotic system with a real world surgical setup was evaluated and confirmed in this work.

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The introduction of a new robot for assistance in ophthalmic surgery

This paper presents the kinematic and dynamic analysis of a robot for 6 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) micromanipulation. This robot is designed for performing intraocular manipulation but its application is not limited to ophthalmic surgery. The novel hybrid parallel-serial mechanism designed for this robot enables microscale motions with high stiffness and sufficient output forces. This portable robot can be easily integrated into standard biomedical environments and does not require any modification of conventional surgical tools. The contribution of this work is a novel design of a miniature micromanipulator comprising piezo actuator based parallel coupled joints which allow adjustable Remote Center of Motion (RCM). The advantages of the introduced mechanism compared to similar mechanisms are compactness, stiffness and simplicity of mathematical computation.

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Kinematics and dynamics analysis of a hybrid parallel-serial micromanipulator designed for biomedical applications

In this paper a new Robot Modeling/Simulation Toolbox for Matlab is presented. The primary purpose of this toolbox is to generate all the common equations required for robot control design. It can compute the kinematic and dynamic equations of a serial robot in closed-form. The toolbox generates codes for the most representative matrices of the robot dynamics. For example, the Inertia Matrix, Coriolis Matrix, Gravitational Torques Vector and most important the Robot Regressor can be computed in closed-form with symbolic representation. This toolbox uses the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) and Euler-Lagrange Methodologies to compute the Kinematic and Dynamic models of the robot. Furthermore, it automatically generates useful code for these models, such as M-Files, Simulink model and C/C++ code, allowing easy integration with other popular Matlab toolboxes or C/C++ environments. The only requirement from the user are the DH parameters, making it an easy to use tool. For 3D visualization, the toolbox supports different methods. The primary contribution is the automation and simplification of the robot modeling process which is important for correct robot design and control. In addition, the easy to use GUI and simplified models allow rapid prototyping and simulation of robots and control design/validation. As a proof of concept, validation of the computed models of a real industrial robot is included, where the toolbox was used to compute all the robot models. Thereafter, using the motion equations generated by this toolbox, a Dynamic Compensation Control was designed and implemented on a Sta¨ubli TX-90 industrial robot in order to demonstrate how this toolbox simplifies the process.

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User friendly Matlab-toolbox for symbolic robot dynamic modeling used for control design

In this paper we propose a general, object-oriented software architecture for model-based visual tracking. The library is general purpose with respect to object model, estimated pose parameters, visual modalities employed, number of cameras and objects, and tracking methodology. The base class structure provides the necessary building blocks for implementing a wide variety of both known and novel tracking systems, integrating different visual modalities, like as color, motion, edge maps etc., in a multi-level fashion, ranging from pixel-level segmentation, up to local features matching and maximum-likelihood object pose estimation. The proposed structure allows integrating known data association algorithms for simultaneous, multiple object tracking tasks, as well as data fusion techniques for robust, multi-sensor tracking; within these contexts, parallelization of each tracking algorithm can as well be easily accomplished. Application of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through the definition and practical implementation of several tasks, all specified in terms of a self-contained description language.

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Suraj Nair

Papers

Joint-action for humans and industrial robots for assembly tasks

The introduction of a new robot for assistance in ophthalmic surgery

Kinematics and dynamics analysis of a hybrid parallel-serial micromanipulator designed for biomedical applications

User friendly Matlab-toolbox for symbolic robot dynamic modeling used for control design

A Unifying Software Architecture for Model-based Visual Tracking