摘要： As our global population ages, the demand for surgical treatment of spinal disorders in elderly patients has increased. The elderly population poses a unique challenge to spine surgeons due to multiple medical comorbidities and increased likelihood of complications. Robotics are being used for pedicle screw placement to enhance accuracy of placement and minimize surgical invasiveness. Although the use of robotics has not been studied specifically in elderly patients, this population may benefit significantly from the use of robotics as a minimally invasive technique to minimize blood loss, decrease operative time, and lessen postoperative pain—ultimately reducing complications. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.

关键词： Roboethics   Roboticists   Dehumanisation   Lived ethics  

摘要： Over the past two decades, ethical challenges related to robotics technologies have gained increasing interest among different research and non-academic communities, in particular through the field of roboethics. While the reasons to address roboethics are clear, why not to engage with ethics needs to be better understood. This paper focuses on a limited or lacking engagement with ethics that takes place within some parts of the robotics community and its implications for the conceptualisation of the human being. The underlying assumption is that the term 'ethical' essentially means 'human'. Thus, this paper discusses a working hypothesis according to which by avoiding to engage with roboethics, roboticists contribute to the tacit dehumanisation process emerging in and outside of robotics. An alternative approach includes 'lived ethics' which involves not only incorporating formal ethical approaches into the roboticists' work but also 'being' ethical and actually engaging with ethical reflection and practice.

关键词： Convolutional neural networks   Deep learning   LIDAR   Multi-dimensional processing   Recurrent neural networks   Relative navigation   Robotics  

摘要： This work proposes a new Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) based navigation architecture that is appropriate for uncooperative relative robotic space navigation applications. In contrast to current solutions that exploit 3D LIDAR data, our architecture suggests a Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (DRCNN) that exploits multi-projected imagery of the acquired 3D LIDAR data. Advantages of the proposed DRCNN are;an effective feature representation facilitated by the Convolutional Neural Network module within DRCNN, a robust modeling of the navigation dynamics due to the Recurrent Neural Network incorporated in the DRCNN, and a low processing time. Our trials evaluate several current state-of-the-art space navigation methods on various simulated but credible scenarios that involve a satellite model developed by Thales Alenia Space (France). Additionally, we evaluate real satellite LIDAR data acquired in our lab. Results demonstrate that the proposed architecture, although trained solely on simulated data, is highly adaptable and is more appealing compared to current algorithms on both simulated and real LIDAR data scenarios affording better odometry accuracy at lower computational requirements.

关键词： Food supply chains   Robotics and autonomous systems   Literature review  

摘要： Background. An increasing global population means resource utilisation and food security remain the critical global challenges. Robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) have been applied to improve productivity, and their role in enhancing supply chain operations is explored here. Scope and approach. Researchers have studied ways to adopt and integrate RAS into the food industry. However, most of the current literature focuses on the technological impact of RAS. In contrast, this paper discusses the adoption of RAS in the food industry from the supply chain perspective with regard to the supply chain operations. Key findings and conclusions. The study has selected 54 papers using a nine-step systematic review process. This research analysed the use of RAS across five major themes of the food supply chain, including food quality, food safety, food waste, supply chain efficiency, and supply chain analysis. The role of RAS the data availability, cybersecurity, skill capability, and financial costs are discussed in the context of adopting RAS in food supply chains. Future research directions are proposed with the aim of enhancing the application of RAS in food supply chain operations.

关键词： Urban technologies   Responsible Research and Innovation   Cityness   Urban justice   Urban planning   Self-driving cars  

摘要： Robots are leaving factories and entering urban spaces. In this paper, I will explore how we can integrate robots of various types into the urban landscape. I will distinguish between two perspectives: (1) the responsible design and use of urban robots and (2) robots as part of responsible urban innovations. The first viewpoint considers issues arising from the use of a robot in an urban environment. To develop a substantive understanding of Responsible Urban Robotics, we need to focus on normative implications of city life as the context in which in robots are being used. I will refer to the desirable qualities of city life as "cityness" and will argue that we should design for cityness. The second approach asks how robots might be used to address challenges specific to cities. From the perspective of RRI, this may require participatory approaches in which the needs of the stakeholders are addressed. But we may also find inspiration in the work undertaken in architecture on expanding the concept and field to ensure that architects not only provide services to the lucky few but also create useful and beautiful spaces for the many. A dialogue with architects, urban designers, and urban planners may also be needed to successfully address the spatial issues raised by the presence of robots in the city.

关键词： robotics   workplace   Twitter Analytics   anthropomorphism   technophobia  

摘要： Robotics application has provided a fruitful combination for hybrid industry 4.0 teams wherein robotic systems are progressing their way into spaces shared with human workers. The advent of artificial intelligence has also instilled the feeling of distress and ambiguity among employees regarding their future. Such confusion has triggered a plethora of deliberations surrounding the possible receptivity and hostility towards these modern technologies in the digital era where people are articulating their opinions and experiences through social media communication. This study explores the antecedents of employees' intention to accept robotics at workplace using two-step analyses: Twitter Analysis and Survey-based analysis. Around 121,750 tweets from 43,000 Twitter handles were evaluated in the form of descriptive analysis, geospatial analysis, network analysis and sentiment analysis. Thereafter, the conceptual model has been formulated and validated based on the extracted themes (anthropomorphism, technophobia and behavioral intention to accept robotics at workplace) by including 864 responses from an online survey conducted in India. The findings corroborated that anthropomorphism and technophobia significantly influence behavioral intention, and technophobia acts as a significant competitive mediator.

关键词： Substance use disorder   Reward positivity   Anterior midcingulate cortex   TMS   Decision-making   Cognitive control  

摘要： Background: Theoretical and empirical work suggest that addictive drugs potentiate dopaminergic reinforcement learning signals and disrupt the reward function of its neural targets, including the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) and the basal ganglia. Here, we aim to use prefrontal 10-Hz TMS to enhance aMCC reward activity and reward learning by the basal ganglia in problematic substance users. Methods: 22 problematic substance users were randomized into an Active and SHAM (coil flipped) TMS group. We recorded the reward positivity-an electrophysiological signal believed to index sensitivity of the aMCC to rewards-while participants engaged in 4 blocks (100 trials per block) of a reward-based choice task. A robotic arm positioned a TMS coil over a prefrontal cortex target, and 50 pulses were delivered at 10-Hz before every 10 trials of blocks 2-4 (1500 pulses, 400 trials). Participants then completed a decision-making task that is diagnostic of striatal dopamine dysfunction. Results: The present study revealed three main findings. First, both groups failed to elicit a reward positivity during the first two task blocks. Second, applying robot-assisted TMS enhanced the amplitude of the reward positivity in the Active group, but not the SHAM group, across the last two task blocks. Third, the Active group performed relatively better at reward-based learning than the SHAM group. Conclusion: These results demonstrate that 10-Hz TMS is successful in modulating the reward function of the aMCC and basal ganglia in problematic substance users, which may have utility in the treatment of reward related neural dysfunction commonly associated with substance use disorders.

关键词： Robot   Robotics   Ethics   Machine ethics   Technology   Responsibility   Philosophy  

摘要： The task of this essay is to respond to the question concerning robots and responsibility-to answer for the way that we understand, debate, and decide who or what is able to answer for decisions and actions undertaken by increasingly interactive, autonomous, and sociable mechanisms. The analysis proceeds through three steps or movements. (1) It begins by critically examining the instrumental theory of technology, which determines the way one typically deals with and responds to the question of responsibility when it involves technology. (2) It then considers three instances where recent innovations in robotics challenge this standard operating procedure by opening gaps in the usual way of assigning responsibility. The innovations considered in this section include: autonomous technology, machine learning, and social robots. (3) The essay concludes by evaluating the three different responses-instrumentalism 2.0, machine ethics, and hybrid responsibility-that have been made in face of these difficulties in an effort to map out the opportunities and challenges of and for responsible robotics.

关键词： Formal methods   Schedulability analysis   Robotics   Binary search  

摘要： The challenges of deploying robots and autonomous vehicles call for further efforts to bridge the gap between the robotics, the real-time systems and the formal methods communities. Indeed, with robots being more and more involved in costly missions and contact with humans, a rigorous formal verification of their behavior in the presence of various real-time constraints is crucial. In order to increase our trust in its results, such verification should be carried out on models that are as close as possible to reality, and thus take into account hardware and OS specificities such as the number of cores provided by the robotic platform and the scheduling policy. In this paper, we propose a novel binary-search-inspired technique that allows to extend timed automata models of robotic specifications with dynamic-priority schedulers. Given a number of cores, the extended models can then be checked against various real-time and behavioral properties, including schedulability, within the same model checking framework. Our technique is implemented in an automatic translation from a robotic framework to UPPAAL, and evaluated on a real robotic case study, where it shows a significant gain in scalability as opposed to the counting technique used in the literature.