关键词： Developing Caribbean countries   Robotic surgery  

摘要： The Caribbean region is part of the world which lagged by 10 years compared to the rest of the developed world nations in the field of minimal access surgery (MAS). The implementation of basic and advanced laparoscopy only came to fruition until a group of surgeons created a partnership across the region. The introduction of robotic surgery to the world possess yet another challenge to the surgical leaders and the people of the developing Caribbean countries.

关键词： Robotics  

关键词： Robots   Robotics   Researchers   Tubes   Energy   Three dimensional printing   Muscles   Insects   Pneumatics   Tongue   Actuators   Elastomers   Biomimetics  

摘要： Chameleon tongues contain a long bone wrapped in a tubular muscle, called the accelerator muscle. When the reptile spots its prey, it contracts this muscle, pulling it back like the string of a bow. Then, suddenly, the chameleon releases its tongue, which shoots forward at over 8,500 ft/sec, expanding up to 2.5 times its original length to grab an unsuspecting insect. It is the tongue's stored elastic energy that makes this high-speed capture possible, and many scientists have attempted to mimic the movement. At Purdue University, researchers created a soft robot inspired by the chameleon tongue, and also developed a soft gripper, both of which exploit the power of elastic energy. To make the prestressed soft actuators, the researchers cast silicone elastomer into 3D-printed molds and baked them to produce stretchy, long tubes similar to a party balloon. The structure contains an inner pneumatic channel that pressurized air can enter.

关键词： Hyperdimensional computing   Vector symbolic architectures   Robotics  

摘要： Hyperdimensional computing combines very high-dimensional vector spaces (e.g. 10,000 dimensional) with a set of carefully designed operators to perform symbolic computations with large numerical vectors. The goal is to exploit their representational power and noise robustness for a broad range of computational tasks. Although there are surprising and impressive results in the literature, the application to practical problems in the area of robotics is so far very limited. In this work, we aim at providing an easy to access introduction to the underlying mathematical concepts and describe the existing computational implementations in form of vector symbolic architectures (VSAs). This is accompanied by references to existing applications of VSAs in the literature. To bridge the gap to practical applications, we describe and experimentally demonstrate the application of VSAs to three different robotic tasks: viewpoint invariant object recognition, place recognition and learning of simple reactive behaviors. The paper closes with a discussion of current limitations and open questions.

关键词： Robotics   Literature review   Artificial intelligence (AI)   Hospitality technology  

摘要： Purpose This paper aims to review the extant hospitality and tourism literature on the state of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the service industry. The aim was to highlight the current areas of research on this emerging topic and identify areas for future application and study. Design/methodology/approach A list of hospitality and tourism journals was used to identify articles related to AI and robotics using the terms AI, robots, robotics, hospitality and tourism, and several combinations thereof. Additional sources were identified through the literature reviews from the identified works. Findings The findings revealed several studies on the current state of robotics and AI in hospitality and tourism. Additional research examines and discusses implications for internal and external customer service, legal and ethical issues and theory. Originality/value This paper provides a compilation of the current studies that examine the impact of robotics and AI in hospitality and tourism. It offers scholars an overview of the current knowledge in the field on this rapidly emerging and evolving topic.

关键词： Robotics   Research agenda   Servicescape   Robonomics   Robot adoption   rService  

摘要： Purpose This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of research on robotics in travel, tourism and hospitality, and to identify research gaps and directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyzes 131 publications published during 1993-2019, identified via Scopus, Web of Science, ResearchGate, *** and Google Scholar. It offers quantitative analysis of frequencies and cross-tables and qualitative thematic analysis of the publications within each of seven identified domains. Findings The paper identifies "Robot," "Human," "Robot manufacturer," "Travel/tourism/hospitality company," "Servicescape," "External environment" and "Education, training and research" as the research domains. Most research studies are dedicated to robots in restaurants, airports, hotels and bars. Papers tend to apply engineering methods, but experiments and surveys grow in popularity. Asia-Pacific countries account for much of the empirical research. Research limitations/implications The analysis was limited to publications indexed in four databases and one search engine. Only publications in English were considered. Growing opportunities for those who are anxious to publish in the field are identified. Importantly, emerging research is branching out from the engineering of robots to the possibilities for human/robot interactions and their use for service providers, opening up new avenues of research for tourism and hospitality scholars. Practical implications The paper identified a myriad of application areas for robots across various tourism and hospitality sectors. Service providers must critically think about how robots affect the servicescape and how it needs to be adjusted or re-imagined to ensure that robots and employees can augment the service experiences (co-)created within it. Originality/value This is the first study to systematically analyze research publications on robotics in travel, tourism and hospitality. ???????????????????? ?? ????

关键词： electronic skins   prosthetics   robotics   stretchable devices   wearable devices  

摘要： An electronic skin (e‐skin) is a device that mimics the various functions of human skin, such as stretchability, self‐healing, and tactile sensitivity. This is a rapidly advancing field, with applications in skin‐attachable devices for health monitoring, prosthetics, and robotics. In article number 1904765, recent progress in the e‐skin field is reviewed by Zhenan Bao, Steve Park, and co‐workers, with a focus on these three applications.

关键词： Industry 4   0   complexity   information theory   entropy  

摘要： The new industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 imposes new challenges to the research community. One of the main issues in Industry 4.0 is the management of the huge amount of information exchanged among its different integrated systems. The present work demonstrates how the traditional manufacturing system is transformed to the Industry 4.0 manufacturing system and proposes a modelling and quantification approach, which includes metrics from the Information Theory estimating the complexity and the capacity of the Industry 4.0, from the perspective of the communication among the systems. The application impact of the proposed Industry 4.0 system and the comparison of these metrics before and after shifting to Industry 4.0 is also analysed and validated in a case study from the Robotics Industry.

关键词： soft active materials   programmable materials   magnetic actuation   soft robotics   active metamaterials  

摘要： Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of a soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional components commonly attains only a single actuation mode under external stimuli, which limits their capability of achieving tunable properties. To greatly enhance the versatility of soft active materials, we exploit a new class of programmable magnetic-responsive composites incorporated with a multifunctional joint design that allows asymmetric multimodal actuation under an external stimulation. We demonstrate that the proposed asymmetric multimodal actuation enables a plethora of novel applications ranging from the basic one-dimensional/two-dimensional (2D) active structures with asymmetric shape-shifting to biomimetic crawling robots, swimming robots with efficient dynamic performance, and 2D metamaterials with tunable properties. This new asymmetric multimodal actuation mechanism will open up new avenues for the design of next-generation multifunctional soft robots, biomedical devices, and acoustic metamaterials.