关键词： Electric stimulation   Rehabilitation   Robotics   Stroke   Upper extremity  

摘要： In this issue of Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Jessica McCabe and colleagues report findings from their methodologically sound, dose-matched clinical trial in 39 patients beyond 6 months poststroke. In this phase II trial, the effects of 60 treatment sessions, each involving 3.5 hours of intensive practice plus either 1.5 hours of functional electrical stimulation (FES) or a shoulder-arm robotic therapy, were compared with 5 hours of intensive daily practice alone. Although no significant between-group differences were found on the primary outcome measure of Arm Motor Ability Test and the secondary outcome measure of Fugl-Meyer Arm motor score, 10% to 15% within-group therapeutic gains were on the Arm Motor Ability Test and Fugl-Meyer Arm. These gains are clinically meaningful for patients with stroke. However, the underlying mechanisms that drive these improvements remain poorly understood. The approximately $1000 cost reduction per patient calculated for the use of motor learning (ML) methods alone or combined with FES, compared with the combination of ML and shoulder-arm robotics, further emphasizes the need for cost considerations when making clinical decisions about selecting the most appropriate therapy for the upper paretic limb in patients with chronic stroke. (C) 2015 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine

关键词： Knowledge representation   Robot skill   Industrial robotics ontology   Assembly   Service-oriented architecture  

摘要： When robots are working in dynamic environments, close to humans lacking extensive knowledge of robotics, there is a strong need to simplify the user interaction and make the system execute as autonomously as possible, as long as it is feasible. For industrial robots working side-by-side with humans in manufacturing industry, Al systems are necessary to lower the demand on programming time and system integration expertise. Only by building a system with appropriate knowledge and reasoning services can one simplify the robot programming sufficiently to meet those demands while still getting a robust and efficient task execution. In this paper, we present a system we have realized that aims at fulfilling the above demands. The paper focuses on the knowledge put into ontologies created for robotic devices and manufacturing tasks, and presents examples of AI-related services that use the semantic descriptions of skills to help users instruct the robot adequately. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

关键词： Nano-robotics   Omni-directional cancer treatment program   (OCTP)   Radiation   Breast   Cancer therapy  

摘要： Nano-robotics is introduced for the nuclear industry for radiation treatment as a complete cure of cancer because it leads to the removal of cancerous cells. In order to ensure the reliability of treatment, one needs to control the radiation behavior of the therapy. The omni-directional cancer treatment program (OCTP) is suggested for the therapy planning in which all cancerous cells are killed without damage to normal cells. This is one of the most important issues in the conventional radiation therapy planning. The clinical cancer therapy planning is performed by nanorobots. The tiny machine treats the cancer cells effectively. The collision event occurs approximately over 35 nm. Therefore, if the diameter of tumor is 1 cm, the curable length is about 5 nm. Thus, one movement of nanorobot radiates about 10 nm in two dimensional planning. The example organ in this study is the breast. Nanorobots enter from the upper side of breast and exit from the lower side of the breast in the clinical example. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

关键词： Evolutionary robotics   visually guided braking   proportional rate control   constant tau-dot strategy  

摘要： This paper utilizes evolutionary robotics techniques as a hypothesis generator to explore optical variables and control strategies that could be used to solve a driving-like braking task. Given such a task, humans exhibit two different braking behaviors: continuously regulated braking and impulsive braking. Based on an oft-used experimental task in human perception/action research, a series of evolutionary robotics simulations were developed to explore the space of possible braking strategies by examining how braking strategies change as the optical information is manipulated. Our results can be summarized as follows: (1) behaviors similar to human behavior were observed only when the constraints were selected correctly;(2) the optical variables and proportional rate yielded significantly better braking performance;(3) two different classes of impulsive braking behaviors were observed, including one not reported in previous studies: discrete impulsive braking and oscillatory impulsive braking;(4) the optical variable is used to initiate and terminate braking;(5) the evolved model agents use a proportional rate control strategy to regulate braking continuously. We argue that combining psychological experiments and evolutionary robotics simulations is a promising research methodology that is useful for testing existing hypotheses and generating new ones.

关键词： POSE estimation (Computer vision)   LIDAR (Optics)   ROBOTICS  

摘要： An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles including 'Minimal solutions for the multi-camera pose estimation problem,' 'Model-free detection and tracking of dynamic objects with 2D lidar,' and 'Exploitation of environmental constraints in human and robotic grasping.'

关键词： Endometrial cancer   Robotic surgery   Laparoscopic surgery   Obesity  

关键词： Intertemporal choice   Evolutionary robotics   Ecological rationality   Delay discounting   Spatial discounting   Preferences  

摘要： In intertemporal choices, subjects face a trade-off between value and delay: achieving the most valuable outcome requires a longer time, whereas the immediately available option is objectively poorer. Intertemporal choices are ubiquitous, and comparative studies reveal commonalities and differences across species: all species devalue future rewards as a function of delay (delay aversion), yet there is a lot of inter-specific variance in how rapidly such devaluation occurs. These differences are often interpreted in terms of ecological rationality, as depending on environmental factors (e.g., feeding ecology) and the physiological and morphological constraints of different species (e.g., metabolic rate). Evolutionary hypotheses, however, are hard to verify in vivo, since it is difficult to observe precisely enough real environments, not to mention ancestral ones. In this paper, we discuss the viability of an approach based on evolutionary robotics: in Study 1, we evolve robots without a metabolism in five different ecologies;in Study 2, we evolve metabolic robots (i.e., robots that consume energy over time) in three different ecologies. The intertemporal choices of the robots are analyzed both in their ecology and under laboratory conditions. Results confirm the generality of delay aversion and the usefulness of studying intertemporal choice through experimental evolutionary robotics. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

关键词： ROBOTICS   COMPUTERS   SPECIAL issues of periodicals   KNOWLEDGE representation (Information theory)   COMPUTER research   PERIODICALS  

关键词： Human-robot interaction   Robot-robot interaction   Ontologies for robotics and automation   Knowledge representation   Ontology engineering   Spatial information  

摘要： Spatial notions play a key role when humans and robots interact. Robotics & Automation (R&A) often involves diverse scenarios where heterogeneous robots must share their spatial knowledge to achieve a given goal. Such scenarios may become more complex when humans are also involved. This means that humans and heterogeneous robots must share their spatial information about the world. For this purpose, the IEEE Ontologies for Robotics and Automation (ORA) Working Group started developing an ontology, called POS, with the purpose of defining the core notions required to share spatial concepts in the R&A domain. This paper evaluates the proposed ontology through a use case scenario involving both heterogeneous robots and human-robot interactions, showing how to define new spatial notions using POS. We discuss the experiment results presenting the ontology strengths as well as the future directions to be taken by the ORA group. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.