关键词： CHIEF executive officers   DEATH   ROBOTICS research   NON-Cartesian coordinate systems  

摘要： Takashi Gomi's death in September 2013 has left an enormous gap in the lives of his family and friends. Here I pay tribute to his multiple roles in bridging many gaps - so uniquely and charismatically - in the field of robotics over several decades. He was a principal player in the development of autonomous and evolutionary robotics over this period. He called his approach Non-Cartesian robotics, others used different terms such as Behavior Based Robotics or Nouvelle AI for broadly similar ideas;what united them was a critical rejection of many of the classical robotic assumptions that have been loosely called GOFAI - Good Old-Fashioned AI.

关键词： Psychic surgery   Surgical robots   Laparoscopic surgery   Endoscopic surgery   Nephrectomy  

关键词： employment   health care sector   motivation   robotics  

摘要： Background: The economy is being lifted by the new concept of robotics, but we cannot be sure of all the possible benefits. At this early stage, it therefore becomes important to find out the possible benefits/limitations associated with robotics, so that the positives can be capitalized, established, and developed further for the employment and motivation of employees in the health care sector, for overall economic development. The negatives should also be further studied and mitigated. Methods: This study is an exploratory research, based on secondary data, such as books on topics related to robotics, websites, public websites of concerned departments for data and statistics, journals, newspapers and magazines, websites of health care providers, and different printed materials (brochures, etc). Results: The impact of robotics has both positive and negative impacts on the employment and motivation of employees in the retail sector. So far, there has been no substantial research done into robotics, especially in the health care sector. Conclusion: Replacing employees with robots is an inevitable choice for organizations in the service sector, more so in the health care sector because of the challenging and sometimes unhealthy working environments, but, at the same time, the researchers propose that it should be done in a manner that helps in improving the employment and motivation of employees in this sector. (C) 2014, Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute. Published by Elsevier. All rights reserved.

关键词： Social assitive robotics   Cerebral palsy  

摘要： Robotics Agent Coacher for Cerebral Palsy motor Function (RAC CP Fun) is an attempt to implement socially assistive robotics, and a motor learning approach in rehabilitating movement disorders with a central origin. The concept and architecture of RAC CP Fun implements the motor learning theory and behavioral approach, i.e. principles of repetition, stages of learning, appropriate feedback, random practice, and enriched environments. Eleven children with cerebral palsy (CP) and fourteen typically developed (TD) children participated in two procedures while interacting with a robot and performing motor exercises. The interaction level and motor performance of children were measured and compared. Children with CP exhibited a higher interaction level;however, their motor performance was lower than that of TD children. RAC CP Fun was found to be feasible to interact with children of pre-school age, to augment the motivation of the children with CP, and to involve the children in motor exercises.

关键词： SPORTS medicine periodicals   ARTHROSCOPY  

摘要： An introduction to this issue of 'Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review' is presented.

关键词： Service Oriented Computing (SOC)   Multi-robot systems   Data mapping   Robotics frameworks   Microsoft robotics developer studio  

摘要： This document summarizes the goals achieved in the development of a data mapping application, for a multi-robot system, implemented as a service with the guidelines found in the Service Oriented Computing paradigm (SOC). The obtained service generates both local and global maps in the reconstruction of a virtual scenario: the local maps represent the surrounding area around each one of the mobile robots, and the global one the totality of the scenario where the robots move. The information of the global map is continuously updated by merging the data coming from the local maps by using a novel approach: each one of the maps manages a confidence level value that defines which of the data coming from the maps is worthy of being updated into the global one. This technique is not present in related work. The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio framework was chosen for its implementation because of the advantages that this tool offers in the management of concurrent and distributed processes, typically found in both a robotics platform and in a multi-robot system. (C) 2014 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.

关键词： assistive robotics   3D haptic rendering   telepresence   individuals with visual impairments   telerobotics  

摘要： Although many assistive devices have been developed and utilized to aid in daily living, the most general assistive means for individuals with visual impairments are the walking cane and guide dogs. These assistive means are effective in assisting the user in navigating within an environment;however, the navigation space is limited to the proximal environment of the user. Thus, in this paper, we discuss a method to increase the range of accessibility to a remote environment through robotic embodiment that enables teleoperation and teleperception through multi-modal feedback. In order to transform remote spatial information into a non-visual modality, we present a framework for utilizing an RGB-D-based depth camera, a mobile robot, and a haptic interface for 3D haptic rendering to accomplish the goal of haptic exploration of a remote environment. Experiments with three different control methods for robot interaction are designed for users with and without visual impairments. Several hypothesis are built to study the correlation between control/feedback modality and performance in telerobotic operations. Results show that users performed best when combining semi-autonomous navigation with 3D haptic exploration and also rated their experience with our system as fairly good. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

摘要： This special issue contains a number of publications in the area of production research. The intention is to give innovative examples of the work of research institutes and to show some of recent developments from the interdisciplinary field of automation and robotics.

关键词： Affective robotics   Body features of emotion   Corpus materials   Culture prototypes   Emotion event scenario   GRID  

摘要： If robots are to successfully interact with humans, they need to measure, quantify and respond to the emotions we produce. Similar to humans, the perceptual cue inputs to any modelling that allows this will be based on behavioural expression and body activity features that are prototypical of each emotion. However, the likely employment of such robots in different cultures necessitates the tuning of the emotion feature recognition system to the specific feature profiles present in these cultures. The amount of tuning depends on the relative convergence of the cross-cultural mappings between the emotion feature profiles of the cultures where the robots will be used. The GRID instrument and the cognitive corpus linguistics methodology were used in a contrastive study analysing a selection of behavioural expression and body activity features to compare the feature profiles of joy, sadness, fear and anger within and between Polish and British English. The intra-linguistic differences that were found in the profile of emotion features suggest that weightings based on this profile can be used in robotic modelling to create emotion-sensitive socially interacting robots. Our cross-cultural results further indicate that this profile of features needs to be tuned in robots to make them emotionally competent in different cultures.