Novel Haptic Cues for UAV Tele-Operation


Book Description

Outlines three case studies: obstacle avoidance, wind gust rejection, and a combination of the two. In each case, Direct Haptic Aid (DHA) and Indirect Haptic Aid (IHA) systems are designed and compared against baseline performance with no haptic aid. This work aims to show that IHA is a valid and promising alternative to the other approaches, which fall into the DHA category.




The Role of Visual Cues in Body Size Estimation


Book Description

Our body is central to what we define as our self. The mental representation of our physical appearance, often called body image, can have a great influence on our psychological health. Given the increase in body mass index worldwide and the societal pressure to conform to body ideals, it is important to gain a better understanding of the nature of body representations and factors that play a role in body size estimation tasks. This doctoral thesis takes a multifaceted approach for investigating the role of different visual cues in the estimation of own body size and shape by using a variety of experimental methods and novel state-of-the-art computer graphics methods. Two visual cues were considered: visual perspective and identity cues in the visual appearance of a body (shape, and color-information), as well as their interactions with own body size and gender. High ecological validity was achieved by testing body size estimation in natural settings, when looking into a mirror, and by generating biometrically plausible virtual bodies based on 3D body scans and statistical body models, and simulating real-world scenarios in immersive virtual reality.




UAV or Drones for Remote Sensing Applications


Book Description

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "UAV or Drones for Remote Sensing Applications" that was published in Sensors




Measuring, modelling and minimizing perceived motion incongruence for vehicle motion simulation


Book Description

Humans always wanted to go faster and higher than their own legs could carry them. This led them to invent numerous types of vehicles to move fast over land, water and air. As training how to handle such vehicles and testing new developments can be dangerous and costly, vehicle motion simulators were invented. Motion-based simulators in particular, combine visual and physical motion cues to provide occupants with a feeling of being in the real vehicle. While visual cues are generally not limited in amplitude, physical cues certainly are, due to the limited simulator motion space. A motion cueing algorithm (MCA) is used to map the vehicle motions onto the simulator motion space. This mapping inherently creates mismatches between the visual and physical motion cues. Due to imperfections in the human perceptual system, not all visual/physical cueing mismatches are perceived. However, if a mismatch is perceived, it can impair the simulation realism and even cause simulator sickness. For MCA design, a good understanding of when mismatches are perceived, and ways to prevent these from occurring, are therefore essential. In this thesis a data-driven approach, using continuous subjective measures of the time-varying Perceived Motion Incongruence (PMI), is adopted. PMI in this case refers to the effect that perceived mismatches between visual and physical motion cues have on the resulting simulator realism. The main goal of this thesis was to develop an MCA-independent off-line prediction method for time-varying PMI during vehicle motion simulation, with the aim of improving motion cueing quality. To this end, a complete roadmap, describing how to measure and model PMI and how to apply such models to predict and minimize PMI in motion simulations is presented. Results from several human-in-the-loop experiments are used to demonstrate the potential of this novel approach.




Indoor Navigation Strategies for Aerial Autonomous Systems


Book Description

Indoor Navigation Strategies for Aerial Autonomous Systems presents the necessary and sufficient theoretical basis for those interested in working in unmanned aerial vehicles, providing three different approaches to mathematically represent the dynamics of an aerial vehicle. The book contains detailed information on fusion inertial measurements for orientation stabilization and its validation in flight tests, also proposing substantial theoretical and practical validation for improving the dropped or noised signals. In addition, the book contains different strategies to control and navigate aerial systems. The comprehensive information will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners working in automatic control, mechatronics, robotics, and UAVs, helping them improve research and motivating them to build a test-bed for future projects. - Provides substantial information on nonlinear control approaches and their validation in flight tests - Details in observer-delay schemes that can be applied in real-time - Teaches how an IMU is built and how they can improve the performance of their system when applying observers or predictors - Improves prototypes with tactics for proposed nonlinear schemes




Haptics: Science, Technology, and Applications


Book Description

The two-volume set LNCS 10893 and 10894 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference EuroHaptics 2018, held in Pisa, Italy, in June 2018. The 95 papers (40 oral presentations and 554 poster presentations) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 138 submissions. These proceedings reflect the multidisciplinary nature of EuroHaptics and cover all aspects of haptics, including neuroscience, psychophysics, perception, engineering, computing, interaction, virtual reality and arts. ​




Gearing up and accelerating cross‐fertilization between academic and industrial robotics research in Europe:


Book Description

This monograph by Florian Röhrbein, Germano Veiga and Ciro Natale is an edited collection of 15 authoritative contributions in the area of robot technology transfer between academia and industry. It comprises three parts on Future Industrial Robotics, Robotic Grasping as well as Human-Centered Robots. The book chapters cover almost all the topics nowadays considered ‘hot’ within the robotics community, from reliable object recognition to dexterous grasping, from speech recognition to intuitive robot programming, from mobile robot navigation to aerial robotics, from safe physical human-robot interaction to body extenders. All contributions stem from the results of ECHORD – the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development, a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme from 2009 to 2013. ECHORD’s two main pillars were the so-called experiments, 52 small-sized industry-driven research projects, and the structured dialog, a powerful interaction instrument between the stakeholders. The results described in this volume are expected to shed new light on innovation and technology transfer from academia to industry in the field of robotics.




Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems, MESAS 2016, held in Rome, Italy, in June 2016. The 33 revised full papers included in the volume ware carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: human machine integration and interfaces; autonomous systems and MS frameworks and architectures; autonomous systems principles and algorithms; unmanned aerial vehicles and remotely piloted aircraft systems; modelling and simulation application.




Aerial Vehicles


Book Description

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space.




Trends in Control and Decision-Making for Human–Robot Collaboration Systems


Book Description

This book provides an overview of recent research developments in the automation and control of robotic systems that collaborate with humans. A measure of human collaboration being necessary for the optimal operation of any robotic system, the contributors exploit a broad selection of such systems to demonstrate the importance of the subject, particularly where the environment is prone to uncertainty or complexity. They show how such human strengths as high-level decision-making, flexibility, and dexterity can be combined with robotic precision, and ability to perform task repetitively or in a dangerous environment. The book focuses on quantitative methods and control design for guaranteed robot performance and balanced human experience from both physical human-robot interaction and social human-robot interaction. Its contributions develop and expand upon material presented at various international conferences. They are organized into three parts covering: one-human–one-robot collaboration; one-human–multiple-robot collaboration; and human–swarm collaboration. Individual topic areas include resource optimization (human and robotic), safety in collaboration, human trust in robot and decision-making when collaborating with robots, abstraction of swarm systems to make them suitable for human control, modeling and control of internal force interactions for collaborative manipulation, and the sharing of control between human and automated systems, etc. Control and decision-making algorithms feature prominently in the text, importantly within the context of human factors and the constraints they impose. Applications such as assistive technology, driverless vehicles, cooperative mobile robots, manufacturing robots and swarm robots are considered. Illustrative figures and tables are provided throughout the book. Researchers and students working in controls, and the interaction of humans and robots will learn new methods for human–robot collaboration from this book and will find the cutting edge of the subject described in depth.