Better Vision Through Manipulation

For the purposes of manipulation, we would like to know what parts of the environment are physically coherent ensembles - that is, which parts will move together, and which are more or less independent. It takes a great deal of experience before this judgement can be made from purely visual information. This paper develops active strategies for acquiring that experience through experimental manipulation, using tight correlations between arm motion and optic flow to detect both the arm itself and the boundaries of objects with which it comes into contact. We argue that following causal chains of events out from the robot's body into the environment allows for a very natural developmental progression of visual competence, and relate this idea to results in neuroscience

Case study evaluating accessibility and use of a laboratory by a student who uses a wheelchair and a blind member of staff

This case study describes the findings of two disabled people who visited an engineering laboratory. It highlights aspects of building design, room layout and equipment use that are often overlooked and which often can be rectified quite simply and inexpensively. The points raised may be used to audit any building and lab

The RobotCub Approach to the Development of Cognition

This paper elaborates on the workplan of an initiative in embodied cognition: RobotCub. Our goal here is to provide background and to motivate our long-term plan of empirical research including brain and robotic sciences following the principles of epigenetic robotics

Beyond Gazing, Pointing, and Reaching: A Survey of Developmental Robotics

Developmental robotics is an emerging field located at the intersection of developmental psychology and robotics, that has lately attracted quite some attention. This paper gives a survey of a variety of research projects dealing with or inspired by developmental issues, and outlines possible future directions

Introduction: The Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics

As in the previous editions, this workshop is trying to be a forum for multi-disciplinary research ranging from developmental psychology to neural sciences (in its widest sense) and robotics including computational studies. This is a two-fold aim of, on the one hand, understanding the brain through engineering embodied systems and, on the other hand, building artificial epigenetic systems. Epigenetic contains in its meaning the idea that we are interested in studying development through interaction with the environment. This idea entails the embodiment of the system, the situatedness in the environment, and of course a prolonged period of postnatal development when this interaction can actually take place. This is still a relatively new endeavor although the seeds of the developmental robotics community were already in the air since the nineties (Berthouze and Kuniyoshi, 1998; Metta et al., 1999; Brooks et al., 1999; Breazeal, 2000; Kozima and Zlatev, 2000). A few had the intuition – see Lungarella et al. (2003) for a comprehensive review – that, intelligence could not be possibly engineered simply by copying systems that are “ready made” but rather that the development of the system fills a major role. This integration of disciplines raises the important issue of learning on the multiple scales of developmental time, that is, how to build systems that eventually can learn in any environment rather than program them for a specific environment. On the other hand, the hope is that robotics might become a new tool for brain science similarly to what simulation and modeling have become for the study of the motor system. Our community is still pretty much evolving and “under construction” and for this reason, we tried to encourage submissions from the psychology community. Additionally, we invited four neuroscientists and no roboticists for the keynote lectures. We received a record number of submissions (more than 50), and given the overall size and duration of the workshop together with our desire to maintain a single-track format, we had to be more selective than ever in the review process (a 20% acceptance rate on full papers). This is, if not an index of quality, at least an index of the interest that gravitates around this still new discipline

Robust visual servoing in 3d reaching tasks

This paper describes a novel approach to the problem of reaching an object in space under visual guidance. The approach is characterized by a great robustness to calibration errors, such that virtually no calibration is required. Servoing is based on binocular vision: a continuous measure of the end-effector motion field, derived from real-time computation of the binocular optical flow over the stereo images, is compared with the actual position of the target and the relative error in the end-effector trajectory is continuously corrected. The paper outlines the general framework of the approach, shows how visual measures are obtained and discusses the synthesis of the controller along with its stability analysis. Real-time experiments are presented to show the applicability of the approach in real 3-D applications

DE CONCINI AND PROCESI MODELS OF REFLECTION GROUPS AND COXETER GROUPS

Study of De Concini and Procesi Wonderful models for subspace arrangement related to subspace arrangement generated by reflection groups and Coxeter groups

The Whole World in Your Hand: Active and Interactive Segmentation

Object segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and a powerful resource for development. This paper presents three embodied approaches to the visual segmentation of objects. Each approach to segmentation is aided by the presence of a hand or arm in the proximity of the object to be segmented. The first approach is suitable for a robotic system, where the robot can use its arm to evoke object motion. The second method operates on a wearable system, viewing the world from a human's perspective, with instrumentation to help detect and segment objects that are held in the wearer's hand. The third method operates when observing a human teacher, locating periodic motion (finger/arm/object waving or tapping) and using it as a seed for segmentation. We show that object segmentation can serve as a key resource for development by demonstrating methods that exploit high-quality object segmentations to develop both low-level vision capabilities (specialized feature detectors) and high-level vision capabilities (object recognition and localization)

Analisis Konsep Dramaturgi Erving Goffman dalam Pola Penggunaan Ruang Publik Kafe oleh Mahasiswa di Kota Surakarta

ANALISIS KONSEP DRAMATURGI ERVING GOFFMAN DALAM POLA PENGGUNAAN RUANG PUBLIK KAFE OLEH MAHASISWA DI KOTA SURAKARTA. Metta Rahma Melati. K8412049. Skripsi. Fakultas Keguruan Dan Ilmu Pendidikan, Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta. Juni 2016Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untukMengetahui pemetaan ruang publik kafe di kota Surakarta.Mengetahui pola penggunaan ruang publik kafe oleh mahasiswa di kota Surakarta.Mengetahui bagaimana konstruksi front stage dan realitas back stage mahasiswa dalam pola penggunaan ruang publik kafe di Kota Surakarta terkait teori dramaturgi.Penelitian ini adalah penelitian kualitatif. Dilaksanakan dengan mengambil sampel sejumlah empat mahasiswa sebagai informan. Pengumpulan data untuk melihat pemetaan ruang publik kafe di kota Surakarta menggunakan metode observasi. Untuk mengetahui pola penggunaan ruang publik kafe oleh mahasiswa di kota Surakarta menggunakan metode wawancara. Selanjutnya untuk mengetahui bagaimana konstruksi front stage dan realitas back stage mahasiswa dalam pola penggunaan ruang publik kafe di Kota Surakarta terkait teori dramaturgi menggunakan metode wawancara pula.Pemetaan kafe di Kota Surakarta menurut dikelompokkan peneliti menjadi tiga bagian yaitu Solo Bagian Timur, Solo Bagian Tengah, dan Solo Bagian Barat. Pola penggunaan kafe oleh mahasiswa di ketahui sebagai berikut, kepentingan pribadi seperti pacaran, kualitas waktu dengan teman – teman, akdemik, waktu luang, dan kepentingan pekerjaan. Untuk konstruksi front stage dan realitas back stage mahasiswa di dapat sebagi berikut, informan mengkonstruksi dirinya agar orang lain terkesan. Namun realiatasnya, mereka menggunakan strategi tertentu untuk membangun kesan tersebut, seperti menyisihkan uang dan mencari tambahan pendapatan dengan bekerja secara freelance