Distributed consensus for interaction between humans and mobile robot swarms (demonstration)

This paper studies self-organized flocking in a swarm of mobile robots. We present Kobot, a mobile robot platform developed specifically for swarm robotic studies, briefly describing its sensing and communication abilities. In particular, we describe a scalable method that allows the robots to sense the orientations of their neighbors using a digital compass and wireless communication. Then we propose a behavior for a swarm of robots that creates self-organized flocking by using heading alignment and proximal control. The flocking behavior is observed to operate in three phases: alignment, advance, and avoidance. We evaluate four variants of this behavior by setting its parameters to extreme values and analyze the performance of flocking using a number of metrics, such as order and entropy. Our results show that, the flocking behavior obtained under appropriate parameter values, is quite robust and generates successful self-organized flocking in constraint environments.

In this experiment, physiological responses of two citrus rootstocks [sour orange (Citrus aurantium L.) and trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata Raf.)] were investigated under in vitro salt stress conditions. This study was conducted on a completely randomized factorial design. Explants (Nucellar seedling obtained from seeds) of both rootstocks were transferred to Murashige and Skoog (MS) solid proliferation medium containing 8.9 µM BA and 0.5 µM NAA with different concentrations 0, 50, 100, 150, 200 mM of sodium chloride (NaCl) whit six replicates. Results show that leaf chlorophyll index, photosynthesis rate, stomatal conductance, internal CO2 concentration (Ci), total protein content decreased in both rootstocks by increasing salinity levels, although there was no significant difference for above-mentioned characteristics in the interaction of salinity and rootstock. The amounts of reduction in total protein content, chlorophyll loss and internal CO2 concentration (Ci), in trifoliate orange genotype were greater than the sour orange. Also, peroxidase enzyme activity increased by increasing salinity level in both rootstocks, but, the rate of increase in the trifoliate orange was higher than the sour orange. By increasing salinity levels in the cultural medium, the uptake of sodium (Na+) and chlorine (Cl-) significantly increased in both rootstocks over 6 weeks culture period. Comparison in to trifoliate orange, sour orange less sodium and chlorine were taken up. Based obtained results, can be declared, salt tolerance has a negative correlation with Na+ and Cl- content in plant tissues, and the plant have a less Na+ and Cl- in tissues are more resistant. Thus, sour orange was more tolerant than trifoliate orange to salt stress and could be has more resistant to high concentration salinity.

Error handling in multimodal voice-enabled interfaces of tour-guide robots using graphical models

Enhancing Humans Trust in Robots through Explanations

Cocoa producers’ communities are affected by malnutrition due to lake of food diversification. To initiate food diversification program with orange sweet potatoes, households eating habits and staple food composition have been evaluated. An assessment of 91 households’ food habits was carried out in 5 localities of Nawa region (Cote d’Ivoire). Anthropometric measurements were performed for children among 6 and 59 months. Dry matter, total sugars, proteins and minerals were determined for the usual staple food and orange sweet potatoes. The results showed that households’ food diversity score is 5.2, indicating that diet is less diversified. The major staple food are yams (36.7%), rice (29.6%) and cassava (17.4%). Sweet potatoes are more cultivated and consumed by native immigrant from the North of Cote d’Ivoire. Children nutritional status revealed that global acute malnutrition prevalence is 6.4% (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 3.0, 13.1%), chronic malnutrition prevalence is about 54.3% (95% CI: 44.2, 64.1%) and underweight prevalence is 31.9% (95% CI: 23.4, 41.9%). The staple food nutrients analyses revealed that rice has the most proteins content 5.0%. Orange flesh sweet potatoes have high content in total sugars (78.2 g/100g dry matter (DM)), zinc (3.3 mg/100g DM), magnesium (27.6 mg/100g DM), potassium (558.0 mg/100g DM) and calcium (388.5 mg/100g DM). Yam contains more potassium (730.8 mg/100g DM) and cassava more iron (18.2 mg/100g DM). Orange sweet potatoes which are cultivated by a few producers contain high level of micronutrients. They could be therefore recommended for culture and food diversification and contribute to overcome children malnutrition.

The wide use of e-technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of the population, especially with the aim of reintegrating excluded individuals back into society through education. This is particularly true for people with different types of disabilities who may have difficulties while attending traditional on-site learning programs that are typically based on printed learning resources. The creation and provision of accessible e-learning contents may therefore become a key factor in enabling people with different access needs to enjoy quality learning experiences and services. Another e-learning challenge is represented by m-learning (which stands for mobile learning), which is emerging as a consequence of mobile terminals diffusion and provides the opportunity to browse didactical materials everywhere, outside places that are traditionally devoted to education. Both such situations share the need to access materials in limited conditions and collide with the growing use of rich media in didactical contents, which are designed to be enjoyed without any restriction. Nowadays, Web-based teaching makes great use of multimedia technologies, ranging from Flash animations to prerecorded video-lectures. Rich media in e-learning can offer significant potential in enhancing the learning environment, through helping to increase access to education, enhance the learning experience and support multiple learning styles. Moreover, they can often be used to improve the structure of Web-based courses. These highly variegated and structured contents may significantly improve the quality and the effectiveness of educational activities for learners. For example, rich media contents allow us to describe complex concepts and process flows. Audio and video elements may be utilized to add a “human touch” to distance-learning courses. Finally, real lectures may be recorded and distributed to integrate or enrich on line materials. A confirmation of the advantages of these approaches can be seen in the exponential growth of video-lecture availability on the net, due to the ease of recording and delivering activities which take place in a traditional classroom. Furthermore, the wide use of assistive technologies for learners with disabilities injects new life into e-learning systems. E-learning allows distance and flexible educational activities, thus helping disabled learners to access resources which would otherwise present significant barriers for them. For instance, students with visual impairments have difficulties in reading traditional visual materials, deaf learners have trouble in following traditional (spoken) lectures, people with motion disabilities have problems in attending on-site programs. As already mentioned, the use of wireless technologies and pervasive computing may really enhance the educational learner experience by offering mobile e-learning services that can be accessed by handheld devices. This new paradigm of educational content distribution maximizes the benefits for learners since it enables users to overcome constraints imposed by the surrounding environment. While certainly helpful for users without disabilities, we believe that the use of newmobile technologies may also become a fundamental tool for impaired learners, since it frees them from sitting in front of a PC. In this way, educational activities can be enjoyed by all the users, without hindrance, thus increasing the social inclusion of non-typical learners. While the provision of fully accessible and portable video-lectures may be extremely useful for students, it is widely recognized that structuring and managing rich media contents for mobile learning services are complex and expensive tasks. Indeed, major difficulties originate from the basic need to provide a textual equivalent for each media resource composing a rich media Learning Object (LO). Moreover, tests need to be carried out to establish whether a given LO is fully accessible to all kinds of learners. Unfortunately, both these tasks are truly time-consuming processes, depending on the type of contents the teacher is writing and on the authoring tool he/she is using. Due to these difficulties, online LOs are often distributed as partially accessible or totally inaccessible content. Bearing this in mind, this thesis aims to discuss the key issues of a system we have developed to deliver accessible, customized or nomadic learning experiences to learners with different access needs and skills. To reduce the risk of excluding users with particular access capabilities, our system exploits Learning Objects (LOs) which are dynamically adapted and transcoded based on the specific needs of non-typical users and on the barriers that they can encounter in the environment. The basic idea is to dynamically adapt contents, by selecting them from a set of media resources packaged in SCORM-compliant LOs and stored in a self-adapting format. The system schedules and orchestrates a set of transcoding processes based on specific learner needs, so as to produce a customized LO that can be fully enjoyed by any (impaired or mobile) student.

We present fundamental progress on the computational universality of swarms of micro- or nano-scale robots in complex environments, controlled not by individual navigation, but by a uniform global, external force. More specifically, we consider a 2D grid world, in which all obstacles and robots are unit squares, and for each actuation, robots move maximally until they collide with an obstacle or another robot. The objective is to control robot motion within obstacles, design obstacles in order to achieve desired permutation of robots, and establish controlled interaction that is complex enough to allow arbitrary computations. In this video, we illustrate progress on all these challenges: we demonstrate NP-hardness of parallel navigation, we describe how to construct obstacles that allow arbitrary permutations, and we establish the necessary logic gates for performing arbitrary in-system computations.

"This research thesis examines the establishment of Supported Playgroups in Schools (SPinS). The aim of the project was to examine SPinS as an under-researched area of early childhood education, involving parents, children and schools promoting children’s access to play. Children’s access to play is important because play in the early years is known to increase children’s later learning outcomes (Roberts, 2010). A sociocultural approach to this study was used to understand ways in which parents learn. This thesis explores parents’ participation in SPinS and the influence of this participation on parents’ perspectives of children’s play. The research was framed by one research question: What influence does participation in a SPinS have on parent perspectives of children’s play at home and in a playgroup setting? A key focus of the study understood the provision of SPinS to support parents to engage with their children during a play-based program, and how parent engagement in children’s play was transferred to the home. In Australia, many families attend playgroups in their local communities for the purpose of play and social engagement (Playgroup Victoria, 2012). These playgroups are self- managed and run by the parents attending. A key role of supported playgroups is to engage families in the community who do not attend community groups. These groups are funded by the State Government and employ a trained playgroup coordinator. The key focus is usually to deliver a service that supports the parent role and promotes children’s learning through play. This project reports on a new initiative of providing supported playgroups in local primary schools to establish and extend on partnerships between early years services, community organisations and parents. Research on supported playgroups is limited and much of the work in Australia has been conducted by only a few researchers (Matthews, 2009; McArthur et al, 2010 and Jackson, 2011b). The research conducted so far has been on supported playgroups, but not supported playgroups located in schools. Existing research suggests that parent support is a major component to improving educational outcomes of children by promoting quality Home Learning Environments and play-activities in the home (Sylva et al., 2014). Support for parents is achieved by providing access to “high quality learning environments that encourage parents to engage in conversations about children, children’s play and children’s development (Jackson, 2010, 2012). The research reported in this thesis therefore focussed on the influence participation in a Supported Playgroup in a School (SPinS) had on parents’ perspectives of children’s play at home and in the playgroup. This was to expand on existing research regarding supported playgroups and to also better understand if SPinS could be used as a parent support or intervention approach for promoting children’s play at home. To conduct the research informing this thesis I used a sociocultural framework that informed social interactions were vital to support learning through guided participation. Rogoff, Matusov and White (1996) investigated a model of learning where learning is described as a process of transformation of participation in sociocultural activities within communities rather than the transmission of knowledge. The focus of learning was parents’ perspectives on play in the home and the playgroup during their participation in SPinS. A sociocultural theoretical perspective explored the perspectives about play parents derived from their participation in SPinS and how they applied these perspectives in the home and at playgroup. A qualitative research design using a single case study methodology was employed in this research. This approach was well suited to the chosen epistemology because it allowed direct interaction with the participants and represented their views and perspectives. Focus groups were conducted at each of the primary school sites during a SPinS session. The participants were parents attending the SPinS with their children living in the local area. Purposive sampling was chosen for this study because it involved understanding the opinions of a predefined group or target population that was easily accessible. The data analysis was conducted using an inductive approach. This was because there was not pre-determined, well established research in the area of investigation. The purpose of inductive analysis is to allow research findings to be generated from significant themes in the raw data. This allows for the development of a model or theory for explaining the structure of experiences. (Thomas, 2003). The results suggested participation in SPinS positively influenced parents’ perspectives of play at home and in the playgroup. These perspectives included how they viewed play at home and at the playgroup. A third finding considered the importance of the social connections established by parents during their participation in the SPinS. This finding was consistent with existing research that shows that supported playgroups provide opportunities for families with children under five years old to learn new parenting skills, as well as building social networks (Jackson, 2011a). The primary outcomes reported by Hancock et al., (2011) suggest that playgroup participation improves children’s developmental outcomes, particularly disadvantaged children. The findings were used to propose a new model for educators to understand how parents learn about children’s play through supported playgroups. This new model was called The Cycle of Intent Engagement (Lambert, 2015). The Cycle of Intent Engagement Model (Lambert, 2015) was created from Rogoff’s (2003) theories on transformation of participation to show how parents’ perspectives of play were influenced by their participation in the SPinS. The Cycle of Intent Engagement Model (Lambert, 2015) focuses on empowering change through collaborative engagement. This investigation identified the necessity for further research into the way parents engage in their children’s play during SPinS and at home. Findings from this study may be used to inform early childhood professionals, families, schools and governments by expanding their awareness of the benefits associated with supporting families to participate in supported playgroups in the community, especially local primary schools."

Fruit flies (Diptera: Tephritidae) are among the most important pests of fruits and vegetables in the world. In Ethiopia, orange (Citrus sp.) and guava (Psidium guajava L) production are highly impacted by fruit fly (Diptera: Tephritidae) infestation and endanger the contribution of these fruits to the national economy. This study was conducted in the orange and guava growing areas of South Wollo and Oromia administrative zone, Ethiopia. In these areas, little is known on fruit fly incidence and the extent of damage on orange and guava fruits. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess fruit fly damage on orange and guava fruits. We measured fruit fly incidence and the extent of fruit damage in four districts of 20 fruit farms of two zones in 2016/17. Mean percent damage of orange fruits was significantly higher at Worebabo (44.4%) and Dawachefa (40.4%) than Tehulederi (34.4%) and Kalu (29.2%). Similarly, the mean number of fruit fly larvae per fruit was significantly higher at Worebabo (5.8%) and Dawachefa (5.8%) than at Tehulderi (3.5%) and Kalu (3.8%). Fruit fly caused higher guava fruit damage (33.3-66.7%) than sweet orange (29.2%-44.4%) of different districts. The severity of damage by fruit fly was high in all economically important fruits. The presence of one or more larvae in fruits results in 100% marketable losses. In conclusion the damage caused by fruit fly on both locations was significantly high and need due attention to reduce the direct losses on marketable fruits. Therefore, we recommend that timely monitoring and forecasting, as well as integrated fruit fly prevention methods should be in place.

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for painting a priori known obstacle free rectangular region by swarm of mobile robots with limited visibility capability. We have assumed that initially the visibility graph is connected. Our approach is to divide the region into some non overlapping strips, and to let each robot to paint one of these strips assigned to it. Width of the strips may vary for different robots. In the proposed algorithm, the robots follow the basic Wait-Observe-Compute-Move model together with the Asynchronous timing model.

Automatic analysis of human facial expressions is one of the challenging problems in machine vision systems. It has many applications in human-computer interactions such as, social signal processing, social robots, deceit detection, interactive video and behavior monitoring. In this paper, we develop a new method for automatic facial expression recognition based on facial muscle anatomy and human face structure. The algorithm finds approximate location of effective facial muscles and extracts features by measuring skin texture in 11 local patches. Seven facial expressions, including neutral are being classified in this study using AdaBoost classifier and other classifiers on MMI databases. Experimental results show that analyzing skin texture from selected local patches gives accurate and efficient information in order to identify different facial expressions.

Execution of a manipulation task of a single object by two robots or welding operation realization when one robot moves an object whereas the other executes welding require continuous coordination of robots’ movements. In the paper basis of generation coordinated trajectories for Cartesian robots are presented. The proposed method relies on complicity introduction, to position controlled system, in the form of a corrective movement. Then static accuracy analysis was carried out for two cases: with force interaction between robots – like in the manipulation task, and without force interaction – a situation which corresponds to welding operations. For the defined form of correctors simulation model was built and the results were confirmed in simulation experiments.

The hyperelastic stress-strain constitutive model of the gastrointestinal tissues is introduced.According to the special characteristics of the gastrointestinal biomechanism,a locomotion gait based on anchoring-extending is proposed for the gastrointestinal micro robot.The relationship between the speed of single cabin and the resistance force is established through studying the mechanical interaction between single cabin of the micro robot and the intestinal tissues,and the locomotion efficiency of the robot is established through studying the mechanical interaction between the entire robot and the intestine.A critical step model based on the hyperelastic constitutive model is deduced based on the above mechanical analyses.This model is a guide for robot design and parameter optimization.Finally,the relationship between the robot’s single cabin speed and the tension force is obtained through robot model experiments,and the critical step model is verified in an in-vitro experiment with a robot prototype.

This paper aims at demonstrating the applicability of video learning in CDIO based project courses and at evaluating to what extent it benefits students. The courses are Machine Elements (PPU210), Product Planning - Needs and Opportunities (PPU085) and Engineering Design and Optimization (PPU190) in the Mechanical Engineering programme at Chalmers University of Technology. The research was carried out by first creating a set of videos for selected topics in three courses. In total, 22 videos were created including topics such as “Benchmarking”, “SWOT”, and “Prototype lab equipment instructions”. The learning outcomes of the video lectures were mapped to the CDIO syllabus. A blended learning environment was developed, i.e. the videos were utilised as additional support alongside existing learning activities. The videos were then used in the courses and the students’ feedbacks collected through a dedicated questionnaire, the regular course evaluation survey, and in student-teacher group meetings during and after the courses. The collected data was analysed to produce inferences about the applicability and utility of the video lectures. The resulting analysis shows the students’ preferences regarding the evaluated video lectures and instructions. The students find videos more appealing compared to traditional lectures. One of the main benefits highlighted is the possibility of watching the videos in parallel to the design-build-test project execution rather having the classroom lecture only. This helps in reinforcing concepts, and results in less dependency on supervisors during the project execution. Videos proved to be suitable for creating a blended learning environment and improved the perceived learning experience for the students. In order to maximize student satisfaction and interaction with the videos, the videos should be short and closely aligned to the other learning activities. The paper also suggests future improvements to be carried out for video-based learning in the courses, and proposes an easy adaptable way for teachers to develop video material.

The flexibility of the MOOC service allows students to learn at their own time, place and pace, enhancing continuous communication and interaction between all participants in knowledge and community building. This model especially benefits people with disabilities, which can improve therefore their level of employability and social inclusion, reaching a better quality of life. Unfortunately the access to MOOC platforms present severe barriers: there is a lack of accessibility on the learning resources, the communicating tools and personalized user interfaces. All these issues add extra difficulties such as the need to develop specific digital or even social skills for students with functional diversity. In this context, MOOCs are leading a revolutionary computer and mobile-based scenario along with social technologies that will emerge new kinds of learning applications that enhance communication and collaboration processes. For that reason, this paper describes the need for designing an information model and related specifications to support a new strategy for delivering accessible MOOC courses to learners with special needs, in terms of their preferences and context of use based on a particular application profile. This user profile’s design is based on standard metadata schemas, data that provides information about other data, regarding the achievement of accessibility from content to user preferences.