Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
End-effectors (hands).
Manipulation is one of the most important features for a robot
aiming to assist persons in daily life context. Taking objects and moving them in the
space are fundamental tasks carried out by persons in most of activities of the day. The
value of service-robot will be strongly related to the manipulation capacity. As humans,
robots should be able to identify objects, to catch them according to their shapes, to
dose the grasping force and to adapt it quickly during tasks and, as persons, to learn
and to memorize from each catch which is the suited force to take and move a specific
object. The new challenges for manipulation of service-robots are:
two-handed manipulation;
•
zero-inertia manipulation;
•
control of mechanically flexible systems.
•
Head.
The aim of Service-robot is assist persons in everyday activity so they must be
able to comprehend natural human strategies for communication and to adopt the same
methods to interact with users: speech, vision, gestural expressiveness, face
expressiveness. In people most of these functions are contained in head; so, in order to
interact with persons like humans, also service-robots should have a sort of head
provided of components for vision, hearing, speech, face expressiveness. The
challenges for robot head functionalities are:
coordinated eyes and ears;
•
focus of attention and visual serving.
•
Interfaces.
The Man-Machine-Interface is yet a great challenge of service and
assistance robotics. According to ideas of acceptability and usability, many efforts have
been carried out till now to develop interfaces exhaustive but also easy-to-use for users;
developed strategies for communication are based on the use of to visual interfaces and
audio messages and adopt inputs coming from keyboards and mouse, touch screens and
some pre-established audio messages. However, in order to insert service-robots in
every day life of common people, robots should adopt the same communication
strategies used usually between persons, that are:
advanced speech
- comprehension of speech expressed not in fixed
commands but in common language, recognition of different voices and
association of each one with a user and expression of vocal messages;
•
complex expressiveness
- recognition of human gestures and face expression,
association of them with emotions and moods, and adoption of the same
expressions to supplement and to strengthen messages to users;
•
touch
- recognition of surface texture and forces and use of appropriate and
safe haptic feedback to express concepts to users
•
advanced visual messages
- use of virtual reality and hologram to provide
video feedback to user.
•
These communication methods will be implemented in service-robots according to
users' characteristics and contexts and to functions that the systems must carried out. In
relation to the last point, it is important execute advanced anthropological, sociological,
semantic and educational studies in order to design human-machine-interfaces suited
