Systems Robotics

El artículo trata sobre la importancia de establecer una pedagogía del ocio, que ayude a comprender los beneficios del ocio. El enfoque se hace a partir del concepto “Crisis”, la “Economía Creativa” y algunos puntos de vistas de diversos autores, quienes sugieren que todas las actividades que una persona hace, debe ser enfocada y redirigidas  para su desarrollo personal, cuyas metas finales son alcanzar la salud física y mental que propicie felicidad, a través del “ocio positivo”, el cual ha comenzado a difundirse en Latinoamérica; pero que aún falta que los “gobernantes y gobernados” conozcan y difundan como se debe manejar el tiempo libre para obtener benéficos sociales y personales.
          A manera de conclusión se incluye  el “Decálogo del Ocio”, para que se pueda apreciar la definición y conceptualización básica del Ocio, como un conjunto de procedimientos en los cuales el individuo puede dedicarse a descansar, divertirse, desarrollar su información o formación, su participación social, cuando se ha liberado de sus obligaciones laborales, familiares y sociales.  La intención de estas líneas, es llamar informar sobre la importancia que tiene el ocio  en esta nueva y creciente economía creativa, vinculada a las Industrias del Ocio o las Industrias de la Felicidad, las cuales contribuyen cada vez más con el desarrollo humano.

We consider the physics of lattice bosons in the presence of either disordered on-site chemical potential or disordered on-site interparticle interactions. By means of analytical results using strong-coupling expansion, and numerical results based on quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we show that important qualitative changes in the zero temperature phase diagram are observed when comparing both cases. Although for both types of disorder superfluid, Mott-insulator and Bose-glass phases may be found, we show that in the case of random interactions the Mott-insulating regions shrink and eventually vanish for any finite disorder strength beyond a sufficiently large filling factor. Furthermore, at low values of the chemical potential both the superfluid and Mott insulator are stable towards the formation of a Bose-glass, leading to a possibly non-trivial tricritical point. We discuss possible experimental realizations of both types of disorder in the context of ultra cold atomic gases in optical lattices.

The capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) is an important and practical problem in the OR literature. In short, the problem is to identify routes to service (e.g., pickup or deliver) demand located along the edges of a network such that the total cost of the routes is minimized. In general, a single route cannot satisfy the entire demand due to capacity constraints on the vehicles. CARP belongs to the set of NP-hard problems; consequently numerous heuristic and metaheuristic solution approaches have been developed to solve it. In this paper an "ellipse rule" based heuristic is proposed for the CARP. This approach is based on the path-scanning heuristic, one of the mostly used greedy-add heuristics for this problem. The innovation consists basically of selecting edges only inside ellipses when the vehicle is near the end of each route. This new approach was implemented and tested on three standard datasets and the solutions are compared against: (i) the original path-scanning heuristic; (ii) two other path-scanning heuristics and (iii) the three best known metaheuristics. The results indicate that the "ellipse rule" approach lead to improvements over the three path-scanning heuristics, reducing the average distance to the lower bound in the test problems by about 44%.

Thirty Portuguese and eight foreign olive (Olea europaea L.) cultivars were screened using Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Inter-Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) markers. Twenty RAPD primers amplified 301 reproducible bands of which 262 were polymorphic; and 17 ISSR primers amplified 204 bands of which 180 were polymorphic. The percentage of polymorphic bands detected by ISSR and RAPD was similar (88 and 87%, respectively). The genetic variability observed was similar in the Portuguese and foreign olive cultivars. Seven ISSR and 12 RAPD primers were able to distinguish individually all 38 olive cultivars. Twenty specific molecular markers are now available to be converted into Sequence Characterised Amplified Region (SCAR) markers. Relationships among Portuguese and foreign cultivars is discussed.

Evacuation planning is an important component of emergency preparedness in urban areas. The number and location of rescue facilities is an important aspect of this planning, as is the identification of primary and secondary evacuation routes for residents to take. This article introduces a multiobjective approach to identify these aspects of evacuation planning. The approach incorporates a multiobjective model into a geographical information systems-based decision support system that planners can access via the Internet. The proposed approach is demonstrated with a case study for the City of Coimbra, Portugal, for evacuation during major fires. Although presented in this context, this approach is applicable to other emergency situations such as earthquakes, floods, and acts of terrorism.

Benign hereditary chorea (BHC) is an autosomaldominant disorder of early onset characterized by a slowly progressing or nonprogressing chorea, without cognitive decline or other progressive neurologic dysfunction, but also by the existence of heterogeneity of the clinical presentation within and among families. The genetic cause of BHC is the presence of either point mutations or deletions in the thyroid transcription factor 1 gene (TITF1). We studied a Portuguese BHC family composed of two probands: a mother and her only son. The patients were identified in a neurology out-patient clinic showing mainly involuntary choreiform movements since childhood, myoc-lonic jerks, falls, and dysarthria. We performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electroencephalogram (EEG), nerve conduction studies, thyroid ultrasound scan, biochemical thyroid tests, and electrocardiogram (ECG). We excluded Huntington disease by appropriate genetic testing and sequenced the entire TITF1 gene for both patients. The patients showed MRI alterations: (1) in the mother, abnormal hyperintense pallida and cortical cerebral/cerebellar atrophy; and (2) in the son, small hyperintense foci in the cerebellum and subtle enlargement of the fourth ventricle. Sequence analysis of the TITF1 gene in these patients revealed the presence of a heterozygous C > T substitution at nucleotide 745, leading to the replacement of a glutamine at position 249 for a premature stop codon. A previously undescribed nonsense mutation in the TITF1 gene was identified as being the genetic cause of BHC in this family.

In the past few years there has been an enthusiastic interest in mobile agent technology and several platforms have been developed. There are some comparisons in the literature about the functionality of some mobile agent systems. However, none of those studies includes a direct comparison between the performance of the platforms. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental study where we compare the performance of eight Java-based Mobile Agent systems: Aglets, Concordia, Voyager, Odyssey, Jumping Beans, Grasshopper, Swarm and JAMES. This study presents some insights about the performance and the robustness of each platform.

The Boundary-Scan technology was proposed fifteen years ago to overcome the limitations of testing digital devices due to the increasing complexity and greater miniaturization of integrated circuits and boards. The use of pin-level fault-injection faced similar difficulties and became obsolete for that reason. In this paper we discuss the use of the Boundary-Scan infrastructure for fault-injection purposes. Several fundamental constraints of such approach are identified. Generic digital systems and processors with Boundary-Scan based On-Chip Debugging (OCD) are considered as target system candidates. We observe that by combining OCD mechanisms with modified boundary-scan cells most of the constraints reported are solved. Finally, some key properties of the technology such as the orthogonality to the purely functional architecture and the low abstraction level access as well as the standard interface and description language provided make it a good candidate to provide a standardized flexible fault injection framework.

This paper proposes a sliding window approach, whose length and time shift are dynamically adaptable in order to improve model confidence, speed and segmentation accuracy in human action sequences. Activity recognition is the process of inferring an action class from a set of observations acquired by sensors. We address the temporal segmentation problem of body part trajectories in Cartesian Space, in which features are generated using Discrete Fast Fourier Transform (DFFT) and Power Spectrum (PS). We pose this as an entropy minimization problem. Using entropy from the classifier output as a feedback parameter, we continuously adjust the two key parameters in a sliding window approach, to maximize the model confidence at every step. The proposed classifier is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) model where classes are estimated using Bayesian inference. We compare our approach with our previously developed fixed window method. Experiments show that our method accurately recognizes and segments activities, with improved model confidence and faster convergence times, exhibiting anticipatory capabilities. Our work demonstrates that entropy feedback mitigates variability problems, and our method is applicable in research areas where action segmentation and classification is used. A working demo source code is provided online for academical dissemination purposes.

Este artigo apresenta um estudo exploratório sobre detecção de diferentes estilos pedagógicos em professores do ensino básico, de escolas do ensino oficial portuguesas, identificando o rendimento escolar dos respectivos alunos. O objetivo foi estabelecer relação entre certos estilos de professores e resultados diferenciados dos alunos, em diferentes níveis sócio-econômicos. Para determinar estilos pedagógicos utilizou-se um questionário construído no âmbito desse estudo, que definiu dimensões pedagógicas dos professores. Os estilos pedagógicos definidos pelos autores apresentam critérios de atuação que variam, segundo dimensões como cultura, papel do professor, orientação educativa global, ou atitude perante o insucesso. Informação escrita recolhida dos alunos e professores permitiu definir o nível sócio-econômico dos alunos e seu rendimento escolar. Os resultados revelaram diferentes estilos pedagógicos do professor e comprovaram a relação entre estilos pedagógicos menos adaptados à lógica reprodutiva e resultados de maior sucesso em níveis sócio-econômicos desfavorecidos, confirmando parcialmente as diferenças esperadas Palavras-chave: Estilos educativos; prática pedagógica; sucesso escolar; nível sócio-econômico.

Purpose: To evaluate the ability of macroporous tricalcium phosphate cement (CPC) scaffolds to enable the adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells derived from human bone marrow. Methods: Cells from the iliac crest of an adult human donor were processed and cultured on macroporous CPC discs. Paraffin spheres sized between 100 and 250µm were used as porogens. Cells were cultured for 5, 10, and 15 days. Next, we assessed cells' behavior and morphology on the biomaterial by scanning electron microscopy. The expression levels of the BGLA and SSP1 genes and the alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity were quantified by the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction technique (QT-PCR) using the fluorophore SYBR GREEN ® . Results: QT-PCR detected the expression of the BGLA and SSP1 genes and the ALP activity in the periods of 10 and 15 days of culture. Thus, we found out that there was cell proliferation and differentiation in osteogenic cells. Conclusion: Macroporous CPC, with pore sized between 100 and 250µm and developed using paraffin spheres, enables adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells in osteogenic cells and can be used as a scaffold for bone tissue engineering.

In this paper we propose a probabilistic model to parameterize human interactive behaviour from human motion. To Support the model taxonomy, we use Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), proposed by Rudolph Laban [11], to characterize human non-verbal communication. In interpersonal communication, body motion carries a lot of meaningful information, useful to analyse group dynamic behaviors in a wide range of social scenarios (e.g. behaviour analysis of human interpersonal activities and surveillance system). Taking the advantage of interpretation of social signals defined by Alex Pentland , and the descriptive body movement analysis proposed by Laban, we identified characteristics allowing both works to complement each other. To explore in group dynamics, we attempt to show the existent connections between Pentland's descriptions for Interpersonal Behaviours (IBs), and LMA parameters for human body part motions. Those relations are the keys to characterize the interpersonal communication. Given the uncertainty of the phenomenon, Bayesian's methodology is applied. The results present LMA parameters as reliable indicators for IBs, allowing us to generalize the model.

This work studies the performance of different signal features regarding the qualitative meaning of Laban Movement Analysis semantics. Motion modeling is becoming a prominent scientific area, with research towards multiple applications. The theoretical representation of movements is a valuable tool when developing such models. One representation growing particular relevance in the community is Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). LMA is a movement descriptive language which was developed with underlying semantics. Divided in components, its qualities are mostly divided in binomial extreme states. One relevant issue to this problem is the interpretation of signal features into Laban semantics. There are multiple signal processing algorithms for feature generation, each providing different characteristics. We implemented some, covering a range of those measure categories. The results for method comparison are provided in terms of class separability of the LMA space state.

In this paper we focus on auditory analysis as the sensory stimulus, and on vocalization synthesis as the output signal. Our scenario is to have one robot interacting with one human through vocalization channel. Notice that vocalization is far beyond speech; while speech analysis would give us what was said, vocalization analysis gives us how was said. A social robot shall be able to perform actions in different manners according to its emotional state. Thus we propose a novel Bayesian approach to determine the emotional state the robot shall assume according to how the interlocutor is talking to it. Results shows that the classification happens as expected converging to the correct decision after two iterations.

This work presents a study about the use of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) as a robust tool to describe human basic behavior patterns, to be applied in human-machine interaction. LMA is a language used to describe and annotate dancing movements and is divided in components [1]: Body, Space, Shape and Effort. Despite its general framework is widely used in physical and mental therapy [2], it has found little application in the engineering domain. Rett J.

Human-robot interaction approaches like face detection, face recognition, pedestrian detection are widely known in robotics field; however often they lead to performance problems. Additionally, false positive and false negative problems are commonly associated to bad illumination and strong featured images. Moreover background segmentation approaches are frequently used to solve this problem on static camera surveillance. Though all these approaches are unable to effectively deal with the constant background changes that certainly happens when the camera sensor is installed on a mobile robot. Hence, in this work we propose a stereo vision dynamic background segmentation solution to this problem.

Human movement analysis through vision sensing systems is an important subject regarding Human-Robot interaction. This is a growing area of research, with wide range of aplications fields. The ability to recognize human actions using passive sensing modalities, is a decisive factor for machine interaction. In mobile platforms, image processing is regarded as a problem, due to constant changes. We propose an approach, based on Horopter technique, to extract Regions Of Interest (ROI) delimiting human contours. This fact will allow tracking algorithms to provide faster and accurate responses to human feature extraction. The key features are head and both hand positions, that will be tracked within image context. Posterior to feature acquisition, they will be contextualized within a technique, Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and will be used to provide sets of classifiers. We will use these classifiers to label/classify human emotion within the context of expressive movements. Compared to full image tracking, results improved with the implemented approach, the horopter and consequently so did classification results.

Present information systems need tools that are able to register the variety of problems that occur in the system, co-ordinating the efforts of resolution and keeping the experience gained in those efforts. These applications are traditionally called Trouble Ticket Systems (TTS). Basically, a TTS system is expected to operate as "a hospital chart, co-ordinating the work of multiple people who may need to work on the problem" .