Robotics Commons^™

The Evolution Of Gendered Software: Products, Scientific Reasoning, Criticism, And Tools, Victoria A. E. Kratel

Human-Machine Communication

Over the past 7 decades, gendered software has become globally established. In this theoretical distribution, I outline the evolution of gendered software. The journey of gendered software started with the raw idea fueled by Alan Turing’s imitation game in the 1950s. And only shortly thereafter, in the 1960s and 1970s, the first gendered software products like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA were developed. Thus, academia took its time to not only explore technological aspects, but to further investigate the matter of gender in the 1990s CASA-paradigm (Nass et al., 1994) and Media Equation (Reeves & Nass, 1996). As these theories reasoned the …

Designing A Loving Robot: A Social Construction Analysis Of A Sex Robot Creator’S Vision, Annette Masterson

Human-Machine Communication

In 2018, one of the world’s first sex robots was released by CEO Matt McMullen and his company, RealDoll. With artificial intelligence capabilities, the Harmony model is meant to support and converse with users. Using a social construction of technology theory lens, this study develops the theory’s fourth level of analysis, emphasizing mass media’s construction abilities. A critical discourse analysis of 38 publicity interviews found a tendency to emphasize the companionship of sex robots while envisioning a future where integration is normalized, and a sentient robot is possible. As the creator, McMullen’s vision could determine the future of robotic design, …

Do People Perceive Alexa As Gendered? A Cross-Cultural Study Of People’S Perceptions, Expectations, And Desires Of Alexa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Autumn P. Edwards, Anna Maria Manganelli, Chad Edwards, Federico De Luca

Human-Machine Communication

Mainly, the scholarly debate on Alexa has focused on sexist/anti-woman gender representations in the everyday life of many families, on a cluster of themes such as privacy, insecurity, and trust, and on the world of education and health. This paper takes another stance and explores via online survey methodology how university student respondents in two countries (the United States, n = 333; and Italy, n = 322) perceive Alexa’s image and gender, what they expect from this voice-based assistant, and how they would like Alexa to be. Results of a free association exercise showed that Alexa’s image was scarcely embodied …

Gender And Human-Machine Communication: Where Are We?, Leopoldina Fortunati, Autumn P. Edwards

Human-Machine Communication

In this introduction to the fifth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the five articles focusing on gender and human-machine communication. In this essay, we will analyze the theme of gender, including how this notion has historically and politically been set up, and for what reasons. We will start by considering gender in in-person communication, then we will progress to consider what happens to gender when it is mediated by the most important ICTs that preceded HMC: the telephone, mobile phone, and computer-mediated communication (CMC). We outline the historical framework necessary to analyze the last section …

Certification Basis For A Fully Autonomous Uncrewed Passenger Carrying Urban Air Mobility Aircraft, Steve Price

Student Works

The Urban Air Mobility campaign has set a goal to efficiently transport passengers and cargo in urban areas of operation with autonomous aircraft. This concept of operations will require aircraft to utilize technology that currently does not have clear regulatory requirements. This report contains a comprehensive analysis and creation of a certification basis for a fully autonomous uncrewed passenger carrying rotorcraft for use in Urban Air Mobility certified under Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 27. Part 27 was first analyzed to determine the applicability of current regulations. The fully electric propulsion system and fully autonomous flight control system …

Assessment Of Simulated And Real-World Autonomy Performance With Small-Scale Unmanned Ground Vehicles, William Peyton Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Off-road autonomy is a challenging topic that requires robust systems to both understand and navigate complex environments. While on-road autonomy has seen a major expansion in recent years in the consumer space, off-road systems are mostly relegated to niche applications. However, these applications can provide safety and navigation to dangerous areas that are the most suited for autonomy tasks. Traversability analysis is at the core of many of the algorithms employed in these topics. In this thesis, a Clearpath Robotics Jackal vehicle is equipped with a 3D Ouster laser scanner to define and traverse off-road environments. The Mississippi State University …

Actively Guided Cansats For Assisting Localization And Mapping In Unstructured And Unknown Environments, Cary Chun, M. Hassan Tanveer

Symposium of Student Scholars

When navigating in unknown and unstructured environments, Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) can struggle when attempting to preform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) operations. Particularly challenging circumstance arise when an UAV may need to land or otherwise navigate through treacherous environments. As the primary UAV may be too large and unwieldly to safely investigate in these types of situations, this research effort proposes the use of actively guided CanSats for assisting in localization and mapping of unstructured environments. A complex UAV could carry multiple of these SLAM capable CanSats, and when additional mapping and localization capabilities where required, the CanSat would …

Unmanned Aerial System Design For Civil Engineering Operations – A Vip Study, Ezra Robles, Harrison Vicknair, Derek Price, Logan Westra, George Pitcock, Joshua Diamond, Bhuvan Saraswat, Jeremiah Prayor, Fon Saliki

Symposium of Student Scholars

Unmanned Aerial System Design for Civil Engineering Operations – A Case Study

The objective of the project is to design and build a modular Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) that meets the specifications set forth by United Consulting – a local civil engineering company. These specifications are achieved through three unique missions. In each mission, data is collected using different methods. These missions include land surveying, bridge structure inspection and manhole probing. The key requirements of the drone are to maintain a minimum flight time of 30 minutes and the ability to receive and transmit telemetry, photographic and video data from …

Intelligent Autonomous Inspections Using Deep Learning And Detection Markers, Alejandro Martinez Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Inspection of industrial and scientific facilities is a crucial task that must be performed regularly. These inspections tasks ensure that the facilityâ??s structure is in safe operational conditions for humans. Furthermore,the safe operation of industrial machinery, is dependent on the conditions of the environment. For safety reasons, inspections for both structural integrity and equipment is often manually performed by operators or technicians. Naturally, this is often a tedious and laborious task. Additionally, buildings and structures frequently contain hard to reach or dangerous areas, which leads to the harm, injury or death of humans. Autonomous robotic systems offer an attractive solution …

Design Of Environment Aware Planning Heuristics For Complex Navigation Objectives, Carter D. Bailey

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A heuristic is the simplified approximations that helps guide a planner in deducing the best way to move forward. Heuristics are valued in many modern AI algorithms and decision-making architectures due to their ability to drastically reduce computation time. Particularly in robotics, path planning heuristics are widely leveraged to aid in navigation and exploration. As the robotic platform explores and navigates, information about the world can and should be used to augment and update the heuristic to guide solutions. Complex heuristics that can account for environmental factors, robot capabilities, and desired actions provide optimal results with little wasted exploration, but …

Productivity And Quality Evaluation In Assembly Using Collaborative Robots, Carlos F. Manzanares Vega

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In Industry 4.0, various technologies have been applied to achieve automation for traditional manufacturing and practices. For this reason, Smart Manufacturing (SM) environments utilize collaborative robots for process optimization by integrating the Internet of Things (IoT). Cobots are equipped with sensors and/or other devices to be able to transmit data in real-time while performing their tasks. Consequently, such SM implementations improves the decision making and business development, such as supply chain and operations, by sharing real-time data from a plant operational level. The collaborative robots are also designed to safely interact and collaborate with humans to perform tasks and optimize …

Modeling, Control And Estimation Of Reconfigurable Cable Driven Parallel Robots, Adhiti Raman Thothathri

All Dissertations

The motivation for this thesis was to develop a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) as part of a two-part robotic device for concrete 3D printing. This research addresses specific research questions in this domain, chiefly, to present advantages offered by the addition of kinematic redundancies to CDPRs. Due to the natural actuation redundancy present in a fully constrained CDPR, the addition of internal mobility offers complex challenges in modeling and control that are not often encountered in literature.

This work presents a systematic analysis of modeling such kinematic redundancies through the application of reciprocal screw theory (RST) and Lie algebra while …

Panodepth – Panoramic Monocular Depth Perception Model And Framework, Adley K. Wong

Master's Theses

Depth perception has become a heavily researched area as companies and researchers are striving towards the development of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars rely on perceiving the surrounding area, which heavily depends on technology capable of providing the system with depth perception capabilities. In this paper, we explore developing a single camera (monocular) depth prediction model that is trained on panoramic depth images. Our model makes novel use of transfer learning efficient encoder models, pre-training on a larger dataset of flat depth images, and optimizing the model for use with a Jetson Nano. Additionally, we present a training and optimization framework …

Material Characterization And Comparison Of Sol-Gel Deposited And Rf Magnetron Deposited Lead Zirconate Titanate Thin Films, Katherine Lynne Miles

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has been a material of interest for sensor, actuator, and transducer applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This is due to their favorable piezoelectric, pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties. While various methods are available to deposit PZT thin films, radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering was selected to provide high quality PZT films with the added capability of batch processing. These sputter deposited PZT films were characterized to determine their internal film stress, Young’s modulus, composition, and structure. After characterization, the sputtered PZT samples were poled using corona poling and direct poling methods. As a means of comparison, commercially …

Autonomous Vehicle For Asphalt Laying, Gilberto Gonzalez

2022 MME Undergraduate Research Symposium

Autonomous vehicles are constantly being developed and are gaining recognition from many industries to improve workplace safety and efficiency. This project intends to weaken the barrier that prevents the usage of autonomous vehicles in the workplace. To move toward this objective, this project focuses on developing a computer vision system for an autonomous utility vehicle that lays asphalt. The goal of this project is to directly address the issue of the high number of potholes in our driving roads, which create a dangerous and hazardous environment for persons that utilize motorized and non-motorized vehicles on roads. The vehicle’s computer vision …

A Machine Learning Approach To Robotic Additive Manufacturing Of Uv-Curable Polymers Using Direct Ink Writing, Luis A. Velazquez

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis presents the design and implementation of a robotic additive manufacturing system that uses ultraviolet (UV)-curable thermoset polymers. Its design considers future applications involving free-standing 3D printing by means of partial UV curing and the fabrication of samples that are reinforced with fillers or fibers to manufacture complex-shape objects.

The proposed setup integrates a custom-built extruder with a UR5e collaborative manipulator. The capabilities of the system were demonstrated using Anycubic resin formulations containing fumed silica (FS) at varying weight fractions from 2.8 to 8 wt%. To fully cure the specimens after fabrication, a UV chamber was used. Then, measurements …

Enabling The Human Perception Of A Working Camera In Web Conferences Via Its Movement, Anish Shrestha

LSU Master's Theses

In recent years, video conferencing has seen a significant increase in its usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When casting user’s video to other participants, the videoconference applications (e.g. Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, etc.) mainly leverage 1) webcam’s LED-light indicator, 2) user’s video feedback in the software and 3) the software’s video on/off icons to remind the user whether the camera is being used. However, these methods all impose the responsibility on the user itself to check the camera status, and there have been numerous cases reported when users expose their privacy inadvertently due to not realizing that their camera is …

Multi-Robot Symbolic Task And Motion Planning Leveraging Human Trust Models: Theory And Applications, Huanfei Zheng

All Dissertations

Multi-robot systems (MRS) can accomplish more complex tasks with two or more robots and have produced a broad set of applications. The presence of a human operator in an MRS can guarantee the safety of the task performing, but the human operators can be subject to heavier stress and cognitive workload in collaboration with the MRS than the single robot. It is significant for the MRS to have the provable correct task and motion planning solution for a complex task. That can reduce the human workload during supervising the task and improve the reliability of human-MRS collaboration. This dissertation relies …

Event-Triggered Optimal Adaptive Control Of Partially Unknown Linear Continuous-Time Systems With State Delay, Rohollah Moghadam, Vignesh Narayanan, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Publications

This paper proposes an event-triggered optimal adaptive output feedback control design approach by utilizing integral reinforcement learning (IRL) for linear time-invariant systems with state delay and uncertain internal dynamics. In the proposed approach, the general optimal control problem is formulated into the game-theoretic framework by treating the event-triggering threshold and the optimal control policy as players. A cost function is defined and a value functional, which includes the delayed system output, is considered. First, by using the value functional and applying stationarity conditions using the Hamiltonian function, the output game delay algebraic Riccati equation (OGDARE) and optimal control policy are …

Device Free Indoor Localization Of Human Target Using Wifi Fingerprinting, Prasanga Neupane

LSU Master's Theses

Indoor localization of human objects has many important applications nowadays. Proposed here is a new device free approach where all the transceiver devices are fixed in an indoor environment so that the human target doesn't need to carry any transceiver device with them. This work proposes radio-frequency fingerprinting for the localization of human targets which makes this even more convenient as radio-frequency wireless signals can be easily acquired using an existing wireless network in an indoor environment. This work explores different avenues for optimal and effective placement of transmitter devices for better localization. In this work, an experimental environment is …

A Comparison Of Robotic Hand Thumb Designs, Ryon Miro

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Adaptive Multi-Scale Place Cell Representations And Replay For Spatial Navigation And Learning In Autonomous Robots, Pablo Scleidorovich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Place cells are one of the most widely studied neurons thought to play a vital role in spatial cognition. Extensive studies show that their activity in the rodent hippocampus is highly correlated with the animal’s spatial location, forming “place fields” of smaller sizes near the dorsal pole and larger sizes near the ventral pole. Despite advances, it is yet unclear how this multi-scale representation enables navigation in complex environments.

In this dissertation, we analyze the place cell representation from a computational point of view, evaluating how multi-scale place fields impact navigation in large and cluttered environments. The objectives are to …

Columnas: The Honors Program Newsletter At Bentley University, Debayan Sen, Hailey Jennato, Gabe Holmes, Daniel Furze

Honors Program

Page 1: SOCIAL MEDIA—A VEHICLE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE OR VIRTUE SIGNALING? ~ By Debayan Sen ’23

Page 2: WILL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ROBOTICS REPLACE THE HUMAN WORKER? ~ By Hailey Jennato ’24

Page 3: HOW TO HEALTHILY COMMUNICATE IN A RELATIONSHIP: NO, NOT JUST A ROMANTIC ONE ~ By Gabe Holmes ’26

Page 4: THE W SLANT ~ By Daniel Furze ’26

Hey Google: Does Environmental Beliefs And Perceived Privacy Risk Influence Potential User’S Intention To Use A Smart Home System In Indonesia?, Adrian Adhe Elian, Imam Salehudin

Smart City

Automation technology has grown in a rapid pace recently. One of the technology that is growing rapidly right now is the Internet of Things or IoT. IoT consist of many devices, and one of the IoT device that are popular right now is called the smart home device. This smart home device can be use to make the house of the user be smart and can be use to save energy for efficiency for the daily life of the user, such as electricity and water that kan provide a negative impact on the environment if used extensively. This smart home …

Ocean Wave Prediction And Characterization For Intelligent Maritime Transportation, Pujan Pokhrel

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The national Earth System Prediction (ESPC) initiative aims to develop the predictions
for the next generation predictions of atmosphere, ocean, and sea-ice interactions in the scale of days to decades. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate the methods we can use to improve the ESPC models, especially the ocean prediction model. In the application side of the weather forecasts, this dissertation explores imitation learning with constraints to solve combinatorial optimization problems, focusing on the weather routing of surface vessels. Prediction of ocean waves is essential for various purposes, including vessel routing, ocean energy harvesting, agriculture, etc. Since the machine learning approaches …

Task-Oriented Manipulation Planning: Teaching Robot Manipulators To Learn Trajectory Tasks, Yan Li

Doctoral Dissertations

As robot manipulator applications are conducted in more complex tasks and unstructured environments, traditional manual programming cannot match the growing requirements. However, human experts usually know how to operate robot manipulators to complete tasks, but they do not know how to manually program the robot for automatically executing tasks. From a general point of view, a robot manipulation task is composed of a series of consecutive robot actions and environment states which we call it trajectory task. Imitation learning, an emerging and popular technique of robot behavior programming, is a good way to tackle this line of work but still …

Collaborative Robotics Strategies For Handling Non-Repetitive Micro-Drilling Tasks Characterized By Low Structural Mechanical Impedance, Xiangyu Wang

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Mechanical micro-drilling finds widespread use in diverse applications ranging from advanced manufacturing to medical surgery. This dissertation aims to develop techniques that allow programming of robots to perform effective micro-drilling tasks. Accomplishing this goal is faced with several challenges. Micro-drills suffer from frequent breakage caused from variations in drill process parameters. Micro-drilling tasks afford extremely low feed rates and almost zero tolerance for any feed rate variations. The accompanying robot programming task is made difficult as mathematical models that capture the micro-drilling process complexities and sensitive variations in micro-drill parameters are highly difficult to obtain. Therefore, an experimental approach is …

Integrating Plcs With Robot Motion Control In Engineering Capstone Courses, Sanjeevi Chitikeshi, Shirshak K. Dhali, Vukica Jovanovic

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Robotic motion control methods and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are critical in engineering automation and process control applications. In most manufacturing and automation processes, robots are used for moving parts and are controlled by industrial PLCs. Proper integration of external I/O devices, sensors and actuating motors with PLC input and output cards is very important to run the process smoothly without any faults and/or safety concerns. Most traditional electrical and computer engineering (ECE) programs offer high level of motion theory and controls but little hands-on exposure to PLCs which are the main industrial controllers. This paper provides a framework for …

Reduced Fuel Emissions Through Connected Vehicles And Truck Platooning, Paul D. Brummitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication enable the sharing, in real time, of vehicular locations and speeds with other vehicles, traffic signals, and traffic control centers. This shared information can help traffic to better traverse intersections, road segments, and congested neighborhoods, thereby reducing travel times, increasing driver safety, generating data for traffic planning, and reducing vehicular pollution. This study, which focuses on vehicular pollution, used an analysis of data from NREL, BTS, and the EPA to determine that the widespread use of V2V-based truck platooning—the convoying of trucks in close proximity to one another so as to reduce air drag …

Finding Approximate Pythagorean Triples (And Applications To Lego Robot Building), Ronald I. Greenberg, Matthew Fahrenbacher, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This assignment combines programming and data analysis to determine good combinations of side lengths that approximately satisfy the Pythagorean Theorem for right triangles. This can be a standalone exercise using a wide variety of programming languages, but the results are useful for determining good ways to assemble LEGO pieces in robot construction, so the exercise can serve to integrate three different units of the Exploring Computer Science high school curriculum: "Programming", "Computing and Data Analysis", and "Robotics". Sample assignment handouts are provided for both Scratch and Java programmers. Ideas for several variants of the assignment are also provided.