Review of Learning-Based Robotic Manipulation in Cluttered Environments.

Robotic manipulation refers to how robots intelligently interact with the objects in their surroundings, such as grasping and carrying an object from one place to another. Dexterous manipulating skills enable robots to assist humans in accomplishing various tasks that might be too dangerous or difficult to do. This requires robots to intelligently plan and control the actions of their hands and arms. Object manipulation is a vital skill in several robotic tasks. However, it poses a challenge to robotics. The motivation behind this review paper is to review and analyze the most relevant studies on learning-based object manipulation in clutter. Unlike other reviews, this review paper provides valuable insights into the manipulation of objects using deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) in dense clutter. Various studies are examined by surveying existing literature and investigating various aspects, namely, the intended applications, the techniques applied, the challenges faced by researchers, and the recommendations adopted to overcome these obstacles. In this review, we divide deep RL-based robotic manipulation tasks in cluttered environments into three categories, namely, object removal, assembly and rearrangement, and object retrieval and singulation tasks. We then discuss the challenges and potential prospects of object manipulation in clutter. The findings of this review are intended to assist in establishing important guidelines and directions for academics and researchers in the future.

MEF: Multidimensional Examination Framework for Prioritization of COVID-19 Severe Patients and Promote Precision Medicine Based on Hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approaches.

Effective prioritization plays critical roles in precision medicine. Healthcare decisions are complex, involving trade-offs among numerous frequently contradictory priorities. Considering the numerous difficulties associated with COVID-19, approaches that could triage COVID-19 patients may help in prioritizing treatment and provide precise medicine for those who are at risk of serious disease. Prioritizing a patient with COVID-19 depends on a variety of examination criteria, but due to the large number of these biomarkers, it may be hard for medical practitioners and emergency systems to decide which cases should be given priority for treatment. The aim of this paper is to propose a Multidimensional Examination Framework (MEF) for the prioritization of COVID-19 severe patients on the basis of combined multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. In contrast to the existing literature, the MEF has not considered only a single dimension of the examination factors; instead, the proposed framework included different multidimensional examination criteria such as demographic, laboratory findings, vital signs, symptoms, and chronic conditions. A real dataset that consists of data from 78 patients with different examination criteria was used as a base in the construction of Multidimensional Evaluation Matrix (MEM). The proposed framework employs the CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method to identify objective weights and importance for multidimensional examination criteria. Furthermore, the VIKOR (VIekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje) method is utilized to prioritize COVID-19 severe patients. The results based on the CRITIC method showed that the most important examination criterion for prioritization is COVID-19 patients with heart disease, followed by cough and nasal congestion symptoms. Moreover, the VIKOR method showed that Patients 8, 3, 9, 59, and 1 are the most urgent cases that required the highest priority among the other 78 patients. Finally, the proposed framework can be used by medical organizations to prioritize the most critical COVID-19 patient that has multidimensional examination criteria and to promptly give appropriate care for more precise medicine.

EEG feature fusion for motor imagery: A new robust framework towards stroke patients rehabilitation.

Stroke is the second foremost cause of death worldwide and is one of the most common causes of disability. Several approaches have been proposed to manage stroke patient rehabilitation such as robotic devices and virtual reality systems, and researchers have found that the brain-computer interfaces (BCI) approaches can provide better results. Therefore, the most challenging tasks with BCI applications involve identifying the best technique(s) that can reveal the neuron stimulus information from the patients' brains and extracting the most effective features from these signals as well. Accordingly, the main novelty of this paper is twofold: propose a new feature fusion method for motor imagery (MI)-based BCI and develop an automatic MI framework to detect the changes pre- and post-rehabilitation. This study investigated the electroencephalography (EEG) dataset from post-stroke patients with upper extremity hemiparesis. All patients performed 25 MI-based BCI sessions with follow up assessment visits to examine the functional changes before and after EEG neurorehabilitation. In the first stage, conventional filters and automatic independent component analysis with wavelet transform (AICA-WT) denoising technique were used. Next, attributes from time, entropy and frequency domains were computed, and the effective features were combined into time-entropy-frequency (TEF) attributes. Consequently, the AICA-WT and the TEF fusion set were utilised to develop an AICA-WT-TEF framework. Then, support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbours (kNN) and random forest (RF) classification technique were tested for MI-based BCI rehabilitation. The proposed AICA-WT-TEF framework with RF classifier achieves the best results compared with other classifiers. Finally, the proposed framework and feature fusion set achieve a significant performance in terms of accuracy measures compared to the state-of-the-art. Therefore, the proposed methods could be crucial for improving the process of automatic MI rehabilitation and are recommended for implementation in real-time applications.