Automatic Extraction of Power Cables Location in Railways Using Surface LiDAR Systems.

The assembly and maintenance of electrified railway systems is of vital importance for its correct operation. Contact wires are critical elements since the correct collection of energy from trains through pantographs depends on them. Periodical inspection of the state of these installations is essential. This task traditionally implies a heavy manual workload subject to errors. A new system that allows one to check the state (height and stagger) of contact and messenger wires is presented on this article blueA new method based on seven steps for identifying the contact wires and measuring their height and stagger from point clouds recorded by means of a LiDAR system is presented. This system can be used both in assembly and maintenance phases, as well as afterwards, allowing the analysis of point clouds previously recorded. The new method was evaluated in both test bench and real environments against the commonly used measurement method. Results with the comparison between this new system and the commonly used measurement method in both test bench and real railway environments are presented. Results of this comparison show differences of less than a centimetre on average and the amount of time spent for the measuring phase is significantly decreased and not prone to human errors.

An Acceptance Test for Assistive Robots.

Socially assistive robots have been used in the care of elderly or dependent people, particularly with patients suffering from neurological diseases, like autism and dementia. There are some proposals, but there are no standardized mechanisms for assessing a particular robot's suitability for specific therapy. This paper reports the evaluation of an acceptance test for assistive robots applied to people with dementia. The proposed test focuses on evaluating the suitability of a robot during therapy sessions. The test measures the rejection of the robot by the patient based on observational data. This test would recommend what kind of robot and what functionalities can be used in therapy. The novelty of this approach is the formalization of a specific validation process that only considers the reaction of the person to whom the robot is applied, and may be used more effectively than existing tests, which may not be adequate for evaluating assistance robots. The test's feasibility was tested by applying it to a set of dementia patients in a specialized care facility.

HiMoP: A three-component architecture to create more human-acceptable social-assistive robots : Motivational architecture for assistive robots.

Generation of autonomous behavior for robots is a general unsolved problem. Users perceive robots as repetitive tools that do not respond to dynamic situations. This research deals with the generation of natural behaviors in assistive service robots for dynamic domestic environments, particularly, a motivational-oriented cognitive architecture to generate more natural behaviors in autonomous robots. The proposed architecture, called HiMoP, is based on three elements: a Hierarchy of needs to define robot drives; a set of Motivational variables connected to robot needs; and a Pool of finite-state machines to run robot behaviors. The first element is inspired in Alderfer's hierarchy of needs, which specifies the variables defined in the motivational component. The pool of finite-state machine implements the available robot actions, and those actions are dynamically selected taking into account the motivational variables and the external stimuli. Thus, the robot is able to exhibit different behaviors even under similar conditions. A customized version of the "Speech Recognition and Audio Detection Test," proposed by the RoboCup Federation, has been used to illustrate how the architecture works and how it dynamically adapts and activates robots behaviors taking into account internal variables and external stimuli.

Primate drum kit: a system for studying acoustic pattern production by non-human primates using acceleration and strain sensors.

The possibility of achieving experimentally controlled, non-vocal acoustic production in non-human primates is a key step to enable the testing of a number of hypotheses on primate behavior and cognition. However, no device or solution is currently available, with the use of sensors in non-human animals being almost exclusively devoted to applications in food industry and animal surveillance. Specifically, no device exists which simultaneously allows: (i) spontaneous production of sound or music by non-human animals via object manipulation, (ii) systematical recording of data sensed from these movements, (iii) the possibility to alter the acoustic feedback properties of the object using remote control. We present two prototypes we developed for application with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) which, while fulfilling the aforementioned requirements, allow to arbitrarily associate sounds to physical object movements. The prototypes differ in sensing technology, costs, intended use and construction requirements. One prototype uses four piezoelectric elements embedded between layers of Plexiglas and foam. Strain data is sent to a computer running Python through an Arduino board. A second prototype consists in a modified Wii Remote contained in a gum toy. Acceleration data is sent via Bluetooth to a computer running Max/MSP. We successfully pilot tested the first device with a group of chimpanzees. We foresee using these devices for a range of cognitive experiments.

Impact of decision-making system in social navigation.

Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot's behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones' information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social_navigation2_WAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Client-Server Approach for Managing Visual Attention, Integrated in a Cognitive Architecture for a Social Robot.

This paper proposes a novel system for managing visual attention in social robots. This system is based on a client/server approach that allows integration with a cognitive architecture controlling the robot. The core of this architecture is a distributed knowledge graph, in which the perceptual needs are expressed by the presence of arcs to stimuli that need to be perceived. The attention server sends motion commands to the actuators of the robot, while the attention clients send requests through the common knowledge representation. The common knowledge graph is shared by all levels of the architecture. This system has been implemented on ROS and tested on a social robot to verify the validity of the approach and was used to solve the tests proposed in RoboCup @ Home and SciROc robotic competitions. The tests have been used to quantitatively compare the proposal to traditional visual attention mechanisms.