The present work, which describes the mechatronic design and development of a novel rehabilitation robotic exoskeleton hand, aims to present a solution for neuromusculoskeletal rehabilitation. It presents a full range of motion for all hand phalanges and was specifically designed to carry out position and force-position control for passive and active rehabilitation routines. System integration and preliminary clinical tests are also presented.

This letter presents a novel wearable haptic controller (WHC) system suitable for teleoperation of demolition machines and robotic platforms. With regard to existing operator controller unit composed by passive joysticks, the WHC has been designed to provide force feedback to the user, hence improving the user perfor- mance during the teleoperation of different robotic platforms and the interaction with the environment on the remote construction sites. The haptic feedback is provided through two compact parallel kinematic (CPK) interfaces that will be presented within the paper. The CPK implements a novel variant of the Delta kinematics which allows minimizing the radial encumbrance while preserving same operational workspace. In addition, we propose a new interaction modality that provides users the feeling of directly maneuvering the end-effector of the demolition machine. Finally, the architec- ture of the proposed system is presented and the results of some preliminary evaluation tests are discussed. The experiments have been performed in simulated environments and on a real machine

Today, computer vision algorithms are very important for different fields and applications, such as closed-circuit television security, health status monitoring, and recognizing a specific person or object and robotics. Regarding this topic, the present paper deals with a recent review of the literature on computer vision algorithms (recognition and tracking of faces, bodies, and objects) oriented towards socially assistive robot applications. The performance, frames per second (FPS) processing speed, and hardware implemented to run the algorithms are highlighted by comparing the available solutions. Moreover, this paper provides general information for researchers interested in knowing which vision algorithms are available, enabling them to select the one that is most suitable to include in their robotic system applications.

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