In human-robot collaborative assembly, robots are often required to dynamically change their pre-planned tasks to collaborate with human operators in a shared workspace. However, the robots used today are controlled by pre-generated rigid codes that cannot support effective human-robot collaboration. In response to this need, multi-modal yet symbiotic communication and control methods have been a focus in recent years. These methods include voice processing, gesture recognition, haptic interaction, and brainwave perception. Deep learning is used for classification, recognition and context awareness identification. Within this context, this keynote provides an overview of symbiotic human-robot collaborative assembly and highlights future research directions.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In this paper, the use of a dispersive prism with a triangular shape is proposed to reduce the dispersive radiation nature of a leaky-wave antenna in groove gap waveguide technology. The operation of gap waveguide technology is based on the use of metallic pins that act as an artificial magnetic conductor, so the electromagnetic fields are confined and guided in the desired directions. To control a leaky-wave radiation of these confined fields is possible by tailoring the height of the pins, its periodicity and the waveguide width. This radiation, as in any conventional leaky-wave antenna, is dispersive, leading to beam squint as frequency is varied. Here, we mitigate this beam squint by using a prism made of dispersive pins and choosing appropriately their periodicity and height. With this prism, the leaky-wave radiation is focused into one single direction in a wide frequency-band.This concept is demonstrated with a prototype designed to radiate at ϕ=41 • with a central frequency of 12 GHz and high-gain of 16.5 dBi. A 22% frequency bandwidth for the 3-dB realized gain at ϕ=41 • is achieved, and the main radiating direction, with half-power beamwidth of 5 • , steers only ±0.5 • from 11.4 to 13.4 GHz.