No abstract

In order to enable robots to work in close contact with humans or in environments with unknown obstacles, new reactive control strategies based on sensitive bumper skins are proposed. The aim of this work is to provide a robot with contact and force control based strategies that make it dependable, safe and with foreseeable behaviours.The sensory skin is composed of rigid-bumpers provided with deformation sensors incorporated in a flexible substrate. This solution is a compromise between a simple bumper skin and current array-based robot skins, with better potential performances but, more costly and with usability problems. Such sensitive bumpers cover all moveable links of the robot allowing the detection of collisions, measuring the force involved and locating the point of contact with reasonable precision and cost.Index Terms -Human-robot interaction, safe robots, robot skin, compliant behaviour.

Human body detection and tracking in a scene constitutes a very active working field due to their applicability to many areas, specially as a man-machine interface (MMI) means. The system presented aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of teleoperation. The system is of application to teleoperated manipulation in civil applications such as big robots in shipyards, mines, public works or even cranes. Image segmentation is performed from movement detection. The recognition of moving bodies is verified by means of a simplified articulated cylindrical model, thus allowing to operate with a low computational cost.

This paper presents a study on how the application of scaling techniques to an interface affects its performance. A progressive scaling factor based on the position and velocity of the cursor and the targets improves the efficiency of an interface, thereby reducing the user's workload. The study uses several human-motor models to interpret human intention and thus contribute to defining and adapting the scaling parameters to the execution of the task. Two techniques addressed to vary the control-display ratio are compared, and a new method for aiding in the task of steering is proposed.

The analysis of the error of stereo measurements by triangulation is revisited from three points of view: geometrical, statistical and visual quality. When the target is visible by a set of distributed cameras in the workspace, there are multiple combinations of camera pairs adequate to be considered for the location, by triangulation, of the target position. Three-camera placements are analysed evaluating their precision in a short-medium distance. The work presented analyses which combination of stereo measurements gives the best results, and proposes a method for the automatic selection of the most adequate cameras pair.