ABSTRACT
Companion bots such as chatbots in cyberspace or robots in real space gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of comforting humans and reducing their loneliness. These bots can also help enhance the lives of elderly people. In this paper, we present how to design and implement a quick prototype of companion bots for elderly people. A companion bot named "Hello Steve"that is able to send emails, open YouTube to provide entertainment, and remember the times an elderly person must take medicine and remind them is designed and implemented as a quick prototype. In addition, the bot combines the features of a mobile robot and a chatbot. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the design through its very high accuracy when navigating mobile-robot-like tasks and responding to chatbot-like tasks via voice commands. © 2023 MYU K.K.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, the novel corona virus pandemic is raging around the world, and the safety of home environment and public environment has become the focus of people's attention [2]. Therefore, the research on disinfection robot has become one of the important directions in the field of machinery and artificial intelligence. This paper proposes a robot with the STM32 MCU as the core of disinfection, and is equipped with a variety of sensors and a camera vision, has the original cloud service management platform, the remote deployment of navigation, based on visual SLAM to realize high precision navigation and positioning, can realize to indoor environment autonomously route planning, automatic obstacle avoidance checking, disinfection, epidemic prevention function, at the same time can pass Bit computer software realizes remote control of robot, which has great development potential. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, two problems arose. Students lacked 1) social opportunities and 2) motivation to maintain their schedules, e.g., studying or relaxing, as their work-life balance disappeared. Thus, we designed a social companion robot, Bulb, that helped students cycle through daily activities with subtle cues, i.e., light, gaze, and movements. Bulb's "head"would light up with different colors or it gazes at different parts of the room, e.g., at the laptop to hint at studying or wiggling to suggest a small break. Five students evaluated Bulb through at-home use, which demonstrated that Bulb was seen as a "living being"and students were responsive to its social cues, like following Bulb's gaze, resulting in a higher awareness and follow-through of students' schedules. Our contribution is in designing a social companion robot that subtly persuaded students through light and anthropomorphic social cues, helping them maintain their daily schedule during the pandemic. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
The ambitious five-year strategic business plan for Petrobras presented a challenge for its Surface Installation Engineering Department. This paper explores the business case behind the strategy, initiatives and identified issues that enabled Petrobras to design, plan, contract, build and deliver more than fifteen new O&G production systems. The company transformation relied on strategic parallel initiatives. Four areas concentrated the efforts: Corporate Integration, Surface Installations, Subsea Systems and Reservoir Wells. This article focuses on the analysis of the technical actions in the Surface Installation department. Nonetheless, it summarizes the related essential efforts, as well. The optimization process started with high level assumptions, for instance to reinforce one company value. That is, to keep and develop a strong in-house technical knowledge. This allowed to continue a previous development initiative to create internal Concept and Basic Design Engineering for Standard FPSO Design. The major challenge occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Petrobras mobilized its longest and largest Organizational Response Structure (EOR) team in its history. It involved all company departments with direct contribution of more than a thousand employees assigned for two years. With deep respect to the lives impacted and lost, there were lessons learned in this process, although Petrobras managed to continue its essential operations. From Corporate Integration perspective, Petrobras actively managed its asset portfolio to reduce the company's debt. Combined with favorable commodity prices, it allowed the company to restore and increase its financial situation to invest in oil production development despite observed volatility in the macroeconomic scenario. Regarding Reservoir and Wells, innovative technology created conditions to reduce the overall completion time. Subsea Systems layout optimizations and a more efficient resource management like the PLSV assigned fleet present significant contribution to the results. standardization process to evolve. Optimization in system machinery design templates saved time while respecting each project unique input design conditions. One of the results was a new series of FPSOs with All Electric concept design. It consequently tends to increase efficiency and overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Another key point identified was the interface among Petrobras, its supply partners, and shipyards. Through a permanent FPSO market monitoring committee, the process of procuring technical qualification was updated and stimulated early engagement of critical equipment suppliers. Furthermore, Petrobras have been continuously improving the drafting of contract terms for each FPSO project to stimulate shared interest. Finally, there were also improvements during FPSO construction and commissioning phase. The above mentioned efforts are expected to increase the chances of Petrobras delivering its strategic plan and sustainable growth. There are lessons learned to undertake fifteen O&G production systems in a synchronous manner. This is a considerable number of offshore projects for any operator company. © 2023, Offshore Technology Conference.
ABSTRACT
The small size and inherent superior electrical characteristics of a toroid has made it the first choice for many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). However, the lack of knowledge regarding the toroidal coil winding equipment is still hampering the growth of toroid as the first choice for transformers, inductors and other electrical applications. Additionally, due to Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown situation, small scale companies are lacking skilled manpower for the high precision task of toroidal core winding and taping. Although the machine is readily available in the market, the cost is still very high. Toroidal core winding machine is an equipment used for the purpose of winding toroidal cores which is used in various electrical machines such as current transformers, power transformers, isolation transformers, inductors and chokes, auto transformers, etc. This project aims to develop a low-cost toroidal winding machine with a user-friendly digital interface for selection of winding parameters as per the user input. The winding machine developed in this project is efficient and reliable with high-speed performance and negligible error. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
With the developments of medical artificial intelligence (AI), meta-data analysis, intelligence-aided drug design and discovery, surgical robots and image-navigated precision treatments, intelligent medicine (IM) as a new era evolved from ancient medicine and biomedical medicine, has become an emerging topic and important criteria for clinical applications. It is fully characterized by fundamental research-driven, new-generation technique-directed as well as state-of-the-art paradigms for advanced disease diagnosis and therapy leading to an even broader future of modern medicine. As a fundamental subject and also a practice-oriented field, intelligent medicine is highly trans-disciplinary and cross-developed, which has emerged the knowledge of modern medicine, basic sciences and engineering. Basically, intelligent medicine has three domains of intelligent biomaterials, intelligent devices and intelligent techniques. Intelligent biomaterials derive from traditional biomedical materials, and currently are endowed with multiple functionalities for medical uses. For example, micro-/nanorobots, smart responsive biomaterials and digital drugs are representative intelligent biomaterials which have been already commercialized and applied to clinical uses. Intelligent devices, such as surgical robots, rehabilitation robots and medical powered exoskeleton, are an important majority in the family of intelligent medicine. Intelligent biomaterials and intelligent devices are more and more closely integrated with each other especially on the occasions of intelligence acquisition, remote transmission, AI-aided analysis and management. In comparison, intelligent techniques are internalized in the former two domains and are playing a critical role in the development of intelligent medicine. Representative intelligent techniques of telemedicine, image-navigated surgery, virtual/augmented reality and AI-assisted image analysis for early-stage disease assessments have been employed in nowadays clinical operations which to a large extent relieved medical labors. In the past decades, China has been in the leading groups compared to international colleagues in the arena of intelligent medicine, and a series of eminent research has been clinically translated for practical uses in China. For instance, the first 5G-aided remote surgery has been realized in Fujian Province in January 2019, which for the first time validated their applicability for human uses. The surgical robots have found China as the most vigorous market, and more than 10 famous Chinese companies are developing versatile surgical robots for both Chinese people and people all over the world. China also applied AI techniques to new drug developments especially in early 2020 when COVID-19 epidemic roared, and several active molecules and drug motifs have been discovered for early-stage COVID-19 screening and treatments. Based on the significance of intelligent medicine and its rapid developments in both basic research and industrials, this review summarized the comprehensive viewpoints of the Y6 Xiangshan Science Conferences titled with Fundamental Principles and Key Technologies of Intelligent Medicine, and gave an in-depth discussion on main perspectives of future developments of the integration of biomaterial and devices, the integration of bioinformatics and medical hardware, and the synergy of biotechnology and intelligence information. It is expected that this featuring article will further promote intelligent medicine to an even broader community not only for scientists but also for industrials, and in the long run embrace a perspective future for its blooming and rich contributions in China in the coming 5 years. © 2023 Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
There has been an increase of interest and demand in the usage of logistic indoor service robots that are designed to minimize interactions between humans due to the occurrence of the COVID-19 outbreak. The application of the rising technology in the medical sector has great benefits in the industry, such as the prevention of the spread of highly infectious diseases using distance as a factor. Rooting from the purpose of the said robot, the main focus should be the ease of navigation through achieving the desired trajectory, in order to maximize the functionality, prevent collision, reduce user maneuvering difficulties, and such. Hence, this paper is focused on improving the trajectory errors on the robot navigation performance based on different control system designs specifically, a physical joystick controller and a mobile-based Bluetooth application controller. The design of the joystick is based on a pivot as its base which is directed to all angles and the design of the Bluetooth app is based on fourdirectional buttons that will operate upon clicking, and switching to other buttons to change commands. With this, the researchers conducted linear path and rotational tests using both remote control modes that are based on five varying speed values of 0.75 m/s, 0.5m/s, 0.35m/s, 0.25m/s, and 0.15 m/s. Based on the data analysis, the yielded results showed that using the Bluetooth app lowers the robot's trajectory error by 50% to 60% compared to using ajoystick to navigate to the desired point. Thus, the researchers concluded that the design of a control system greatly affects the robot navigation in achieving the desired trajectory. Considering the nonsystematic errors, a calibration based on the hardware structure design specifically on the caster wheel is recommended. © 2023 IEEE.
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The current COVID-19 pandemic situation necessitates the need for a prompt, safe and a contactless method for the dispatch of basic items and other essentials in various domains such as hospitals, manufacturing industries and warehouses. Contemporary robot technology can help build robots that can handle objects safely and replace and/or assist humans in such domains. Robots with soft grippers can be used in hospitals where lightweight items like bottles, medicines and tablets can be handed over to patients. They can be used in warehouses to lift objects of varying topology. This paper discusses the design of the gripper arm for a robotic trolley that can be used to pick and place objects. The gripper arm was modelled on Autodesk Fusion360, and the analysis was done on Ansys. The arm and the gripper were manufactured using ABS plastic and a composite material consisting of elastosil silicone rubber, respectively. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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In view of the fact that Covid-19 is highly contagious, which poses great threat and inconvenience to people's production and life, a multifunctional robot control system with single-chip microcomputer as the control core is designed, aiming at the problems of centralized isolation points in communities, complicated situation and difficult management. Firstly, Gmapping algorithm is used to realize the robot's autonomous positioning and avoidance. Secondly, a three-degree-of-freedom robot arm is designed to disinfect any indoor space. Finally, Gmapping algorithm is used to recognize and measure the temperature of human face. Through the simulation experiment, this method can improve the efficiency of searching the shortest path and carry out disinfection work while reducing human contact, improving public safety and has practical value. © 2023 IEEE.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for non-contact medical robots to alleviate the heavy workload and emotional stress experienced by healthcare professionals while preventing infection. In response, we propose a non-contact robotic diagnostic system for otolaryngology clinics, utilizing a digital twin model for initial design optimization. The system employs a master-slave robot architecture, with the slave robot comprising a flexible endoscope manipulation robot and a parallel robot arm for controlling additional medical instruments. The novel 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) control mechanism enables the single robotic arm to handle the endoscope, facilitating the process compared to the traditional two-handed approach. Phantom experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed flexible endoscope manipulation system in terms of diagnosis completion time, NASA task load index (NASA-TLX), and subjective risk score. The results demonstrate the system's usability and its potential to alternate conventional diagnosis. © 2013 IEEE.
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Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, anthropomorphic service robots are continuously penetrating various domains of our daily lives. With this development, the urge for an interdisciplinary approach to responsibly design human-robot interaction (HRI), with particular attention to human dignity, privacy, compliance, and transparency, increases. This paper contributes to design science, in developing a new artifact, i.e., an interdisciplinary framework for designing responsible HRI with anthropomorphic service robots, which covers the three design science research cycles. Furthermore, we propose a multi-method approach by applying this interdisciplinary framework. Thereby, our finding offer implications for designing HRI in a responsible manner. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
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The history of the medical robot is not very far from the first experiment in the 1980s. Nowadays robot in the medical sector plays a vital role in monitoring patient's health condition from distance. This paper aimed at developing an auxiliary medical solution that could provide a wide range of non-invasive diagnoses carried out by an automated robot whose motion can also be controlled manually using either a mobile application or voice command. The authors also incorporate modern features of video conferences and automated patient data management systems using the Internet of Things (IoT) which eventually facilitate medical practitioners in proper investigation from distance. The results of the clinical trial among 6 persons indicated that the robot could measure different health parameters properly using the proposed non-invasive method. The non-invasive results are verified by standard testing equipment and conventional clinical investigation and are also presented in this paper. The developed medical robot having a wide range of functionality could play a significant role in reducing human workload and ensuring timely medical assistance during a challenging crisis pandemic period like COVID-19. © 2023 IEEE.
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Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19, including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing, contact tracing, and vaccination. However, combining these measures into an efficient holistic pandemic response instrument is even more involved than anticipated. We argue that some non-trivial factors behind the varying effectiveness of these measures are selfish decision making and the differing national implementations of the response mechanism. In this article, through simple games, we show the effect of individual incentives on the decisions made with respect to mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccination, and how these may result in sub-optimal outcomes. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national authorities in designing these games properly regarding data transparency, the chosen policies, and their influence on the preferred outcome. We promote a mechanism design approach: It is in the best interest of every government to carefully balance social good and response costs when implementing their respective pandemic response mechanism;moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when designing an effective solution. © 2022 held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
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The science of robotics is considered one of the most practical sciences in all fields. The application of this science is visible in all kinds of work fields and related fields, from construction activities to activities in the fields of medicine or even social services. One of the social services that are very widely used, is delivering items and orders to customers. This work is the duty of people who are called waiters. This job has very few benefits for people working in this field. Also, things like illness can cause some delay in the employer's work or not complete his work in some cases, also in situations such as when contagious diseases have spread, the direct communication of people within a short distance can cause more spread of the disease. The devices ordered by the customers could increase the speed of work and have a low-risk connection, the costs of the employer could be reduced, perfect service could be given to the customers, and the workforce could be employed for more useful work. This robot is specifically designed to use for reception in the conference hall of the growth center of Kharazmi University to receive the people present in this conference hall, but as mentioned above, these robots can be used in other places such as hospitals for delivering medicines to patients, also can be used in restaurants to deliver customer's orders to them. With this replacement, the speed of catering increases, at the same time, there is no lack of accuracy, and the issue that becomes more important with the spread of the contagious disease Covid-19 is hygiene, which can achieve several important goals in this field with this replacement. Specifically, during the reception, the distance between the host and the guest is less than one meter and is unsafe. Also, there is a possibility that each of the parties is a carrier of contagious diseases, and these problems are solved by this replacement. © 2022 IEEE.
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Robots' visual qualities (VQs) impact people's perception of their characteristics and affect users' behaviors and attitudes toward the robot. Recent years point toward a growing need for Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) in various contexts and functions, interacting with various users. Since SAR types have functional differences, the user experience must vary by the context of use, functionality, user characteristics, and environmental conditions. Still, SAR manufacturers often design and deploy the same robotic embodiment for diverse contexts. We argue that the visual design of SARs requires a more scientific approach considering their multiple evolving roles in future society. In this work, we define four contextual layers: the domain in which the SAR exists, the physical environment, its intended users, and the robot's role. Via an online questionnaire, we collected potential users' expectations regarding the desired characteristics and visual qualities of four different SARs: a service robot for an assisted living/retirement residence facility, a medical assistant robot for a hospital environment, a COVID-19 officer robot, and a personal assistant robot for domestic use. Results indicated that users' expectations differ regarding the robot's desired characteristics and the anticipated visual qualities for each context and use case. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Nowadays, telepresence systems based on the Extended Reality (XR) system are actively developed and used for remote collaboration due to COVID-19. Still, several issues, such as limited traversable space in Virtual Reality (VR) and require all participants to wear head-mounted display (HMD), stop these systems from being used in our daily life. On the other hand, telepresence robots have been used in various fields before the pandemic. However, these robots also have a limitation in that the current form is incapable of delivering non-verbal expressions, which is essential for social interaction. Therefore, we present a Holobot, a telepresence robot based on the XR system. A remote user connects to the Holobot through VR HMDs, and the Holobot augments a virtual avatar that projectsusers' facial and gesture expressions.We developed a prototype and conducted a simple field test in the exhibition to receive feedback. VR participants enjoyed exploring remote spaces and interacting with each other through Holobot. Furthermore, remote space participants mentioned that a 1:1 scale avatar helped to build co-presence with the VR user. Based on these insights, we think Holobot could provide design guideline for future telepresence robot. For further approach, we plan to improve our prototype and conduct user test for structured evaluation of our system. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
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New work has been a topic for a few years now and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought this trend more into focus, i.e., working remotely became more popular. However, besides various advantages, there is the risk of loneliness in employees, which can negatively affect their work performance and mental health. Research in different domains suggests that social robots could reduce loneliness. Since we were interested in whether and how such findings are transferable to the office context, we developed and tested a concept for a social office robot. More specifically, we first conducted a cultural probes study with white-collar workers to gain information about workplace loneliness and its drivers. Second, we explored design possibilities for a social office robot in a focus group. Based on the results, we created a concrete concept, Luca, which we finally evaluated and optimized with the help of interviews with participants from various industries. The present work contributes to HRI research and practice, e.g., by providing design recommendations for the implementation of a social office robot. Future research could investigate the effectiveness of a social office robot intervention in field studies. Next to implications for research and practice, potential limitations are discussed. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2023.
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In addition to equipment maintenance decisions, spare parts ordering decisions from different suppliers play a key role in reducing related costs (e.g., maintenance, inventory and ordering costs). Since suppliers may use different production technologies and materials, spare parts (or products) from different suppliers can be different in quality. Nevertheless, in recent studies, the quality of spare parts is rarely considered to incorporate both equipment maintenance and spare parts ordering. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of condition-based maintenance and spare parts provisioning policy under two suppliers with different product quality. We formulate a sequential-decision problem with a Markov decision process and consequently obtain an optimal maintenance and ordering policy by an exact value iteration algorithm. To improve computation efficiency, based on the principle of sequential optimization, we develop heuristic methods. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the overall performance of the developed heuristic methods. Compared to the optimal method, results showed that the average cost gap is about 2% and computation time is reduced by 94% on average under the proposed heuristic method. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the observation that automobile industries tried to integrate emergency suppliers from which spare parts have different quality into maintenance schedules to avoid stockout and reduce equipment failure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, the article focuses on balancing the trade-offs between condition-based maintenance and inventory management from two suppliers with different lead times and spare parts quality for multi-unit systems. On the one hand, effective maintenance scheduling relies on spare parts for replacement to ensure the stability of production. On the other hand, inventory management needs to select the supplier with appropriate lead time and product quality to reduce the ordering cost and avoid stockout based on the degradation states of equipment. The joint optimization of these two aspects serves to reduce the total maintenance and ordering cost. Nevertheless, most existing research aims to optimize them separately. In this paper, we formulate the joint decision problem considering the two aspects based on a Markov decision process. We obtain an optimal maintenance and ordering policy by an exact value iteration algorithm and present heuristics to improve the computation efficiency when the system contains multiple machines. Practitioners can implement the proposed methodology to make condition-based maintenance and inventory management when spare parts with different qualities are ordered from two suppliers. To balance cost and computational efficiency, it is suggested to implement the optimal policy by an exact value iteration algorithm when the number of machines is small in the system and use the heuristic methods when the number of machines is large (i.e., usually larger than 3). IEEE
ABSTRACT
The current COVID-19 pandemic situation necessitates the need for a prompt, safe and a contactless method for the dispatch of basic items and other essentials in various domains such as hospitals, manufacturing industries and warehouses. Contemporary robot technology can help build robots that can handle objects safely and replace and/or assist humans in such domains. Robots with soft grippers can be used in hospitals where lightweight items like bottles, medicines and tablets can be handed over to patients. They can be used in warehouses to lift objects of varying topology. This paper discusses the design of the gripper arm for a robotic trolley that can be used to pick and place objects. The gripper arm was modelled on Autodesk Fusion360, and the analysis was done on Ansys. The arm and the gripper were manufactured using ABS plastic and a composite material consisting of elastosil silicone rubber, respectively. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
The high prevalence rate of covid-19 is the most prominent feature making this deadly virus known in the world. One of the efficient ways to bridle this spread is disinfecting furniture in public places. Since there are demerits in utilizing chemical sanitizers, like imperfect disinfection processes, developed countries have turned to use modern cleaning methods. In this paper, the design, manufacturing, and experimental test of a UVC1 multipurpose robot are presented. Containing 8 UVC lights, the portable system is capable of disinfecting a whole sphere around its working area. Consider the Ozone gas produced by the lights, this robot can sanitize covered places that UVC rays cannot reach. As UVC rays are dangerous, this system is remotely controllable in a range of two km. An atmega128 microcontroller is utilized to navigate the robot and send the operator's commands to the system. Corona group viruses like SARS and Ebola besides E. coli bacteria have been studied during an experiment. 39 sample points of a surgery room in a hospital were disinfected by three types of mentioned microbes. Cultivating the microorganisms before and after a 20 minutes UVC disinfection process, almost 80% of the microbes were deactivated. © 2022 IEEE.