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Advances in Human-Robot Interaction" provides a unique collection of recent research in human-robot interaction. It covers the basic important research areas ranging from multi-modal interfaces, interpretation, interaction, learning, or motion coordination to topics such as physical interaction, systems, and architectures. The book addresses key issues of human-robot interaction concerned with perception, modelling, control, planning and cognition, covering a wide spectrum of applications. This includes interaction and communication with robots in manufacturing environments and the collaboration and co-existence with assistive robots in domestic environments. Among the presented examples are a robotic bartender, a new programming paradigm for a cleaning robot, or an approach to interactive teaching of a robot assistant in manufacturing environment. This carefully edited book reports on contributions from leading German academic institutions and industrial companies brought together within MORPHA, a 4 year project on interaction and communication between humans and anthropomorphic robot assistants.
This article describes the current state of our research on anthropomorphic robots. Our aim is to make the reader familiar with the two basic principles our work is based on: anthropomorphism and dynamics. The principle of anthropomorphism means a restriction to human-like robots which use version, audition and touch as their only sensors so that natural man-machine interaction is possible. The principle of dynamics stands for the mathematical framework based on which our robots generate their behavior. Both principles have their root in the idea that concepts of biological behavior and information processing can be exploited to control technical systems.
As service robotics research advances rapidly, availability of objective, reproducible test specifications and evaluation criteria and also of benchmarking is more and more felt to be desirable in the community. As a first step towards benchmarking, in this paper we propose a formalization of tests - exemplified for domestic grasp&place tasks. The underlying philosophy of our approach is to confront the robot system in a black-box manner with requirements of a “rational customer”, and characterize the performance of the system in an objective way by the outcomes of a test-suite tailored to this scenario. A formalized single test description consists of a clear and reproducible specification of the robot’s task and the full context on the one hand, and a number of figures which objectively characterize the test result on the other hand. We illustrate this methodology for the domestic assistance scenario.
CoRA is a robotic assistant whose task is to collaborate with a human operator on simple manipulation or handling tasks. Its sensory channels comprising vision, audition, haptics, and force sensing are used to extract perceptual information about speech, gestures and gaze of the operator, and object recognition. The anthropomorphic robot arm makes goal-directed movements to pick up and hand-over objects. The human operator may mechanically interact with the arm by pushing it away (haptics) or by taking an object out of the robot’s gripper (force sensing). The design objective has been to exploit the human operator’s intuition by modeling the mechanical structure, the senses, and the behaviors of the assistant on human anatomy, human perception, and human motor behavior.
In asynchronous collaboration scenarios, document metadata play an important role for indexing and retrieving documents in jointly used archives. However, the manual input of metadata is usually an unpleasant and error prone task. This paper describes an approach that allows the partially automatic generation of metadata in a collaborative modeling environment. It illustrates some usage scenarios for the metadata within the modelling framework – including concepts for document based social navigation and ideas for tool embedded archive queries based on the current state of the user's work.
In this paper we present an approach for People-to-People recommendations based on a Rich Context Model (RCM). We consider personal user information as contextual information used for our recommendations. The evaluation of our recommendation approach was performed on a social network of students. The obtained results do show a significant increase in performance while, at the same time, a slight increase in quality in comparison to a manual matching process. The proposed approach is flexible enough to handle different data types of contextual information and easy adaptable to other recommendation domains.
This chapter describes our current research efforts related to the contextualization of learners in mobile learning activities. Substantial research in the field of mobile learning has explored aspects related to contextualized learning scenarios. However, new ways of interpretation and consideration of contextual information of mobile learners are necessary. This chapter provides an overview regarding the state of the art of innovative approaches for supporting contextualization in mobile learning. Additionally, we provide the description of the design and implementation of a flexible multi-dimensional vector space model to organize and process contextual data together with visualization tools for further analysis and interpretation. We also present a study with outcomes and insights on the usage of the contextualization support for mobile learners. To conlcude, we discuss the benefits of using contextualization models for learners in different use-cases. Moreover, a description is presented in order to illustrate how the proposed contextual model can easily be adapted and reused for different use-cases in mobile learning scenarios and potentially other mobile fields.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) become more and more popular. These course formats are typically highly flexible and attract large groups of learners from heterogeneous backgrounds. So far research in this area concentrating on success factors for low dropout rates and high satisfaction on the side of the learners in MOOCs is scarce. In this chapter, we describe experiences of a large online course offered to students of two large German universities. Based on theory drawn from a social psychological perspective on the relevance of social interaction for learning, we describe the background, structure, and specific elements of the MOOC-like course. We outline evaluation results of both small group collaboration (in workshops) and mass interaction (via forum and wiki usage) as well as results of the general evaluation of the overall course concept. We argue that the specific mixture of small and large group interaction as well as teacher- and learner-generated content is especially promising with regard to satisfaction, learning outcomes, and course completion rates.
Resource Usage in Online Courses: Analyzing Learner’s Active and Passive Participation Patterns
(2015)
The paper analyzes the experience with an open university course for a very heterogeneous target group in which MOOC-like materials and activities were used. The course was conducted in a specifically prepared and extended Moodle environment. The analysis involves questionnaires as well as performance data that reflect the resource access on the learning platform. A special focus is put on the participants’ acceptance and usage of student-generated versus teacher-provided learning content. Network analysis techniques have been used to identify "interest clusters" of students around certain resources.
Social networking sites (SNSs) are an integral part of our daily life. With the evermore increasing appearance of SNSs, their users spend considerable time producing of different forms everyday (e.g. text, videos, photos, links, etc.) or browsing the varieties of contents in different SNSs. In this paper, we propose an architectural perspective on a framework that provides a unified environment through which users can produce and browse different contents of SNSs from one place.
This paper discusses the efforts carried out related to the design and development of a web-based framework that allows designing, deploying and executing mobile data collecting applications. Furthermore, it also allows analyzing and presenting the data that is generated during the mentioned process. The fact that the framework is completely web-based provides a platform independent execution of the mobile application on any mobile device with a web-browser. As a result that the whole life-cycle of creating, executing and discussing a mobile learning activity is implemented in pure web-based manner separates this work from similar efforts. In the course of this work, the current state of development of two of the components, the authoring tool and the mobile application is presented. This framework was introduced to teachers in an activity to follow up an initial study. On the basis of a workshop with teachers, we performed an explorative study regarding the technology acceptance and usability of two components of the proposed framework. The results are discussed and analyzed in this paper.
With the spread of mobile devices among both, men and women, app-based games also become more popular. While traditionally, digital games are more famous among men, women seem to spend more time and money on mobile gaming. There are a lot of open questions with regard to women and gaming in general; research on gender differences in app-based mobile gaming is almost nonexistent. Taking an exploratory perspective, our study investigates gender differences in general usage patterns, attachment towards the game and motivational differences for choosing to play the famous QuizClash app. Also, we identify differences in reported and actual performance in specific categories and capture anticipation of success as well as likeliness of choosing specific knowledge categories depending on the opponents’ performance profile.
Sensing and processing of multimedia information is one of the basic traits of human beings. The development of digital technologies and applications allows the production of huge amounts of multimedia data. The rapidly decreasing prices for hardware such as digital cameras/camcorders, sound cards and the corresponding displays led to wide distribution of multimedia-capable input and output devices in all fields of the everyday life, from home entertainment to companies and educational organisations. Thus, multimedia information in terms of digital pictures, videos, and music can be created intuitively and is affordable for a broad spectrum of users.
Recently, standardization bodies such as IEEE and ITU addressed, independently, standards for the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer specification of PLCs. MAC designers develop coexistence mechanisms irrespectively of the physical layer. Power line channel behavior changes every time a modem sends/receives on the channel. Changing the channel behavior influences the communication between nodes. As a consequence, the MAC coexistence mechanisms are affected. Power line impedance is a very important parameter on the design of PLC architecture. The changed channel behavior is a result of changing the impedance values between sending and receiving states. Transmitter and receiver nodes behave simultaneously on the power line. Transmitter nodes transmit although other nodes receive at the same time. Changing states from the MAC layer simultaneously between send and receive for the different nodes influence the channel behavior, as a consequence, influence the physical layer and the coexistence between the different nodes even when the systems are separated in frequency. In this paper, we discuss the coexistence of the NB-PLC applications considering the communication requirements. We then investigate the impedance problem of the power line by providing a typical transmission scenario and simulation results on the CENELEC frequency bands. Finally, we introduce a transmission model which overcomes the impedance problem and optimizes the communications between the non-interoperable nodes.
To enable a robotic assistant to autonomously reach for and transport objects while avoiding obstacles we have generalized the attractor dynamics approach established for vehicles to trajectory formation in robot arms. This approach is able to deal with the time-varying environments that occur when a human operator moves in a shared workspace. Stable fixed-points (attractors) for the heading direction of the end-effector shift during movement and are being tracked by the system. This enables the attractor dynamics aoproach to avoid the spurious states that hamper potential field methods. Separating planning and control computationally, the approach is also simpler to implement. The stability properties of the movement plan enable to approach to deal with fluctuating and imprecise sensory information. We implement this approach on a seven degree of freedom anthropomorphic arm reaching for objects on a working surface. We use an exact solution of the inverse kinematics, which enables us to steer the spatial position of the elbow clear of obstacles. The straight-line trajectories of the end-effector that result far from obstacles make the movement goals of the robotic assistant predictable, improving man-machine interaction.
NewsGrid
(2005)
Film archives—particularly those storing video material on all kinds of news items—are important information sources for TV stations. Each TV station creates and maintains its own archive by storing video material received via satellite and/or internet on tapes in analogue and/or digital form. It cannot be predicted in advance which of this archived material will actually be used. Thus all material received must be catalogued and stored. On average only a small percentage of the material stored is actually used. Due to the increase in data volumes the cost of maintaining such repositories and retrieving particular stored items has become prohibitive. To-day digital videos are increasingly replacing analogue material. Digital videos offer the advantage that the can be stored in distributed databases and then be transferred without loss of quality to the transmitting station. Such digital archives can be made accessible to many TV stations, thus spreading the maintenance cost. Individual stations can retrieve only the material they actually need for particular news casts. In this paper a grid architecture for distributed video archives for news broadcasts is proposed. A crucial aspect of such a grid approach is that advanced methods for retrieving data must be available.
Coming out of the labs, the first robots are currently appearing on the consumer market. Initially they target rather simple application scenarios ranging from entertainment to home convenience. However, one can expect, that they will capture more complex areas soon. These robots will have a higher and higher level and a broad range of functional competence, and will collaborate and interactively communicate with their human users. All this requires considerable cognitive abilities on the robot’s side and appropriate man-machine interaction technologies. Apart from further development of individual functions and technologies it is crucial to build and evaluate fully integrated systems. This paper describes our approach to construct a robotic assistance system. We present experience with an integrated technology demonstration and the exposure of the integrated system to the public.
In this paper we describe a session management system for setting up various collabora- tive classroom ,scenarios. The approach ,is addressing the additional workload ,of administrating classroom networks on the teacher, which is an important aspect for teachers' willingness to im- plement technology enhanced,learning in schools. The system facilitates preparation of classroom scenarios and the adhoc installation of networked collaborative sessions. We provided a graphical interface, which is usable for administration, monitoring, and for specification of a wide variety of different classroom ,situations with group work. The resulting graphical specifications are well suited to be re-used in the more formal learning design format IMS/LD; this is achieved by a auto- matable transformation of the scenarios to LD documents. Keywords: Collaborative classroom scenarios, lightweight classroom orchestration, learning de- sign, shared workspaces.
