− Future society must be utopia in which every constituent can share equal welfare. In particular, it should be a society where the elderly and the physically handicapped can lead their lives happily along with the normal. In order to realize such a welfare-driven society, it is essential to build an infrastructure with a variety of facilities based on advanced technology or devices and systems...

Finding an optimal path for a robot in a soccer field involves different parameters such as the positions of the robot, positions of the obstacles, etc. Due to simplicity and smoothness of Ferguson Spline, it has been employed for path planning between arbitrary points on the field in many research teams. In order to optimize the parameters of Ferguson Spline some evolutionary or intelligent al...

In this article, a fast and reliable map-merging algorithm is proposed to produce a global two dimensional map of an indoor environment in a multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) process. In SLAM process, to find its way in this environment, a robot should be able to determine its position relative to a map formed from its observations. To solve this complex problem, simultan...

Robot usage outside of the automobile, appliance, undersea, space, and hazardous materials industries has increased over the past decade. Robots have potential for enormous benefit to the medical field, but researchers must proceed with care to ensure human safety. With the rising cost of medicine, automation may be one way to make medicine affordable [1-3]. The trend is to work side-by-side wi...

marketing, as competing hospitals purchase robots and advertise them to consumers eager for the latest technology. “It’s definitely a consumer-driven health care offering,” says Lynda Petty, RN, director of perioperative education, policy, and process improvement at The Ohio State University (OSU) Medical Center in Columbus. OSU was the first hospital to use the da Vinci robot, manufactured by ...

Recently, more robots are being created to interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. From this point of view we started with the development of a social robot named Probo, intended to comfort and emotionally interact with hospitalized children. In this paper we present the objectives of this new robot and describe the concepts of the first prototype. The robot will be...

Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with “robot diabetes” that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes. Robin provides children with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an “Embodied” ...

Enabling robots to safely interact with humans is an essential goal of robotics research. The developments achieved over the last years in mechanical design and control made it possible to have active cooperation between humans and robots in rather complex situations. For this, safe robot behavior even under worst-case situations is crucial and forms also a basis for higher level decisional asp...

We develop visual servo control to stabilize the image of moving soft tissue in B-mode ultrasound (US) imaging. We define the target region in a B-mode US image, and automatically control a robot to manipulate an US probe by minimizing the difference between the target and the most recently acquired US image. We exploit tissue speckle information to compute the relative pose between the probe a...