Development of an Integrated Virtual Reality System with Wearable Sensors for Ergonomic Evaluation of Human-Robot Cooperative Workplaces.

This work proposes a novel virtual reality system which makes use of wearable sensors for testing and validation of cooperative workplaces from the ergonomic point of view. The main objective is to show, in real time, the ergonomic evaluation based on a muscular activity analysis within the immersive virtual environment. The system comprises the following key elements: a robotic simulator for modeling the robot and the working environment; virtual reality devices for human immersion and interaction within the simulated environment; five surface electromyographic sensors; and one uniaxial accelerometer for measuring the human ergonomic status.

ROAD: The Road Event Awareness Dataset for Autonomous Driving.

Humans drive in a holistic fashion which entails, in particular, understanding dynamic road events and their evolution. Injecting these capabilities in autonomous vehicles can thus take situational awareness and decision making closer to human-level performance. To this purpose, we introduce the ROad event Awareness Dataset (ROAD) for Autonomous Driving, to our knowledge the first of its kind.

IART: Inertial Assistant Referee and Trainer for Race Walking.

This paper presents IART, a novel inertial wearable system for automatic detection of infringements and analysis of sports performance in race walking. IART algorithms are developed from raw inertial measurements collected by a single sensor located at the bottom of the vertebral column (L5-S1). Two novel parameters are developed to estimate infringements: loss of ground contact time and loss of ground contact step classification; three classic parameters are indeed used to estimate performance: step length ratio, step cadence, and smoothness.

A Geometrically Exact Model for Soft Continuum Robots: The Finite Element Deformation Space Formulation.

Mathematical modeling of soft robots is complicated by the description of the continuously deformable three-dimensional shape that they assume when subjected to external loads. In this article we present the deformation space formulation for soft robots dynamics, developed using a finite element approach. Starting from the Cosserat rod theory formulated on a Lie group, we derive a discrete model using a helicoidal shape function for the spatial discretization and a geometric scheme for the time integration of the robot shape configuration.