Crash, boom, bang

Audience participation is a prominent thread running through much of sound art practice, yet it remains largely absent from the sound art scholarship. In this article, I argue that the most widespread methodologies employed in sound art research – roughly split into the phenomenological branch and the object-oriented branch – are ill equipped to tackle the questions of sociality and participation. Instead, I offer a framework for the study of participation in sound art – and, more broadly, for sound aesthetics in general – rooted in the pragmatist tradition. My starting point is John Dewey’s conceptualization of an artwork as an aesthetic experience developing in cycles of doing and undergoing – a structure, he claims, present in both the creative process and the reception of artworks, putting them on equal footing. I then expand this notion by turning to the contemporary pragmatist trends in creativity studies, ANT and affordance theory, introducing the concepts of we-creativity, mediation and affordance. The second half of the article focuses specifically on affordance – a relationship between a sound artwork and its audience delimiting and facilitating the possibilities for participation. I discuss the low-level affordances (facilitating elementary action) for creative listening and soundmaking and high-level affordances (facilitating complex behaviors) for creativity, experimentation and connectivity. I conclude that the pragmatist framework allows to go beyond the subject- or object-centeredness of phenomenological or object-oriented methodologies, bringing to the foreground the relational and social character of sound art.

A State Validation System for Augmented Reality Based Maintenance Procedures

Maintenance has been one of the most important domains for augmented reality (AR) since its inception. AR applications enable technicians to receive visual and audio computer-generated aids while performing different activities, such as assembling, repairing, or maintenance procedures. These procedures are usually organized as a sequence of steps, each one involving an elementary action to be performed by the user. However, since it is not possible to automatically validate the users actions, they might incorrectly execute or miss some steps. Thus, a relevant open problem is to provide users with some sort of automated verification tool. This paper presents a system, used to support maintenance procedures through AR, which tries to address the validation problem. The novel technology consists of a computer vision algorithm able to evaluate, at each step of a maintenance procedure, if the user correctly completed the assigned task or not. The validation occurs by comparing an image of the final status of the machinery, after the user has performed the task, and a virtual 3D representation of the expected final status. Moreover, in order to avoid false positives, the system can identify both motions in the scene and changes in the camera’s zoom and/or position, thus enhancing the robustness of the validation phase. Tests demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively help the user in detecting and avoiding errors during the maintenance process.

A method for displaying a graphical system design

The methods of displaying the design system are considered. The interpretation of the design model of buildings and structures is given. Designing is usually considered as a set of operations performed by the designer when creating a project and functions in other areas. The design process is an adequate representation of the project for the construction of an object in all conditions. It is described by design routes, design operations algorithms, including tools for evaluating custom indicators, methods for determining design resources. This is an informational labour process. Among the many characteristics of design systems, the structure occupies a special position. The structure is the most general and most stable characteristic of the system, invariant with respect to the specific execution of elements and state. The structure reflects the general, essential and stable properties of the system. Many structural elements that perform one elementary action form an organizational module. An organizational module is an organizational system module. The introduced concepts allow us to define organizational management as a process of redistributing modules of an organizational system by technological and information modules.

A manipulation analysis for robot programming

In this paper a procedure is proposed for a rational and optimum use of robots. It is the result of the lessons learned by the author in the course of his consultancy and teaching activities on manipulative tasks and programming capabilities of robots.One of the chief aims of this paper is educational, and has been set on the basis of students' practice with robots in the Laboratory of Robotics at the University of Cassino, Italy. A second goal consists in highlighting and teaching how robots' versatility and flexibility can be easily exploited during robot's operation when a task is properly modelled through elementary actions. An elementary action, representing a small manipulative operation and consisting in one or few simple instructions given in robot language, can be easily performed by the robot's programming capability. Some examples have been reported to better illustrate the ideas and the procedure proposed, whose main advantage, also from an educational viewpoint, consist in providing a simpler method for analysing manipulations for robot design and programming.

An approach to automatic robots programming in the flexible manufacturing cell

SUMMARYThe paper presents an approach to automatic synthesis of program for robots in a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC). The system of program generation consists of two layers: Task-Level Programming Layer and Program Interpretation and Verification Layer. The first layer uses robot-independent planning techniques to create a work plan for robots (set of elementary actions) and program for each elementary action. The second layer uses robot-dependent planning methods to plan robot's trajectories and calculate the robot's motion times. A simulation model of whole FMC, which is created based on a description of FMC and program for robots, makes possible evaluation of efficiency of FMC work.