Human-Robot Interaction Design Using Smart Device Based Robot Partner

Nowadays, various robot partners have been developed to realize human-friendly interactions. In general, a robot system is composed of hardware modules, software modules, and application contents. It takes much time to design utterance contents and motion patterns as application contents simultaneously, but the design support systems mainly focus on the generation of robot motion patterns. Furthermore, a methodology is needed to easily change the specification of hardware and software according to diversified needs, and the developmental environment to design the application contents on verbal and nonverbal communication with people. In this paper, the authors propose robot partners with the modularized architecture of hardware and software by using smart devices, and propose a developmental environment to realize easy contents design of verbal and nonverbal communication. In order to solve the problem of difficulty in the content design, they develop a design support environment using design templates of communication application contents. Next, they apply the robot partner to navigate visitors to the robot contest of the system design forum held in Tokyo Metropolitan University. Finally, they show several examples of the interaction cases, and discuss the interaction design for smart device based robot partners.

Συνέντευξη με την καθηγήτρια Diana Laurillard

Diana Laurillard is Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab, UCL Institute of Education, leading externally-funded research projects on: a) developing a learning design support environment for teachers, and b) developing software interventions for learners with low numeracy and dyscalculia.The interview was taken during the International Symposium “The Future Is Now: Open & Distance Universities in Europe” on the 5-6 November, 2015 in Athens by Vasiliki (Sylvie) Ioakimidou, a Ph.D. candidate at the Hellenic Open University.

An Integrated Design Support Environment for a Micro-Scale Portable Absorption Cooling System

Portable cooling systems play an important role in assisting human operations in unfriendly environments, such as soldiers continuously working in a desert area for long hours. Typical cooling system designs utilizing a vapor compression cycle driven by electrical power usually have high weights due to batteries and as a result, compromise the effectiveness of the portable cooling system. A self-contained absorption cycle cooling system design based on micro-scale thermal technology has demonstrated unique advantages in minimizing system weight while providing reasonable thermal efficiency. This system adopts a heat actuated absorption/desorption thermal cycle to raise the pressure of the refrigerant vapor without a heavy battery load. Design challenges exist: 1) multi-physics considerations when integrating the thermodynamic and transport models for the heat pump and peripheral component devices; 2) trade-off among multi-functional design requirements of system weight and thermal efficiency, using the inputs of cooling load, heat rejection temperature, and heat transfer characteristics based on the micro-channel geometry. No existing design automation tools are available on the market to directly support these design tasks. In this work, physics-based system-level models are developed and validated against state-of-the-art prototypes. The use of these models is demonstrated through the design of a 150-watt portable cooling system, typically used by the military in desert training. The system modeling methodology is implemented in Java as a part of an Integrated Design Support Environment, and has been used to generate trade-off study results. These results show that the current implementation is effective, and is a significant step toward a complete integrated design support environment to analyze and synthesize high-quality micro-scale portable cooling systems.