Serious Games (SG) have been shown to have instructional potential and a number of formal models, frameworks and methodologies have emerged to support their design and analysis. The Activity Theory-based Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) facilitates a systematic and detailed representation of educational SG describing how game elements are connected together to contribute to pedagogical goals. This paper proposes and presents an extension to the ATMSG framework to facilitate the identification, selection and integration of analytics into serious games. A practical example of the approach in use in the analysis and design phase of a SG for engineering is demonstrated.
Automatic surveillance and monitoring using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) require the development of perception systems that robustly work under different illumination conditions. Event cameras are neuromorphic sensors that capture the illumination changes in the scene with very low latency and high dynamic range. Although recent advances in eventbased vision have explored the use of event cameras onboard UAS, most techniques group events in frames and, therefore, do not fully exploit the sequential and asynchronous nature of the event stream. This paper proposes a fully asynchronous scheme for intruder monitoring using UAS. It employs efficient event clustering and feature tracking modules and includes a sampling mechanism to cope with the computational cost of event-by-event processing adapting to on-board hardware computational constraints. The proposed scheme was tested on a real multirotor in challenging scenarios showing significant accuracy and robustness to lighting conditions.
Abstract-In a world where students are increasing digitally tethered to powerful, 'always on' mobile devices, new models of engagement and approaches to teaching and learning are required from educators. Serious Games (SG) have proved to have instructional potential but there is still a lack of methodologies and tools not only for their design but also to support game analysis and assessment. This paper explores the use of SG to increase student engagement and retention. The development phase of the Circuit Warz game is presented to demonstrate how electronic engineering education can be radically reimagined to create immersive, highly engaging learning experiences that are problem-centered and pedagogically sound. The Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics (LM-GM) framework for SG game analysis is introduced and its practical use in an educational game design scenario is shown as a case study.
The development of perception systems for bio-inspired flapping wing robots, or ornithopters, is very challenging due to their fast flying maneuvers and the high amount of vibrations and motion blur originated by the wing flapping. Visual sensors have been widely used in aerial robot perception due to their size, weight, and energy consumption capabilities. This paper analyzes the issues and challenges for vision sensors onboard ornithopter robots. Two visual sensors are evaluated: a monocular camera and an event-based camera. First, the pros and cons of integrating different sensors on flapping wing robots are studied. Second, the paper experimentally evaluates the impact of wing flapping frequency on both sensors using experiments with the ornithopter developed in the EU-funded GRIFFIN ERC project.
Serious Games (SG) have proved to have instructional potential but there is still a lack of methodologies and tools not only for their design but also to support game analysis and assessment. This paper explores the use of SG to increase student engagement and retention. The ongoing development phase of a game to teach the theoretical and practical principles of the operation of a sound synthesizer is presented to demonstrate how electronic engineering education can be radically reimagined to create immersive, highly engaging learning experiences that are problem-centered and pedagogically sound. The Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics (LM-GM) framework for SG game analysis is introduced and its use in an educational game design scenario is shown as a case study.
The relative ubiquity of high powered mobile devices and increasing high speed connectivity offers new opportunities for educators. On the App stores, the freemium model has gained popularity to such an extent that the majority of games are now free to play. This type of business model depends on the ability to record, analyze and interpret analytics and metrics to finesse the user experience and plan future iterations of a product to ensure a high level of user retention and monetization. This paper explores the use of analytics in an educational context to measure student engagement and retention. A mobile version of the Circuit Warz project is introduced and demonstrates how engineering education can be completely reimagined to create immersive and highly engaging student learning experiences.
Joint manipulation and object exchange are common in many everyday scenarios. Although they are trivial tasks for humans, they are still very challenging for robots. Existing approaches for robot-tohuman object handover assume that there is no fault during the transfer. However, unintentional perturbation forces can be occasionally applied to the object, resulting in the robot and the object being damaged, for example by being dropped. In this paper we present a novel approach to handover objects in a reliable manner while ensuring the safety of the robot and the object. Relying on tactile sensing, the system uses an effort controller to adapt the grasp forces in the presence of perturbations. Moreover, the proposed approach identifies a perturbation being applied on the object. When a perturbation event is detected, the algorithm classifies the direction of the pulling forces to decide whether to release it or not. The reliable handover system was implemented using a Shadow Robot hand equipped with BioTAC tactile sensors. Our results show that the system correctly adapts to the forces applied on the object to maintain the grasp and only releases the object if the human receiver pulls in the right direction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.