Assistance and rehabilitation robotic platforms must have precise sensory systems for human–robot interaction. Therefore, human pose estimation is a current topic of research, especially for the safety of human–robot collaboration and the evaluation of human biomarkers. Within this field of research, the evaluation of the low-cost marker-less human pose estimators of OpenPose and Detectron 2 has received much attention for their diversity of applications, such as surveillance, sports, videogames, and assessment in human motor rehabilitation. This work aimed to evaluate and compare the angles in the elbow and shoulder joints estimated by OpenPose and Detectron 2 during four typical upper-limb rehabilitation exercises: elbow side flexion, elbow flexion, shoulder extension, and shoulder abduction. A setup of two Kinect 2 RGBD cameras was used to obtain the ground truth of the joint and skeleton estimations during the different exercises. Finally, we provided a numerical comparison (RMSE and MAE) among the angle measurements obtained with OpenPose, Detectron 2, and the ground truth. The results showed how OpenPose outperforms Detectron 2 in these types of applications.

This paper presents a direct image-based controller to perform the guidance of a mobile manipulator using image-based control. An eye-in-hand camera is employed to perform the guidance of a mobile differential platform with a seven degrees-of-freedom robot arm. The presented approach is based on an optimal control framework and it is employed to control mobile manipulators during the tracking of image trajectories taking into account robot dynamics. The direct approach allows us to take both the manipulator and base dynamics into account. The proposed image-based controllers consider the optimization of the motor signals sent to the mobile manipulator during the tracking of image trajectories by minimizing the control force and torque. As the results show, the proposed direct visual servoing system uses the eye-in-hand camera images for concurrently controlling both the base platform and robot arm. The use of the optimal framework allows us to derive different visual controllers with different dynamical behaviors during the tracking of image trajectories.

The main goal of this study is to evaluate how to optimally select the best vibrotactile pattern to be used in a closed loop control of upper limb myoelectric prostheses as a feedback of the exerted force. To that end, we assessed both the selection of actuation patterns and the effects of the selection of frequency and amplitude parameters to discriminate between different feedback levels. A single vibrotactile actuator has been used to deliver the vibrations to subjects participating in the experiments. The results show no difference between pattern shapes in terms of feedback perception. Similarly, changes in amplitude level do not reflect significant improvement compared to changes in frequency. However, decreasing the number of feedback levels increases the accuracy of feedback perception and subject-specific variations are high for particular participants, showing that a fine-tuning of the parameters is necessary in a real-time application to upper limb prosthetics. In future works, the effects of training, location, and number of actuators will be assessed. This optimized selection will be tested in a real-time proportional myocontrol of a prosthetic hand.

In this paper, we present ARMIA: a sensorized arm wearable that includes a combination of inertial and sEMG sensors to interact with serious games in telerehabilitation setups. This device reduces the cost of robotic assistance technologies to be affordable for end-users at home and at rehabilitation centers. Hardware and acquisition software specifications are described together with potential applications of ARMIA in real-life rehabilitation scenarios. A detailed comparison with similar medical technologies is provided, with a specific focus on wearable devices and virtual and augmented reality approaches. The potential advantages of the proposed device are also described showing that ARMIA could provide similar, if not better, the effectivity of physical therapy as well as giving the possibility of home-based rehabilitation.

Résumé Un petit monument votif publié en 2001 par P. Chrysostomou dans le Bulletin du Musée Bénaki porte une dédicace à la déesse Ennodia désignée comme ??????????. Le texte doit probablement être attribué à la Théssalie : c’est bien dans cette région en effet que le culte d’Ennodia est le plus attesté. Nous présentons ici une interprétation de l’épithète comme nom d’agent au féminin (avec le suffixe -????? déjà connu en Thessalie) du léxème sous-jacent ????? « satiété » (*« nourriture », « croissance » : órh 1 -o- ), cf. att. korevnnumi « rassasier » : l’épithète ?????????? est donc issu de * kor?-t(e)r a- « celle qui fait grandir », plus précisément « celle qui dote de nourriture/croissance », correspondant à *????- du type ???????- « couronner » (*« doter d’une couronne »). Cette interprétation conduit à caractériser Ennodia comme une divinité kourotrophe de la Thessalie, comme le sont aussi, dans la même région, Artémis, Brimô, Hékatè Leukathéa, Pasikrata et Appolon lui-même, notamment dans le sanctuaire qui lui était consacré à Pagasai et que les fouilles récentes de l’université de Thessalie ont permis de mieux connaître.

An optimization algorithm for planning the motion of a humanoid robot during extravehicular activities is presented in this paper. The algorithm can schedule and plan the movements of the two robotic arms to move the humanoid robot by using the handrails present outside the international space station. The optimization algorithm considers the eventual constraints imposed by the topology of the handrails and calculates the sequence of grasping and non-grasping phases needed to push and pull the robot along the handrails. A low-level controller is also developed and used to track the planned arms and end-effectors trajectories. Numerical simulations assess the applicability of the proposed strategy in three different typical operations that potentially can be performed in an extravehicular activity scenario.I.

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A direct visual-servoing algorithm for control a space-based manipulator is proposed. A two-arm manipulator is assumed as a baseline scenario for this investigation, with one of the arms performing the manipulation and the second arm dedicated to the observation of the target zone of manipulation. The algorithm relies on images taken independently from de-localized cameras, e.g. at the end-effector of a second manipulator. Through the implementation of a Kalman filter, the algorithm can estimate the movements of the features in the image plane due to the relative movements between the camera and the target and then calculate the torques to be provided to the joints of the manipulator by adopting a visual servoing control strategy. Simulations results in two different scenarios have been presented to show an adequate behaviour of the presented approach in on-orbit-servicing operations.