This book makes a consolidated guided tour to the world of sociorobots (social or socialized robots). Sociorobots and assistive robots provide entertainment, assistance to the handicapped, companionship to the elderly and health care to autistic children and people with dementia. The book provides, in a fluent educational way, all major concepts, architectures and design methodologies. All types of sociorobots are examined, namely walking anthropomorphic, wheeled anthropomorphic, fixed-place anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sociorobots. The book provides an outline of sociorobot intelligent control architectures, robot learning and human robot interaction.
Assistive robots are categorized as robots that share their area of work and interact with humans. Their main goals are to help, assist, and monitor humans, especially people with disabilities. To achieve these goals, it is necessary that these robots possess a series of characteristics, namely the abilities to perceive their environment from their sensors and act consequently, to interact with people in a multimodal manner, and to navigate and make decisions autonomously. This complexity demands computationally expensive algorithms to be performed in real time. The advent of high-end embedded processors has enabled several such algorithms to be processed concurrently and in real time. All these capabilities involve, to a greater or less extent, the use of machine learning techniques. In particular, in the last few years, new deep learning techniques have enabled a very important qualitative leap in different problems related to perception, navigation, and human understanding. In this Special Issue, several works are presented involving the use of machine learning techniques for assistive technologies, in particular for assistive robots.
Systems, cybernetics, control, and automation (SCCA)are four interrelated and overlapping scientific and technological fields that have contributed substantially to the development, growth, and progress of human society. A large number of models, methods, and tools were developed that assure high efficiency of SCCA applied to practical situations. The real-life applications of SCCA encompass a wide range of man-made or biological systems, including transportations, power generation, chemical industry, robotics, manufacturing, cybernetics organisms (cyborgs), aviation, economic systems, enterprise, systems, medical/health systems, environmental applications, and so on. The SCCA fields exhibit strong influences on society and rise, during their use and application, many ethical concerns and dilemmas. This book provides a consolidated and concise overview of SCCA, in a single volume for the first time, focusing on ontological, epistemological, social impact, ethical, and general philosophical issues. It is appropriate for use in engineering courses as a convenient tutorial source providing fundamental conceptual and educational material on these issues, or for independent reading by students and scientists.Included in the book is:• Background material on philosophy and systems theory• Major ontological, epistemological, societal and ethical/philosophical aspects of the four fields that are considered in the book• Over 400 references and a list of 130 additional books in the relevant fields • Over 100 colored photos and 70 line figures that illustrate the text
These proceedings comprise about 50 contributions from experts worldwide. The major themes covered include knowledge-based and expert systems, cognitive modeling, neural networks and AI, image processing and computational geometry, and parallel, distributed and decentralised architecture for AI and robotics.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks, EANN 2016, held in Aberdeen, UK, in September 2016. The 22 revised full papers and three short papers presented together with two tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on active learning and dynamic environments; semi-supervised modeling; classification applications; clustering applications; cyber-physical systems and cloud applications; time-series prediction; learning-algorithms.
American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.
Robots in groups or colonies can exhibit an enormous variety and richness of behaviors which cannot be observed with singly autonomous systems. Of course, this is analogous to the amazing variety of group animal behaviors which can be observed in nature. In recent years more and more investigators have started to study these behaviors. The studies range from classifications and taxonomies of behaviors, to development of architectures which cause such group activities as flocking or swarming, and from emphasis on the role of intelligent agents in such groups to studies of learning and obstacle avoidance. There used to be a time when many robotics researchers would question those who were interested in working with teams of robots: `Why are you worried about robotic teams when it's hard enough to just get one to work?'. This issue responds to that question. Robot Colonies provides a new approach to task problem-solving that is similar in many ways to distributed computing. Multiagent robotic teams offer the possibility of spatially distributed parallel and concurrent perception and action. A paradigm shift results when using multiple robots, providing a different perspective on how to carry out complex tasks. New issues such as interagent communications, spatial task distribution, heterogeneous or homogeneous societies, and interference management are now central to achieving coordinated and productive activity within a colony. Fortunately mobile robot hardware has evolved sufficiently in terms of both cost and robustness to enable these issues to be studied on actual robots and not merely in simulation. Robot Colonies presents a sampling of the research in this field. While capturing a reasonable representation of the most important work within this area, its objective is not to be a comprehensive survey, but rather to stimulate new research by exposing readers to the principles of robot group behaviors, architectures and theories. Robot Colonies is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising eight invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Autonomous Robots (Volume 4, Number 1).
