11.25 – 11.55
Concrete Printing – a journey with destination unknown
Zeeshan Yunus Ahmed - PhD candidate
TU/e Built Environment - Material related Structural Design - Concrete Structures The Architecture Engineering and Construction Industry lacks behind with other industries in construction productivity. The industry needs to change from the era of Industry 1.0 towards an industry 4.0 and benefit from the opportunities of a digital transition. One of the opportunities is the embracement of additive manufacturing. The department of the Built Environment at TU/e has realised a large-scale facility to print, amongst others, concrete. The research is focussed on the stability of freshly printed mortars with a very low stiffness and the improvement of the materials ductility by embedding a reinforcement sequential to the printing process. Despite the research just started some years ago, some valorisation projects have been realised already, including a pedestrian bridge and the first houses in Eindhoven are under construction at the time.
Holistic Scene Understanding using Deep Learning
Daan de Geus – PhD candidate
TU/e Electrical Engineering - Signal Processing Systems - Video Coding and Architectures
Scene understanding plays a crucial role in automated driving and robotics. In our work, we approach holistic scene understanding from a visual perspective, by addressing the task of panoptic segmentation. In panoptic segmentation, the goal is to make semantic class predictions for all pixels in an image, and to differentiate between different instances of objects. So far, this problem has been addressed by using outputs from multiple deep neural networks. In our method, we apply a single deep neural network to make panoptic segmentation predictions. This method allows for easier implementation on a device, and reduces needs on computational resources. Our system achieves competitive results and cuts computational time in half compared to existing approaches.
Robots in the warehouse: working 'with' or 'against' the machine
Jilles Smids – Post Doc
TU/e Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences - Philosophy & Ethics
The introduction of advanced robotics in logistics significantly affects quality of work and workers’ competence profiles. Our project aims to answer the question of how robotization in logistic warehouses can be utilized and developed in a way that does not conflict with workers’ sense of meaning in work and general wellbeing. Workers should have a sense of working ‘with’ instead of ‘under’ or ‘against ’robots, and take responsibility for the collaboration. We take an interdisciplinary approach, combining organizational psychology and philosophy.
15.30 – 16.00
Humans and robots understanding each other
Margot Neggers - PhD Candidate
TU/e Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences - Human Technology Interaction
In recent years, more and more autonomous service robots are being developed that need to operate in environments with people. Currently, social skills of robots are still very poor. However, in environments with people, a robot must take social rules and human behaviour into account and show socially acceptable behaviour. A robot should respect social distances and navigate in a human- and robot-friendly way, and also be able to recognize actions and predict human intentions. Additionally, the robot must navigate towards a target while communicating its intentions in such a way that people will understand whether the robot is planning to interact with them or just plans to pass them by. It is expected that understanding human intentions and communicating a robot’s own intentions are necessary requirements for fluent and efficienthuman-robot interaction. Our work aims to investigate some of the unanswered questions in this field.
3D-printed Soft Robotics
Brandon Caasenbrood - PhD Candidate
TU/e Mechanical Engineering - Dynamics & Control
The field of soft robotics holds many attributes that can be difficult to accomplish by traditional robotics. Unlike traditional robotics, soft robots are composed of flexible materials that mimic the mechanical properties of matter found in nature. Similar to an octopus squeezing through a narrow opening or an elephant's trunk grasping food from trees, soft robots exploit their structural flexibility and morphology for a broad range of objectives. This class of (bio-inspired) robots introduces a new and exciting field of robotics, which could revolutionize the role of robots regarding healthcare and human-robot interaction. Although significant advances have been made in soft robotics, the field is still in the stage of inception, particularly the field of control and fabrication. In this talk, we will discuss the emerging field of soft robotics, the fabrication process using 3D-printing, and the challenges concerning control.
Closer to Nature: Interactive Installation Design with a Therapeutic Robot for Enhancing Positive Engagement in Seniors with Dementia
Maggie Song - PhD candidate
TU/e Industrial Design – Systemic Change
The number of people with dementia is on the rise alongside an ageing population. Seniors with dementia in Long-term Care facilities often spend most of the time alone and with limited stimulations of the senses, empty conversations or little engagement in meaningful activities. Without a cure in sight, developing and evaluating meaningful activities that foster and sustain engagement is critical for quality care of this group. In this project, we proposed an interactive system design that combines the benefits of two common approaches in dementia care: Multi-sensory Stimulation and Social Commitment Robot. It aims to perform as a provocative strategy for enhancing positive engagement, provoking emotional responses and increasing social bonding.