The emergence of the field of soft robotics has led to an interest in suction cups as auxiliary structures on soft continuum arms to support the execution of manipulation tasks. This application poses demanding requirements on suction cups with respect to sensorization, adhesion under non-ideal contact conditions, and integration into fully soft systems. The octopus can serve as an important source of inspiration for addressing these challenges. This review aims to accelerate research in octopus-inspired suction cups by providing a detailed analysis of the octopus sucker, determining meaningful performance metrics for suction cups on the basis of this analysis, and evaluating the state-of-the-art in suction cups according to these performance metrics. In total, 47 records describing suction cups are found, classified according to the deployed actuation method, and evaluated on performance metrics reflecting the level of sensorization, adhesion, and integration. Despite significant advances in recent years, the octopus sucker outperforms all suction cups on all performance metrics. The realization of high resolution tactile sensing in suction cups and the integration of such sensorized suction cups in soft continuum structures are identified as two major hurdles toward the realization of octopus-inspired manipulation strategies in soft continuum robot arms.

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Enhancing engagement of patients during stroke rehabilitation exercises are in the focus of current research. Various methods and computer supported tools have been developed for this purpose, which try to avoid mundane exercising that is prone to become a routine or even boring for the patients and leads to ineffective training. This paper introduces an engagement enhancing cyber-physical stroke rehabilitation system (CP-SRS) aiming at enhancing the patient's engagement during rehabilitation training exercises. This paper focuses on introducing the implementation and validation of the engagement monitoring subsystem (EMS) in the CP-SRS. The EMS is expected to evaluate the patient's actual engagement levels in motor, perceptive, cognitive and emotional aspects. Experiments in these four aspects were conducted separately, in order to characterize the range and accuracy of the engagement indicators by influencing the subjects into different engaged states. During the experiments, different setups were created to mimic the situations in which the subject was engaged or not engaged. The subjects involved in the experiments were healthy subjects. Results showed that the measurement in motor, perceptive, cognitive, and emotional aspects can represent the corresponding engagement level. More experiments will be conducted in the future to validate the efficiency of the CP-SRS in enhancing the engagement with stroke patients.

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3D printed electronics introduces new opportunities in product design. On the other side, it also brings challenges regarding many aspects in the design and manufacturing process of prototypes/products. In this paper, based on our preliminary investigations, we summarize the opportunities of using 3D printed electronics in product design as: 1) it offers designers more freedom in their designs; 2) it promotes miniaturization of design; 3) it accelerates the design and manufacturing process; 4) it is able to improve the efficiency of producing customized/personalized mechatronic/electronic products and 5) it improves the sustainability in the product design and manufacturing process. Motivated by those opportunities, we conducted four case studies regarding four key aspects of 3D printed electronics: the conductive materials, geometric modelling, multiphysics simulation and manufacturing tools. Based on the findings in those case studies, we identified the challenges in 3D printed electronics and highlight the future works which may provide a better support to the needs of product designers.@en

Efficient computer support of product innovation processes has become an important issue of industrial competitiveness in the last forty years. As a consequence, there has been a growing demand for new computer-based tools and system. Various hardware, software and knowledge technologies have been used over the years as the basis of design support systems. With the appearance of network technologies, the conventional standalone workstation paradigm has been replaced by the paradigm of web-interconnected collaborative environments. Currently, the emerging and rapidly proliferating mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies create a technological push again. These technologies force us to reconsider not only the digital information processing devices and their interconnection, but also the way of obtaining, processing and communicating product design information. Many researches and laboratories are engaged with the development of novel concepts, architectures, tools and methods for next-generation design support environments. They will integrate many resources of the current collaborative design environments with pervasive computing functionality and large-scale mobility in a volatile manner. Part of the design support tools will have fixed location, but will be remotely accessible through wireless networks. Other part of the tools will be moving with the designers as portable, embedded, wearable and transferable devices, and will feature ad hoc connectivity. These not only offer new ways for aggregation, processing and presentation of design information, but also enable alternative ways of completing design activities. Our current research concentrates on three interrelated main issues: (i) studying workflow scenarios for future design support environment, (ii) investigation and integration of multiple technologies into an ad hoc interconnected heterogeneous infrastructure, and (iii) exploring efficient methods for utilizing new affordances in supporting product innovation. In this paper we report on the results of our recent technology study that analyzed the current results and trends of ubiquitous technology development, and tried to form a vision about the possible manifestation of future ubiquitous design support environments. Essentially, they have been conceptualized as ad hoc and volatile networks of fixed and mobile information collection, processing and communication units. This network functions as a complex service provider system, with special attention to the on-demand information management in the fuzzy front end of design projects.@en

We present a method of automatic alignment of two partially matching 3D shapes. The algorithm selects large fat tetrahedrons (LFT) composed of 4 vertices in one shape and exhaustively searches in the other shape for sets of 4 vertices being compatible with the tetrahedron. By selecting such salient tetrahedrons that are relatively wide and fat, although also being not too unlikely to be contained in the overlap region, the cost of search can be reduced. The method is relatively insensitive to noise and not depending on the existence of local shape features nor on feature correspondences. When implemented on a GPU in Cuda, two point sets of 40,000 each can be aligned within seconds. The method is intended to support interactive 3D scan registration applications.@en

We present a method of partial matching two shapes aimed to support 3D scanning applications. To digitize the surface of a 3D object, a number of scan views are taken from different angles, collectively representing the entire surface of the object. The registration process assigns a transformation to each of the scan views such that the surface of the object can be reconstructed. The motivation of our work is to provide an initial geometric model to a designer who develops the shape further using Computer-Aided Design. We propose a method of pairwise shape matching of partial scans, without depending on any distinct geometric feature type. The degree of matching of two shapes, that is the congruence of their overlapping portions, has been defined by a matching index I, which should be maximized to attain the right relative placement of the two shapes. By using a simplification of one of the shapes and a sampling strategy in 6D configuration space we achieve matching in an amount of time that would be too high for practical interactive use. However, we offload the most computation intensive part of the matching process to the graphical processing unit (GPU) to achieve 50-80 times shorter times. The method does not require the detection of intrinsic or artificial features (or shape descriptors), nor optical markers nor position or orientation tracking information. To our best knowledge there are no previous reports about practically usable results of similar methods. We present the outcomes of tests with scanned point clouds and initial conclusions about the robustness and costs of the method. The limitations of the method are discussed and improvements of the search strategy and the GPU-based computation of the matching index are proposed.@en

Implementation of tangible virtuality means providing means for creating airborne visual images, rendering them with physical properties and making them sensible for the human senses. Airborne creation and direct manipulation requires separating the virtual objects from the image generating (physical rendering) device. One step in this direction is using electroholographic, or pseudo-electroholographic, devices which are able to create virtual objects in mid-air by various light interference techniques. A virtual object is a computer model, visualized by the projection system to appear as a real, tangible object. Te enable the required direct interaction with the virtual objects these have to be perceptually separated from the projected device, they have to be perceived as floating in the air. In our research we use the Holovizio Hv128WD system, a mono-parallax, high resolution holographic imaging device supporting 3D image visualization rather than physical rendering of virtual objects. The device generates 62 views of virtual objects where each view is visible from a specific viewing direction. The user of the system perceives this as a stereo view to the object. We have been collecting application experiences related to this device for more than one year, and we have found some restrictions and limitations in the image creating capabilities which we are trying to eliminate in our current research. This paper reports on the first phase of research which focuses on some major image generation problems and exploration of possible hardware, software or data management causes. The goal of this first phase is to develop and validate the proper measurement methods. A pilot experiment is performed to verify the applicability of the method. The results show that the proposed measurement methods are feasible and helpful in analyzing the observed problems. Some problems appear to have a more fundamental cause and may only be worked around.@en