Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is increasingly prevalent across various industries, promising to boost productivity, efficiency, and safety. As robotics technology advances and takes on more complex tasks traditionally performed by humans, the nature of work and the demands on workers are evolving. This shift emphasizes the need to critically integrate human factors into these interactions, as the effectiveness and safety of these systems are highly dependent on how workers cooperate with and understand robots. A significant challenge in this domain is the lack of a consensus on the most efficient way to operationalize and assess mental workload, which is crucial for optimizing HRC. In this systematic literature review, we analyze the different psychophysiological measures that can reliably capture and differentiate varying degrees of mental workload in different HRC settings. The findings highlight the crucial need for standardized methodologies in workload assessment to enhance HRC models. Ultimately, this work aims to guide both theorists and practitioners in creating more sophisticated, safe, and efficient HRC frameworks by providing a comprehensive overview of the existing literature and pointing out areas for further study.
Multi-human detection and tracking in indoor surveillance is a challenging task due to various factors such as occlusions, illumination changes, and complex human-human and human-object interactions. In this study, we address these challenges by exploring the benefits of a low-level sensor fusion approach that combines grayscale and neuromorphic vision sensor (NVS) data. We first generate a custom dataset using an NVS camera in an indoor environment. We then conduct a comprehensive study by experimenting with different image features and deep learning networks, followed by a multi-input fusion strategy to optimize our experiments with respect to overfitting. Our primary goal is to determine the best input feature types for multi-human motion detection using statistical analysis. We find that there is a significant difference between the input features of optimized backbones, with the best strategy depending on the amount of available data. Specifically, under a low-data regime, event-based frames seem to be the preferred input feature type, while higher data availability benefits the combined use of grayscale and optical flow features. Our results demonstrate the potential of sensor fusion and deep learning techniques for multi-human tracking in indoor surveillance, although it is acknowledged that further studies are needed to confirm our findings.
In the context of Shared Autonomous Vehicles, the need to monitor the environment inside the car will be crucial. This article focuses on the application of deep learning algorithms to present a fusion monitoring solution which was three different algorithms: a violent action detection system, which recognizes violent behaviors between passengers, a violent object detection system, and a lost items detection system. Public datasets were used for object detection algorithms (COCO and TAO) to train state-of-the-art algorithms such as YOLOv5. For violent action detection, the MoLa InCar dataset was used to train on state-of-the-art algorithms such as I3D, R(2+1)D, SlowFast, TSN, and TSM. Finally, an embedded automotive solution was used to demonstrate that both methods are running in real-time.
With the evolution of technology associated with mobility and autonomy, Shared Autonomous Vehicles will be a reality. To ensure passenger safety, there is a need to create a monitoring system inside the vehicle capable of recognizing human actions. We introduce two datasets to train human action recognition inside the vehicle, focusing on violence detection. The InCar dataset tackles violent actions for in-car background which give us more realistic data. The InVicon dataset although doesn't have the realistic background as the InCar dataset can provide skeleton (3D body joints) data. This datasets were recorded with RGB, Depth, Thermal, Event-based, and Skeleton data. The resulting dataset contains 6 400 video samples and more than 3 million frames, collected from sixteen distinct subjects. The dataset contains 58 action classes, including violent and neutral (i.e., non-violent) activities.
Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a technique often proposed to train brain activity SR with promising results. However, some criticism has been raised due to the lack of evaluation, reliability, and validation of its learning effects. The current work evaluates the hypothesis that SR learning may be improved by priming the subject before NFT with guided mindfulness meditation (MM). The proposed framework was tested in a two-way parallel-group randomized controlled intervention with a single session alpha NFT, in a simplistic serious game design. Sixty-two healthy naïve subjects, aged between 18 and 43 years, were divided into MM priming and no-priming groups. Although both the EG and CG successfully attained the up-regulation of alpha rhythms (F(1,59) = 20.67, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.26), the EG showed a significantly enhanced ability (t(29) = 4.38, p < 0.001) to control brain activity, compared to the CG (t(29) = 1.18, p > 0.1). Furthermore, EG superior performance on NFT seems to be explained by the subject’s lack of awareness at pre-intervention, less vigour at post-intervention, increased task engagement, and a relaxed non-judgemental attitude towards the NFT tasks. This study is a preliminary validation of the proposed assisted priming framework, advancing some implicit and explicit metrics about its efficacy on NFT performance, and a promising tool for improving naïve “users” self-regulation ability.
About Me
Nuno Costa is a PhD student on the MIT Portugal Program.
Nuno Costa is a PhD student on the MIT Portugal Program.