Ali Gürcan Özkil

Service robots for hospitals: A case study of transportation tasks in a hospital

In this paper, the need for automated transportation systems for hospitals is investigated. Among other alternatives, mobile robots stand out as the most prominent means of automation of transportation tasks in hospitals. Existing transportation routines of a hospital are analyzed in order to verify the need for automation and identify possible areas of improvement. The analysis shows that most of the existing transportation is carried out manually, and hospitals can greatly benefit from automated transportation. Based on the results of the analysis, three alternatives are derived for implementing mobile service robots for transportation tasks in hospitals.

Mapping of multi-floor buildings: A barometric approach

This paper presents a new method for mapping multi-floor buildings. The method combines laser range sensor for metric mapping and barometric pressure sensor for detecting floor transitions and map segmentation. We exploit the fact that the barometric pressure is a function of the elevation, and it varies between different floors. The method is tested with a real robot in a typical indoor environment, and the results show that physically consistent multi5floor representations are achievable.

Pervasive assistive technology for people with dementia: a UCD case

Smart mobile and wearable technology offers exciting opportunities to support people with dementia (PwD). Its ubiquity and popularity could even benefit user adoption – a great challenge for assistive technology (AT) for PwD that calls for user-centred design (UCD) methods. This study describes a user-centred approach to developing and testing AT based on off-the-shelf pervasive technologies. A prototype is created by combining a smartphone, smartwatch and various applications to offer six support features. This is tested among five end-users (PwD) and their caregivers. Controlled usability testing was followed by field testing in a real-world context. Data is gathered from video recordings, interaction logs, system usability scale questionnaires, logbooks, application usage logs and interviews structured on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model. The data is analysed to evaluate usability, usefulness and user acceptance. Results show some promise for user adoption, but highlight challenges to be overcome, emphasising personalisation and familiarity as key considerations. The complete findings regarding usability issues, usefulness of support features and four identified adoption profiles are used to provide a set of recommendations for practitioners and further research. These contribute toward UCD practices for improved smart, pervasive AT for dementia.

Kansei Engineering and Web Site Design

Capturing users’ needs is critical in web site design. However, a lot of attention has been paid to enhance the functionality and usability, whereas much less consideration has been given to satisfy the emotional needs of users, which is also important to a successful design. This paper explores a methodology based on Kansei Engineering, which was significant used in product and industrial design but not quite been adopted in the IT field, in order to discover implicit emotional needs of users toward web site and transform them into design details. Survey, interview techniques and statistical methods were performed in this paper. A prototype web site was developed based on the Kansei study results integrated with technical expertise and practical considerations. The results showed that the Kansei Engineering methodology, in this paper, played a significant role in web site design in terms of satisfying the emotional needs of users.Copyright

Practical indoor mobile robot navigation using hybrid maps

This paper presents a practical navigation scheme for indoor mobile robots using hybrid maps. The method makes use of metric maps for local navigation and a topological map for global path planning. Metric maps are generated as 2D occupancy grids by a range sensor to represent local information about partial areas. The global topological map is used to indicate the connectivity of the ‘places-of-interests’ in the environment and the interconnectivity of the local maps. Visual tags on the ceiling to be detected by the robot provide valuable information and contribute to reliable localization. The navigation scheme based on the hybrid metric-topological maps is scalable and adaptable since new local maps can be easily added to the global topology, and the method can be deployed with minimum amount of modification if new areas are to be explored. The method is implemented successfully on a physical robot and evaluated in a hospital environment.

Makerspaces in Engineering Education: A Case Study

The recent years have witnessed a new generation of Makers working with new ways of knowledge generation for creation and sharing of digital and physical products. While this development has started within collaborative and grass roots organised networks; educational institutions have also embraced it by opening makerspaces and adopting elements of the Maker Movement in their offerings. This paper investigates how university driven makerspaces can affect engineering design and product development education trough a case study. We provide our findings based on interviews and data collected from educators, students the administrative and workshop staff of the makerspace. The findings are used to outline the challenges in incorporating the offerings of makerspaces. By discussing these challenges we identify opportunities for turning university makerspaces into innovation hubs and platforms that can support engineering design education. INTRODUCTION The recent years has witnessed the rise of the Maker Movement and Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and FabLabs. This new generation of Makers collaborate through loosely coupled networks and explore new ways of knowledge generation on creation and sharing of digital and physical products. The concept of makerspaces stems from grassroot movements; they are usually community-driven, and they provide facilities and means for (mostly digital) manufacturing to individuals. Recently, a new class of ‘institutionalised’ makerspaces have also been emerging, which are established by the industry, municipalities, and educational institutions to be a part of their innovation ecosystem. Makerspaces provide alternative learning environments, and support project and problem based learning. Especially, universities offering technical programs have embraced the idea of opening makerspaces in their own facilities, to support project based courses and student innovation activities. Furthermore, there are strong correlations between the core elements of engineering design education and the offerings of makerspaces, such as rapid prototyping tools, multi-disciplinary approaches to knowledge generation and creativity. A number of university makerspaces has opened in the past few years, with broad range of value propositions. While these places provide relevant offerings, and are being used -often indirectlyfor design education, their effect on both educators and students are unknown. In this regard, this paper aims to better understand: -Why have technical universities adapted the principle of FabLabs and Makerspaces as part of their educational offerings? -How does the adaption of FabLabs and Makerspaces affect engineering education?

A Serious Game: Assessing Teaching and Learning in a Mechatronics Course

This paper presents a game that is developed to help the assessment of teaching and learning activities in a mechatronics course. The game is played with a mobile phone and it follows the dynamics of a ‘treasure hunt’ where participants follow a route and answer a series of questions that are encrypted in 2D barcodes. Participants interact with the game through a website; which allows to record various types of information related to the gameplay. In addition to gamifying the learning experience for students, the game allows the teacher to quantitatively assess the progression of the students and identify the topics that are challenging to comprehend.Copyright

Automatically Annotated Mapping for Indoor Mobile Robot Applications

This paper presents a new and practical method for mapping and annotating indoor environments for mobile robot use. The method makes use of 2D occupancy grid maps for metric representation, and topology maps to indicate the connectivity of the ‘places-of-interests’ in the environment. Novel use of 2D visual tags allows encoding information physically at places-of-interest. Moreover, using physical characteristics of the visual tags (i.e. paper size) is exploited to recover relative poses of the tags in the environment using a simple camera. This method extends tag encoding to simultaneous localization and mapping in topology space, and fuses camera and robot pose estimations to build an automatically annotated global topo-metric map. It is developed as a framework for a hospital service robot and tested in a real hospital. Experiments show that the method is capable of producing globally consistent, automatically annotated hybrid metric-topological maps that is needed by mobile service robots.Copyright

Genetically generated double-level fuzzy controller with a fuzzy adjustment strategy

This paper describes the use of a genetic algorithm (GA) in tuning a double-level modular fuzzy logic controller (DLMFLC), which can expand its control working zone to a larger spectrum than a single-level FLC. The first-level FLCs are tuned by a GA so that the input parameters of their membership functions and fuzzy rules are optimized according to their individual working zones. The second-level FLC is then used to adjust contributions of the first-level FLCs to the final output signal of the whole controller, i.e., DLMFLC, so that it can function in a wider spectrum covering all individual working zones of the first-level FLCs. The second-level FLC is again optimized by a GA. An inverted pendulum system (IPS) is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.