Francisco Díez Martín

Medición de la legitimidad organizativa: el caso de las Sociedades de Garantía Recíproca

espanolEn la busqueda por comprender la supervivencia y el crecimiento de las organizaciones, la legitimidad juega un papel clave. Esta llega a convertirse en un factor tan importante como el capital, la tecnologia, el personal o las redes sociales, pues la aceptacion y deseabilidad de las actividades de una organizacion le permite acceder a los recursos necesarios para sobrevivir y crecer. Las organizaciones que demuestran mas credibilidad, conveniencia y adecuacion con los valores, normas y creencias de la sociedad son mas predecibles, fiables y equilibradas. Por ello, estas organizaciones encuentran mayores facilidades a la hora de conseguir clientes, entablar relaciones con proveedores y, en definitiva, incrementar el acceso a los recursos claves para el exito. En este sentido, las organizaciones con mayor legitimidad, disponen de un mayor acceso a la sociedad y sus recursos. Desde el punto de vista organizacional la legitimidad proporciona una base para la toma de decisiones diferente a otros medios racionales, pues las personas son influenciadas porque creen que las decisiones tomadas por otras personas u organizaciones legitimadas son correctas o apropiadas y deben ser seguidas. Aunque la teoria institucional identifica la legitimidad como un factor critico de exito que deben tener en cuenta todas las organizaciones, son escasas las investigaciones empiricas en este campo. Este hecho posiblemente se encuentra motivado por el problema que conlleva cuantificar el concepto de legitimidad. Pese a que algunos autores han establecidos medidas parciales de la legitimidad, ninguna investigacion ha sido capaz de establecer una medida de la legitimidad organizacional, observandola desde todas sus dimensiones (pragmatica, moral y cognitiva). Con esta investigacion intentamos dar un paso mas en el esfuerzo por establecer una metodologia capaz de medir la legitimidad organizacional. El estudio se ha llevado a cabo sobre el sector de las Sociedades de Garantia Reciproca (SGR) en Espana. Mediante el analisis multicriterio y, siguiendo el proceso analitico jerarquico (AHP), hemos conseguido evaluar la legitimidad de las SGR. Considerando la legitimidad como una variable continua, se ha estableciendo una clasificacion de las SGR segun su grado de legitimidad. Asimismo, se ha analizado la importancia relativa de las dimensiones que conforman la legitimidad en las SGR y establecido el perfil de legitimidad del sector. Los resultados de la investigacion han confirmado diferencias importantes entre los niveles de legitimidad de algunas SGR. EnglishLegitimacy plays a key role to understand why companies growth and survive. It becomes a factor as important as the social capital, technology, human resources or networks, because the acceptance and desirability of the organization activities allow them to get those necessary resources to survive and grow. Organizations who demonstrate more credibility, convenience and adjustment with the values, norms and beliefs of the society are more predictable, trustworthy and balanced. For that reason, these organizations find greater facilities to obtain customers, to establish relations with suppliers and to increase their access to key resources for success. In this sense, organizations with greater legitimacy, have a greater access to the society and their resources. From the organizational point of view, legitimacy provides a base for the decision making process. People are influenced because the think other legitimized people or organizations are correct or appropriate and must be followed. Although institutional theory identifies legitimacy like a critical factor for success which must be consider by organizations, in this field there is little empirical research. This fact come be possibly inspired by the problem of quantify the legitimacy concept. Although some authors have settled down partial measures of legitimacy, any research has been able to establish a measurement of the organizational legitimacy, observing it from all its dimensions (pragmatic, moral and cognitive). This research tried to take a step in the effort to establish a methodology able to measure the organizational legitimacy. The study has been carried out on the sector of the Mutual Guarantee Societies (MGS) in Spain. By means of the multicriteria analysis and, following the analytical hierarchic process (AHP), we have been able to evaluate the legitimacy of the MGS. Considering legitimacy like a continuous variable, we listed MGS according to its legitimacy degree. Also, we has been analyzed the relative importance of the dimensions that conform legitimacy in the MGS and established the legitimacy profile of the sector. Our results confirmed important differences between the levels of legitimacy of some MGS.

Robotherapy with Dementia Patients

Humanoids have increasingly become the focus of attention in robotics research in recent years, especially in service and personal assistance robotics. This paper presents the application developed for humanoid robots in the therapy of dementia patients as a cognitive stimulation tool. The behaviour of the robot during the therapy sessions is visually programmed in a session script that allows music to play, physical movements (dancing, exercises, etc.), speech synthesis and interaction with the human monitor. The application includes the control software on board the robot and some tools like the visual script generator or a monitor to supervise the robot behaviour during the sessions. The robot applications impact on the patients health has been studied. Experiments with real patients have been performed in collaboration with a centre of research in neurodegenerative diseases. Initial results show a slight or mild improvement in neuropsychiatric symptoms over other traditional therapy methods.

Localization of legged robots combining a fuzzy-Markov method and a population of extended Kalman filters

This paper presents a new approach to robot vision-based self-localization in dynamic and noisy environments for legged robots when efficiency is a strong requirement. The major contribution of this paper is the improvement of a Markovian method based on a fuzzy occupancy grid (FMK). Our proposal combines FMK with a population of Extended Kalman Filters, making the complete algorithm both robust and accurate while keeping its computational cost bounded. Two different strategies have been designed to combine both the methods. They have been tested in the RoboCup environment and quantitatively compared with other approaches in several experiments with the real robot.

A hybrid approach to fast and accurate localization for legged robots

This paper describes a hybrid approach to a fast and accurate localization method for legged robots based on Fuzzy-Markov (FM) and Extended Kalman Filters (EKF). Both FM and EKF techniques have been used in robot localization and exhibit different characteristics in terms of processing time, convergence, and accuracy. We propose a Fuzzy-Markov–Kalman (FM–EKF) localization method as a combined solution for a poor predictable platform such as Sony Aibo walking robots. The experimental results show the performance of EKF, FM, and FM-EKF in a localization task with simple movements, combined behaviors, and kidnapped situations. An overhead tracking system was adopted to provide a ground truth to verify the performance of the proposed method.

Comparison of Smart Visual Attention Mechanisms for Humanoid Robots

Cameras are one of the most relevant sensors in autonomous robots. One challenge with them is to manage the small field of view of regular cameras. A method of coping with this, similar to the attention systems in humans, is to use mobile cameras to cover all the robot surroundings and to perceive all the objects of interest to the robot tasks even if they do not lie in the same snapshot. A gaze control algorithm is then required that continuously selects where the camera should look. This paper presents three different covert attention mechanisms that have been designed and compared: one based on round-Robin sharing, another based on dynamic salience and one with fixed pattern camera movements. Several experiments have been performed with a humanoid robot in order to validate them and to give an objective comparison in the context of RoboCup, where the robots have several perceptive needs like localization and object tracking that must be satisfied and may not be fully compatible.

Portable autonomous walk calibration for 4-legged robots

In the present paper we describe an efficient and portable optimization method for calibrating the walk parameters of a quadruped robot, and its contribution for the robot control and localization. The locomotion of a legged robot presents not only the problem of maximizing the speed, but also the problem of obtaining a precise speed response, and achieving an acceptable odometry information. In this study we use a simulated annealing algorithm for calibrating different parametric sets for different speed ranges, with the goal of avoiding discontinuities. The results are applied to the robot AIBO in the RoboCup domain. Moreover, we outline the relevance of calibration to the control, showing the improvement obtained in odometry and, as a consequence, in robot localization.

Effective real-time visual object detection

Autonomous mobile robots equipped with visual perception aim at detecting objects towards intelligently acting in their environments. Such real-time vision processing continues to offer challenges in terms of getting the object detection algorithm to process images at the frame rate of live video. Our work contributes a novel algorithm that is capable of making use of all the frames, where each frame is efficiently processed as a “continuation” of the processing of the previous frames. From the 2D camera images as captured by the robot, our algorithm, Wave3D, maintains 3D hypotheses of the presence of the objects in the real 3D world relative to the robot. The algorithm does not ignore any new frame and continues its object detection on each frame by projecting the 3D hypotheses back into the 2D images to focus the object detection. We can view Wave3D as validating the 3D hypotheses in each of the images in the live video. Wave3D outperforms the static single-image classical approach in processing effort and detection accuracy, in particular for moving objects. In addition, the resulting reduced vision processing time translates into more computation available for task-related behaviors, as greatly needed in situated autonomous intelligent robot agents. We conduct targeted experiments using the humanoid NAO robot that illustrate the effectiveness of Wave3D.

Visual based localization for a legged robot

This paper presents a visual based localization mechanism for a legged robot in indoor office environments. Our proposal is a probabilistic approach which uses partially observable Markov decision processes. We use a precompiled topological map where natural landmarks like doors or ceiling lights are recognized by the robot using its on-board camera. Experiments have been conducted using the AIBO Sony robotic dog showing that it is able to deal with noisy sensors like vision and to approximate world models representing indoor office environments. The major contributions of this work is the use of an active vision as the main input and localization in not-engineered environments.

Quantitative analysis of security in distributed robotic frameworks

Abstract Robotic software frameworks simplify the development of robotic applications. The more powerful ones help to build such applications as a distributed collection of interoperating software nodes. The communications inside those robotic systems are amenable of being attacked and vulnerable to the security threats present on any networked system. With the robots increasingly entering in people’s daily lives, like autonomous cars, drones, etc. security on them is a central issue gaining attention. This paper studies several well known communication middleware used by robotic frameworks running on robots with regular computers, and their support for cybersecurity. It analyzes their performance when transmitting regular robotic data of different sizes, with or without security features, on several network settings. The experiments show that security, when available, does not significantly decrease the quality of the robotic data communication in terms of latency and packet loss rate.

Active Visual Perception for Humanoid Robots

Robots detect and keep track of relevant objects in their environment to accomplish some tasks. Many of them are equipped with mobile cameras as the main sensors, process the images and maintain an internal representation of the detected objects. We propose a novel active visual memory that moves the camera to detect objects in robots surroundings and tracks their positions. This visual memory is based on a combination of multi-modal filters that efficiently integrates partial information. The visual attention subsystem is distributed among the software components in charge of detecting relevant objects. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of this perception system in a real humanoid robot participating in the RoboCup SPL competition.