Since the golden era of automata (17th and 18th centuries), the development of mechanical dolls served as a mean to understand how the human brain is able of coordinating multiple degrees of freedom in order to play musical instruments. A particular interest was given to wind instruments as a research approach since this requires the understanding of human breathing mechanisms. Nowadays, different kinds of automated machines and humanoid robots have been developed to play wind instruments. In this chapter, we will detail some issues related to the development of humanoid robots and the challenges in their design, control and system integration for playing wind instruments.
This special issue deals with the emerging debate on roboethics, the human ethics applied to robotics. Is a specific ethic applied to robotics truly necessary? Or, conversely, are not the general principles of ethics adequate to answer many of the issues raised by our field's applications? In our opinion, and according to many roboticists and human scientists, many novel issues that emerge and many more that will show up in the immediate future, arising from the upcoming marketed robotics products, demand the development of new cultural and legal tools that can provide the crucial answers to the most sensitive questions
Ageing is becoming an increasingly major problem in European and Japanese societies. We have so far mainly focused on how to improve the eating experience for both frail elderly and caregivers by introducing and developing the eating aid robot, Bestic, made to get the food from plate to the mouth for frail elderly or person with disabilities. We expand the functionalities of Bestic to create food intake reports automatically so as to decrease the undernutrition among frail elderly and workload of caregivers through collecting data via a vision system connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) system. Since the computation capability of Bestic is very limited, computation offloading, in which resource intensive computational tasks are transferred from Bestic to an external cloud server, is proposed to solve Bestic’s resource limitation. In this paper, we proposed a Monte Carlo algorithm based heuristic computation offloading algorithm, to minimize the total overhead of all the Bestic users after we show that the target optimization problem is NP-hard in a theorem. Numeric results showed that the proposed algorithm is effective in terms of system-wide overhead.