Sharif Digital Repository

Emotions are one of the most important issues which affects daily life and activities. On the other hand, robots play an increasing role in human life and play a fundamental role in meeting our needs. One of these basic roles is empathy and verbal interaction between the robot and human. In this research, participant's emotions were stimulated in two ways: by using OASIS and GAPED image data sets and by instructing the participants to remind about their good or bad memories. During emotional stimulation, EEG signals have been recorded for the training and testing process. The preprocessing of training data includes filtering, removing bad parts of data, removing bad channels and... 

Skin, as the largest organ of the body and the first protector against external injuries, plays an important role in maintaining human health. Therefore, providing a method for complete treatment of skin lesions is very important. In the last century, tissue engineering approaches, with the introduction of skin scaffolds, have been instrumental in the process of skin tissue regeneration and treatment. The aim of the present study is to construct an optimal bilayer scaffold to mimic the two outer layer of the skin (epidermis and dermis). Besides, the effects of placenta extract on acceleration of wound healing was investigated by an in-vivo test. both layer of scaffold are porous hydrogels,... 

Using learning from demonstration approaches is one of the ways to teach a robot how to perform different skills. In classic methods of learning from demonstration, the subject should wear some sensors and devices which is and expensive way. But, with the progresses that have been made in the context of computer vision, it is possible now to achieve to the same results with less cost. Learning from observation is the approach that would be used in this project to do that. By using this method, when robot watches a video, it tries to understand the behavior of the subject and behave in the same way.The purpose of the project is that the robot learns some social (interactive) skills through... 

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder for which there is no definitive cure and it is increasing every year for people with this disorder. In the last decade, the use of virtual environment to improve the skills of people on the autism spectrum has increased. In this research, a semi-intelligent algorithm was designed for a virtual reality game that could provide a more appropriate step to the user according to the user's responses. Our focus is on designing games to strengthen the child in terms of shared attention and eye contact. In other words, we seek to create a virtual environment with the ability to intelligently adapt to interact with our user and turn it into a suitable coaching... 

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and during the last few years considerable measures have been taken to rehabilitate its patients. To prevent the disorder from deteriorating and to control its progress, patients have to undergo some therapy sessions that incorporate some mobility exercises e.g. walking, sitting up and down, and etc. Since transporting the patients to the clinical centers is too burdensome, growing attention is drawn towards telerehabilitation. To this end, DMRCINT has developed a telerehab system for PD patients. This system is an intelligent classifier that uses features of linear acceleration and angular velocity signals to detect the activity that... 

Nowadays children’s toys and educational stuff, have been enhanced by technology and they have found capabilities like intelligence. It is obvious that after the period of using smart devices such as phones and tablets, robots and smart robotic tools will be popular. On the other hand, children are willing to use such smart devices. Social robots are smart ones that interact with humans and are not necessarily humanoid. One of the social robots applications is for educational purposes. Many studies have shown that teaching by means of robots has good effects on learning. For example robots have been used for educating autistic children. Moreover, robots have been used for rehabilitation and... 

Social robots are a group of robots designed and built to interact with humans, so the ability to interact emotionally in these robots, especially in interaction with people with hearing and speech disorders, is essential because these people do not have an emotional state sound. Therefore, in this research, an emotional interaction system based on recognizing the user's emotional state from his facial state using deep learning algorithms as well as performing an appropriate emotional response on the robot's face has been designed and implemented on an expressive social robot. In order to design the emotional state recognition system, first, the best model was found on the large AffectNet... 

The usage of robots as our friends has been proliferated these days. Knowing that they are going to be used in ordinary houses, we should develop methods and algorithms in order to provide a situation for end-users to program their own robots for their desired tasks. Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) can play a crucial role in this field. In this study, we had taught a non-verbal communication method (pointing) to a robot utilizing LfD. The learning method used was TP-GMM1. The rationale to use this method was that it models all the degrees of freedom together, and we thought it might be an essential parameter to make a movement more natural and understandable which could be two vital... 

With the development of technology in the field of control, biomechanics and robotics, wearable robots have found many applications in the field of rehabilitation and empowerment. In the empowerment phase, due to the interaction of these robots with humans, it is necessary to manage the interaction forces between the robot and humans with the help of appropriate control methods. One of the applications of these robots is when a person wants to carry a heavy load attached to the structure of the robot and the robot should be able to transfer the force caused by this load to the ground. At this time, humans should not be exposed to this load and the relationship between the robot and humans... 

The most crucial physical component in human-robot interaction is the head of the robot, which may have the potential to interact via representing facial expressions. There are several different types of robotic heads. This thesis presents the design process and realization of a retro-projected social robotic head, “Taban”. Taban is a cost-effective portable robot with a lifelike robotic face which can produce different facial expressions, different 3D face animation avatars (ranging from different ages, races, and gender) with the help of rear-projector in its head to projects animations onto a translucent 3D printout mask. It has a neck system with two degrees of freedom, a camera in the... 

The purpose of this research is the design and fabrication of a mobile social robot for children with cancer. This robot is named Arash. Interaction with the robot can improve children's education, as well as their mental condition. Design and development of Arash robot project have been carried out in a number of M.Sc. projects. In the present study, it is specifically focused on three areas of activity:
1. Design and fabrication of the robot head (and the overall appearance of the robot)
2. Design and development of human-robot interactions
3. Social and educational interactions/interventions of the robot with children
In this study, with the cooperation of child... 

The statistics show that around 5% of the world's population suffers from deafness. For these people, the most comprehensive way of communicating with the world around them is using sign language. These facts will clarify the need for review in design practices, especially in designing user interfaces, in order to make technology usable for people with disabilities. The present study wants to design a sign language-based user interface for the RASA robot. The goal is to enable the robot to interact with deaf users. In the first step, a cognitive architecture developed, to enable the robot to interact by sign language in specific working conditions. The second step was the implementation of a... 

Over the years, The robots have entered the human community in addition to the factories and industrial centers, and a new branch in the field of robotics called social robots has been created. Such robots can become a personal companion for children and elderly people who accompany that person at home or outside. Social robots can even be used as a platform for health services or as a vendor in stores. The interaction of humans and robots in social robots and communicating with the audience is the main part of this series of robots. Human-robot interaction can be divided into three parts: visual, auditory and facial or body movements. Also, the behavior of a social robot must be as natural... 

In the present study, the thermal behavior of human teeth during laser radiation has been discussed. The high laser power, as well as its low emission, can allow deviations from the Fourier heat transfer model. To overcome this problem, the non- Fourier heat transfer method, dual phase lagged (DPL), has been used. Wisdom considered in this study to evaluate the thermal behavior of tooth. Using the finite volume method, the DPL equations are solved and the thermal response of the teeth is obtained during laser irradiation. The effect of delay times, which are the parameters of the DPL model and depart from the Fourier model, is fully demonstrated on the temperature behavior of the tooth, and... 

Exoskeleton robot is so useful because of the interaction with them and human and are used in rehabilitation and augmentation applications. These robots can be either passively or actively actuated. Human and robot interaction is an important issue involved with these robots. In this thesis, the interaction force reduction is considered leading to the transparency of a lower limb exoskeleton during switch between swing and stance phasees of walking. Achieving this goal, a robust Lyapunov based motion control method has been developed. The desired reference signals for motion control are generated using a direct force control approach. Robot accelerations are estimated by an observer to be... 

Musculoskeletal abnormalities affect joints and change their range of motion (RoM). Correcting these abnormalities thoroughly depends on the information related to the normal spine movement. Therefore, spine motion analysis can be used as an important tool to distinguish between healthy and patient individuals as well as to determine the intensity of such diseases. Additionally, existing biomechanical models need kinematics data in order to analyze spinal forces. The present study hence aims to measure 3D range of motion of thoracic and lumbar spine using inertial sensors. Their small size, portability, low weight, and relatively low cost make inertial sensors as indispensable tools in... 

Lateral Flow Immunoassay kits are one of the most important instrument in laboratories and houses for diagnosing diseases, hormones, food toxins and etc. fast, exactly and by low cost. Since one of the most expensive parts in the mentioned kits, is using antibodies in their construction, an attempt has been made in this project for descending usage of antibody and consequently final cost of these sensors besides keeping desired and necessary sensitivity of these diagnostic kits. For this purpose, first of all with the help of simulating flow’s behavior in Lattice-Boltzmann method, provisions has been made to predicting flow’s movement behavior in Nitrocellulose membrane, Based on its results... 

In recent years, computer haptics research area have gradually grown all around the world. It deals with displaying the rendered contact properties in a virtual environment to a human user while interaction to a haptic interface. In general, a haptic interface provides essential haptic feedback information of a remote environment to a human user. The human operator, as a part of computer haptic system, will usually make an interaction by the haptic interface in a real environment which is usually limited to the end-effector of the physical device. On the other hand, the virtual tool in the virtual environment will interact by the virtual based remote environment which is generated from the... 

The control approaches in Exoskeletons are different from Autonomous robot. Because the Exoskeletons are in connection and interaction with the user. On the other hand they can use the wearer’s abilities such as intelligence, sensory organs, self-control and etc. Therefore, one of the most important parts of exoskeletons control algorithms is its interaction with the user. This part should recognize the goal and purpose of the wearer such as stopping, walking start, change in stepping and direction and etc. properly. Utilizing these algorithms properly, one can reduce the muscle activities and energy consumption up to 20 percent [1]. This investigations demonstrate the importance of the... 

Natural intuitive human-robot interaction depends on how responsive a social robot can be to environmental information. Speaker localization is a prominent ability for communication and socialization that allows the robot to react to a speaker by turning its head towards it. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a robotic head, “Ava”, which turns toward the speaker in noisy environments. Ava is able to detect and enhance a speech activity and estimate the azimuth direction and vertical level of a speaker. The speech segments which are differentiated by a Speech Activity Detection system are processed to reduce noise levels. Then, by extracting the binaural features of two signals...