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In the process of trajectory optimization for robot manipulator, the path that is generated may deviate from the intended path because of the adjustment of trajectory parameters, if there is limitation of end-effector path in Cartesian space for specific tasks, this phenomenon is dangerous. This paper proposes a methodology that is based on the Pareto front to address this issue, and the methodology takes into account both the multi-objective optimization of robotic arm and the quality of end-effector path. Based on dung beetle optimizer, this research proposes improved non-dominated sorting dung beetle optimizer. This paper interpolates manipulator trajectory with quintic B-spline curves, achieves multi-objective trajectory optimization that simultaneously optimizes traveling time, energy consumption, and mean jerk, proposes a trajectory selection strategy that is based on Pareto solution set by introducing the concept of Fréchet distance, and the strategy enables the end-effector to approach the desired path in Cartesian space. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed methodology on the Sawyer robot manipulator.
The bipartite independence number of a graph $G$, denoted as $\tilde \alpha (G)$, is the minimal number $k$ such that there exist positive integers $a$ and $b$ with $a+b=k+1$ with the property that for any two disjoint sets $A,B\subseteq V(G)$ with $|A|=a$ and $|B|=b$, there is an edge between $A$ and $B$. McDiarmid and Yolov showed that if $\delta (G)\geq \tilde \alpha (G)$ then $G$ is Hamiltonian, extending the famous theorem of Dirac which states that if $\delta (G)\geq |G|/2$ then $G$ is Hamiltonian. In 1973, Bondy showed that, unless $G$ is a complete bipartite graph, Dirac’s Hamiltonicity condition also implies pancyclicity, i.e., existence of cycles of all the lengths from $3$ up to $n$. In this paper, we show that $\delta (G)\geq \tilde \alpha (G)$ implies that $G$ is pancyclic or that $G=K_{\frac{n}{2},\frac{n}{2}}$, thus extending the result of McDiarmid and Yolov, and generalizing the classic theorem of Bondy.
Multibody dynamics methodologies have been fundamental tools utilized to model and simulate robotic systems that experience contact conditions with the surrounding environment, such as in the case of feet and ground interactions. In addressing such problems, it is of paramount importance to accurately and efficiently handle the large body displacement associated with locomotion of robots, as well as the dynamic response related to contact-impact events. Thus, a generic computational approach, based on the Newton–Euler formulation, to represent the gross motion of robotic systems, is revisited in this work. The main kinematic and dynamic features, necessary to obtain the equations of motion, are discussed. A numerical procedure suitable to solve the equations of motion is also presented. The problem of modeling contacts in dynamical systems involves two main tasks, namely, the contact detection and the contact resolution, which take into account for the kinematics and dynamics of the contacting bodies, constituting the general framework for the process of modeling and simulating complex contact scenarios. In order to properly model the contact interactions, the contact kinematic properties are established based on the geometry of contacting bodies, which allow to perform the contact detection task. The contact dynamics is represented by continuous contact force models, both in terms of normal and tangential contact directions. Finally, the presented formulations are demonstrated by the application to several robotics systems that involve contact and impact events with surrounding environment. Special emphasis is put on the systems’ dynamic behavior, in terms of performance and stability.
Since its establishment in 2014, Data for Policy (https://dataforpolicy.org) has emerged as a prominent global community promoting interdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaborations in the realm of data-driven innovation for governance and policymaking. This report presents an overview of the community’s evolution from 2014 to 2023 and introduces its six-area framework, which provides a comprehensive mapping of the data for policy research landscape. The framework is based on extensive consultations with key stakeholders involved in the international committees of the annual Data for Policy conference series and the open-access journal Data & Policy (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-and-policy), published by Cambridge University Press. By presenting this inclusive framework, along with the guiding principles and future outlook for the community, this report serves as a vital foundation for continued research and innovation in the field of data for policy.
Abstract This chapter documents how children negotiated with the gender-based norms in engaging with digital technologies. They used two negotiation strategies to navigate the gender-constraints imposed on their digital engagements: 1) producing glamour and 2) enacting and experiencing privacy. The chapter begins with a description of the first thematic category: glamour. Poor children in Indian slums perceived digital technologies as channels for fulfilling their aspirations, especially upward class mobility. To unpack the second negotiation strategy i.e., privacy, I complicate the dominant understanding of digital users’ right to privacy by demonstrating that privacy is a gendered, classed, and culturally distinct concept. Children's definition and practice of digital privacy bore witness to the influence of patriarchy and misogyny dominant in their communities.
Keywords: glamour, digital privacy, upward class mobility, surveillance, public, confession
Manufacturing Online Identities
Thrift (2008) defines glamour as the industrial production of a sense of fascination with digital technologies. The fascination for digital technologies is tied to the discourse that digital technologies can revolutionise living conditions and alter the material realities of the users. Similarly, Gundle and Castelli (2006) define glamour as an outcome of modernist thought, arguing that the concept has antecedents in capitalist logic. I extend this conceptualisation and propose that glamour allows users to compensate for the “lack” in their lives resulting from the socio-economic and cultural constraints they face. The glamour of digital technologies grants the users liminal access to experiences they aspire to participate in, thus making them increasingly aware of the existing constraints and scarcity in their material worlds. I have categorised children's perception of the glamour of digital technologies under two themes. First, children believed they would experience upward social mobility through the online identities and networks they cultivated. In other words, children used digital technologies to get a glimpse into middle- and upper-class lives. Still, they could not translate these virtual experiences into material reality. Second, children used digital technologies to create glamorous online profiles and networks mimicking the realities of middle- and high-income people. Though children used digital technologies to give others an illusion of their glamour, the glamour was manufactured online and rarely helped them acquire upward class mobility.
Abstract This chapter documents how poor children in the slums of India used digital technologies as proxy sites for enacting their religious identities. Enactments on digital platforms seldom translated into children performing their digitally mediated religious ideas/practices in physical spaces. Using digital technologies as proxy sites to enact their religious identities was influenced by children's desire to experience a sense of belongingness with their community. Children chose to demonise the religious other in closed/covert online spaces. They continued collaborating and co-existing with the religious other in material sites for economic and social benefits. Children practised jugaad as they simultaneously reinforced and challenged/circumvented the religious norms dominant in their communities for personal desires, financial motivations, and other social benefits.
Keywords: proxy sites, Hindu, Muslim, social media, collective aggression, community building
Children's religious identities influence the meanings and functions they ascribe to digital technologies. This chapter traces the continuities and disjunctures in children's enactments of their religious identities both in online spaces and material contexts. Hindu and Muslim children in Azad Nagar, Munnekollal, and Seemapuri enacted their religious identities online and in physical and material sites. My goal was threefold: a) exploring the connections between children's religious enactments and the public discourses on religion and politics in their communities, b) understanding how children reflected on the similarities and differences in their enactments of religious identities on/offline, and c) documenting how children deliberately used digital technologies as proxy sites to enact the facets of their religious identities they could not perform in physical sites and offline interactions with other people from their neighbourhoods.
I relied on critical ethnography to centre my analysis on the worldviews of the children and their communities, the local epistemologies related to religious identities and the process of community-building, and the realities relevant to the class locations the participants inhabited. Borrowing from the literature on critical ethnographic commitment (Banks & Gingrich, 2006; Boromisza-Habashi, 2013; Hervik, 2019), I present children's experiences of using digital technologies to enact their religious identities. This approach requires that I appreciate the nuances and complexities inherent in human experiences without endorsing or dismissing children's views and emotions. According to the traditions of critical ethnography, my analysis moves between different levels of influence. It reiterates the need to use inductive reasoning and comparison (van der Veer, 2016) to study the macro structures of power and the micro realities of lived experiences.
Consider a locally cartesian closed category with an object $\mathbb{I}$ and a class of trivial fibrations, which admit sections and are stable under pushforward and retract as arrows. Define the fibrations to be those maps whose Leibniz exponential with the generic point of $\mathbb{I}$ defines a trivial fibration. Then the fibrations are also closed under pushforward.
Abstract In this chapter, I question the common assumptions and dominant discussions on poor children's digital lives. Popular narratives on poor children in global South countries emphasise that the proliferation of digital technologies can tackle poverty, discrimination, and other social inequities. These narratives embed neoliberal logic and argue that children are either victims of digital technologies and need protection or are self-motivated to use these technologies for empowerment and development purposes. Poor children's engagements with digital technologies exceed binary categories of analysis such as resistance–oppression and agency–subjection. Contrary to these dominant explanations, the chapter makes a case that poor children in India are globally oriented, locally grounded, exploitative and exploited, ambitious and leisure-driven, creative and innovative.
Keywords:jugaad, poverty of resources, digital leisure, resilience, global South, India
More than eight million children live in low-income neighbourhoods in India, with a monthly family income of ten dollars. Children in these urban sprawls have acquired access to affordable digital technologies, including smartphones, laptops, personal computers, and data packages. They labour long hours every day to earn daily wages—as domestic workers, waitpersons, delivery persons, garbage collectors, and street hawkers. Even still, they spend a large portion of their limited time and meagre income on their smartphones, scrolling through social media, chatting with their friends, gossiping about relatives, surveilling their neighbours, and cultivating connections (Arora, 2019; Rangaswamy & Nair, 2010).
Unbeknownst to the quotidian digital experiences of poor children and people, popular narratives explore the possibility of tackling poverty, discrimination, and other social inequities through digital technologies. Developmental agencies, government policies, not-for-profit organisations, and corporate offers and services in low-income settlements in India embed the assumption that digital access is a great leveller. It is not a stretch to argue that different organisations working in low-income settlements in India adopt the conservative definition of development promoted by research in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). For a long time, research on the role of ICTs in resource-constrained contexts of the global South has continued to use a socio-economic framework for the analysis of development goals (Burrell and Anderson, 2009) within which the functions, serviceability, and mobilisation of ICTs are limited to a traditional, scientific and West-focused understanding of development and progress. Scholarship, state programmes and policies, and corporate offerings promoting a conservative and neoliberal understanding of ICT for development (ICT4D) are thus designed to impact entire communities/ populations through ICT interventions.
Abstract This chapter presents ethnographic narratives highlighting how children's experience with caste-based discrimination informs their quotidian digital practices—how they present themselves online, how they use social media, for what purposes, and why and when they choose to be silent or invisible. I debunk the neoliberal idea of development based on the assumption that access to new technologies will help Dalit-Bahujan children overcome caste-based inequities and historical systems of discrimination. Children used a multi-modal and non-resistive approach to conceal their caste identity and avoid discrimination online. The conclusion expounds that the strategies of negotiation children used in their digital encounters to engage with their caste identities reflect the scope of jugaad as a selfdesigned tactical approach to navigating constraints.
In 2018, I met Ishu, a 17-year-old girl from Azad Nagar. Ishu worked as a domestic helper in a middle-class home in Andheri West, Mumbai. She worked full-time at Mr and Mrs Purohit's house. She washed utensils, did laundry, mopped the floors, and cooked for the family. As a part of my ethnographic fieldwork, I sought Mr and Mrs Purohit's permission to hang out with Ishu at their home. Ishu insisted that her employers were generous with her. She was allowed to eat food from their kitchen, use a fan while cooking and doing other domestic chores, and was also allowed paid leave of three days every month.
Ishu was given a separate set of utensils for her meals at her employer's house. She was not supposed to wash her utensils with those the family members used. She was also expected to store these utensils in a separate cabinet in the kitchen. Ishu was not allowed to switch on the television, listen to the radio, or use tube lights during the day. She was allowed to use a fan only during unbearably hot weather. What was particularly striking in her interaction with Mr and Mrs Purohit was the cleanliness protocol she followed every time she used any technological device in their house. For instance, after using Mrs Purohit's mobile phone to call and inform her mother that she would be working late, Ishu wiped the mobile phone with a kitchen towel before handing it back to Mrs Purohit. Similarly, whenever she used the television or AC remote control, she had to wipe it down using sanitiser and a piece of cloth.
In this paper, an $\textrm{H}_{{\infty }}$ dynamic output feedback controller is experimentally implemented for the position regulation of a fully actuated tilted-rotor octocopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to improve wind disturbance rejection during station-keeping. To apply the lateral forces, besides the standard tilt-to-translate (attitude-thrust) movement, tilted-rotor UAVs can generate vectored (horizontal) thrust. Vectored-thrust is high-bandwidth but saturation-constrained, while attitude-thrust generates larger forces with lower bandwidth. For the first time, this paper emphasizes the frequency-dependent allocation of weighting matrices in $\textrm{H}_{{\infty }}$ control design based on the physical capabilities of the fully actuated UAV (vectored-thrust and attitude-thrust). A dynamic model of the tilted-rotor octocopter, including aerodynamic effects and rotor dynamics, is presented to design the controller. The proposed $\textrm{H}_{{\infty }}$ controller solves the frequency-dependent actuator allocation problem by augmenting the dynamic model with weighting transfer functions. This novel frequency-dependent allocation utilizes the attitude-thrust for low-frequency disturbances and vectored-thrust for high-frequency disturbances, which exploits the maximum potential of the fully actuated UAV. Several wind tunnel experiments are conducted to validate the model and wind disturbance rejection performance, and the results are compared to the baseline PX4 Autopilot controller on both the tilted-rotor and a planar octocopter. The $\textrm{H}_{{\infty }}$controller is shown to reduce station-keeping error by up to 50% for an actuator usage 25% higher in free-flight tests.
Abstract This chapter concludes that popular narratives sometimes identify poor children as vulnerable groups who need help and protection to negotiate contemporary caste, class, gender, and religious inequities. Simultaneously, these children are labelled lazy—deviants who use hard-won access to digital technologies for entertainment, socialising, and other nonproductive purposes. This messiness in the popular narratives describing children's digital engagements in the three low-income urban settlements is convenient for governments, corporations, and the market-driven society. Such notional messiness allows the macro institutions of power in the country to reduce poor children into a market segment driven by the neoliberal and profit logic. This chapter provides a glimpse into the existing state of digital dystopia in the urban sprawls of India.
Keywords: digital dystopia, digital leisure, entertainment, market segment, neoliberal logic, Indian slums
This book has highlighted the messiness intrinsic to the popular narratives of poor children from low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Academic research, government discourse, policies, and media corporations have generated these popular narratives. These popular narratives identify the poor children in Azad Nagar, Munnekollal, and Seemapuri as victims—relying on the protection and opportunities afforded by digital technologies. These narratives burden the already vulnerable children with the task of challenging historical and deep-rooted systems of oppression in their communities. Popular narratives bracket the digital engagements of children from marginalised groups and low-income settlements to meet the expectations of pre-tailored technological interventions designed by macro structures of power. Also, several academic studies have analysed children's digital engagements using binary categories such as risk versus protection and empowerment versus oppression. A review of academic literature, state-led policies and programmes, available media products and services, and popular narratives reveals that poor children are sometimes identified as vulnerable groups who need help and protection to negotiate contemporary inequities of caste, class, gender, and religion. Simultaneously, these children are labelled deviants who neither work hard nor use their access to digital technologies for developmental purposes.
This messiness in the popular narratives describing children's engagements with digital technologies in the three low-income urban settlements is convenient for neoliberal and macro institutions of power for two reasons. First, such notional messiness allows the macro institutions to convert poor children into a market segment and target audience to promote the businesses of giant media corporations.
Abstract The chapter examines the Digital India initiative rolled out by the Government of India in 2015. The proliferation of the Digital India initiative in the slums of India highlights the ubiquity of the development/empowerment paradigm at the heart of tech projects and programmes designed for poor and marginalised communities. The initiative serves as a placeholder for understanding the different processes, mentalities, and actions that bracket poor children's complex aspirations and desires and consider them empowered neoliberal subjects. The chapter makes a case that children sometimes marshal their digital practices to align with the dominant expectation to function and aspire like a neoliberal subject. However, they continue to ascribe novel meanings to their digital engagements in covert and implicit ways.
Keywords: Digital India, Reliance Jio, working children, prosumer, privatised risk, jugaad
In this chapter, I unpack the connections between technology-centred narratives sponsored by both states/governments and corporations in India and the resulting policies, market conditions, and children's digital experiences in the country. Accordingly, I have examined the role of two macro institutions of power: the Indian state and telecommunication companies, in reinforcing the neoliberal and technology-centred narratives among children in low-income settlements of Azad Nagar, Munnekolala, and Seemapuri. The nexus of state, companies, and users constitutes the popular narratives on digital technologies and their role in these low-income settlements. To study this nexus, I trace the implications of two significant initiatives related to digital technologies in India—the launch of the Digital India initiative and Reliance Jio—on the lives of children and residents from poor neighbourhoods in Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai.
As discussed in the introduction, children's engagements with digital technologies are influenced by a broader assemblage of social identities, cultural conditions, and existing power structures in their communities. I will demonstrate how macro structures of power defining the role of digital technologies in societies dovetail into children's everyday experiences with digital technologies. I identify government discourse, the role of telecom corporations, large not-for-profit organisations working on digital inclusion and equity issues, and the existing national and local policies related to children's access to digital technologies, especially for educational and development purposes, as collectively constituting the macro structures of power. These power relations coalesce with children's social identities, cultural norms, and quotidian digital practices, giving rise to popular narratives about digital technologies at the community and national levels.
Developing an artificial design agent that mimics human design behaviors through the integration of heuristics is pivotal for various purposes, including advancing design automation, fostering human-AI collaboration, and enhancing design education. However, this endeavor necessitates abundant behavioral data from human designers, posing a challenge due to data scarcity for many design problems. One potential solution lies in transferring learned design knowledge from one problem domain to another. This article aims to gather empirical evidence and computationally evaluate the transferability of design knowledge represented at a high level of abstraction across different design problems. Initially, a design agent grounded in reinforcement learning (RL) is developed to emulate human design behaviors. A data-driven reward mechanism, informed by the Markov chain model, is introduced to reinforce prominent sequential design patterns. Subsequently, the design agent transfers the acquired knowledge from a source task to a target task using a problem-agnostic high-level representation. Through a case study involving two solar system designs, one dataset trains the design agent to mimic human behaviors, while another evaluates the transferability of these learned behaviors to a distinct problem. Results demonstrate that the RL-based agent outperforms a baseline model utilizing the first-order Markov chain model in both the source task without knowledge transfer and the target task with knowledge transfer. However, the model’s performance is comparatively lower in predicting the decisions of low-performing designers, suggesting caution in its application, as it may yield unsatisfactory results when mimicking such behaviors.
This research offers an adaptive model-based methodology for autonomous control of 3-RRR spherical parallel manipulator (RSPM) based on a novel modeling framework. RSPM is an overconstrained parallel mechanism that has a variety of applications in medical procedures such as ankle rehabilitation because of its precision and accuracy. However, obtaining a complete explicit dynamic model of these mechanisms for tracking purposes has been a problematic challenge due to their inherent singularities, coupling effects of the limbs, and redundant constraints imposed by the intermediate joints. This paper presents a novel algorithm to obtain the analytical kinematic solutions of RSPMs based on the closed-loop vector method, which includes constraint analysis. By incorporating constrained kinematics into the dynamic model, a comprehensive explicit dynamic solution of the non-overconstrained version 3-RCC of RSPM is developed in task space, based on screw theory and the linear homogeneous property of algebraic equations on the manipulator twist. Based on the proposed computational framework, a robust self-tuning backstepping control (STBC) strategy is applied to the robot to overcome the effect of external disturbances and time-varying uncertainties. Furthermore, an observer-based compensation (OBC) method is presented for dealing with the nonlinear hysteresis loops of the ankle during trajectory tracking purposes. The closed-loop stability of the whole system including STBC and OBC is theoretically performed by Lyapunov methods. The proposed methodologies are validated by realistic co-simulations in different scenarios. For instant, in the presence of external disturbances, the maximum tracking error norm of STBC is 37.5% less than the sliding mode approach.
Collecting network data directly from network members can be challenging. One alternative involves inferring a network from observed groups, for example, inferring a network of scientific collaboration from researchers’ observed paper authorships. In this paper, I explore when an unobserved undirected network of interest can accurately be inferred from observed groups. The analysis uses simulations to experimentally manipulate the structure of the unobserved network to be inferred, the number of groups observed, the extent to which the observed groups correspond to cliques in the unobserved network, and the method used to draw inferences. I find that when a small number of groups are observed, an unobserved network can be accurately inferred using a simple unweighted two-mode projection, provided that each group’s membership closely corresponds to a clique in the unobserved network. In contrast, when a large number of groups are observed, an unobserved network can be accurately inferred using a statistical backbone extraction model, even if the groups’ memberships are mostly random. These findings offer guidance for researchers seeking to indirectly measure a network of interest using observations of groups.