Cristina Urdiales

• MSc (UPM) PhD (UMA) PhD (UPC)
• Professor (Full) at University of Malaga

Contribución para el debate sobre uso y abuso de las herramientas digitales en educación patrimonial.

Este trabajo presenta un sistema basado en visión que utiliza redes neuronales para la estimación de poses humanas en 3D. La solución desarrollada identifica en el sujeto analizado 18 "puntos clave" o keypoints mediante cuatro cámaras RGB calibradas. La utilización de múltiples cámaras permite superar problemas inherentes al uso de una sola cámara...

Introduction: The formation of bacterial biofilms on knee arthroplasty implants can have catastrophic consequences. The aim of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of the bioelectric effect in the elimination of bacterial biofilms on cultivated knee arthroplasty implants. Methods: A novel device was designed to deliver a bioelectric effect o...

The goal of using a rollator is to provide physical stability, support, and increase independence while walking or performing daily activities. The decision to use a rollator is often made in consultation with healthcare professionals, who assess the individual’s mobility limitations and recommend the appropriate assistive device. Rollators can be...

Stability loss may lead to serious injury. Fall risk is often assessed using wearable sensors and/or external motion capture devices. However, these approaches may not be valid for all environments. As rollators are widely used to improve stability and provide physical support, in this work we propose a stability assessment method to proactively pr...

In assisted ambulation, the user’s psychological comfort has a significant impact not only on acceptability of mobility aids but also on overall gait performance. Specifically, in the case of rollators, negative states such as distress may result in balance loss, inefficient manoeuvres, and an increased risk of falling. This paper presents a pilot...

Despite the major interest in the field of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) in recent years, not much work has been presented on physical HRI (pHRI), especially for robot-initiated contact. Although pHRI is a key skill in areas like assistive or rescue robots, advances are limited by hard constraints in safety and compliance that require specific hard...

Mobility loss has a major impact on autonomy. Smart rollators have been proposed to enhance human abilities when conventional devices are not enough. Many human–robot interaction systems have been proposed in the last decade in this area. Comparative analysis shows that mechanical issues aside, they mainly differ in first, equipped sensors and actu...

Physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) is an essential skill for robots expected to work with humans, such as assistive or rescue robots. However, due to hard safety and compliance constraints, pHRI is still underdeveloped in practice. Tactile sensing is vital for pHRI, as constant occlusions while grasping make it hard to rely on vision or range...

Nowadays, the ratio of elderly people per caregiver is increasing, and the statistics confirm that this trend will continue for decades. Healthcare systems need to change to support this unbalance. The have to move to enhanced, value-added and cost-effective services to patients, professionals and caregivers. Industry is already involved in this pr...

Rollators are widely used in clinical rehabilitation for gait assessment, but gait analysis usually requires a great deal of expertise and focus from medical staff. Smart rollators can capture gait parameters autonomously while avoiding complex setups. However, commercial smart rollators, as closed systems, can not be modified; plus, they are often...

Background: Supervised machine learning models in artificial intelligence (AI) have been increasingly used to predict different types of events. However, their use in orthopaedic surgery has been limited. Hypothesis: It was hypothesized that supervised learning techniques could be used to build a mathematical model to predict primary anterior cr...

Nowadays, many R&I institutions are presently implementing mechanisms to measure and rate their scientific production so as to comply with current legislation and to support research management and decision making. In many cases, they rely on the implementation of current research information systems (CRIS). This is a challenging task that often re...

Efficient algorithm integration is a key issue in aerial robotics. However, only a few integration solutions rely on a cognitive approach. Cognitive approaches break down complex problems into independent units that may deal with progressively lower-level data interfaces, all the way down to sensors and actuators. A cognitive architecture defines i...

In physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI), forces exerted by humans need to be estimated to accommodate robot commands to human constraints, preferences, and needs. This paper presents a method for the estimation of the interaction forces between a human and a robot using a gripper with proprioceptive sensing. Specifically, we measure forces exert...

Persons with disabilities often rely on assistive devices to carry on their Activities of Daily Living. Deploying sensors on these devices may provide continuous valuable knowledge on their state and condition. Canes are among the most frequently used assistive devices, regularly employed for ambulation by persons with pain on lower limbs and also...

Mobility is a fundamental requirement for a healthy, active lifestyle. Gait analysis is widely acknowledged as a clinically useful tool for identifying problems with mobility, as identifying abnormalities within the gait profile is essential to correct them via training, drugs, or surgical intervention. However, continuous gait analysis is difficul...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a relatively new technology. Their application can often involve complex and unseen problems. For instance, they can work in a cooperative-based environment under the supervision of a ground station to speed up critical decision-making processes. However, the amount of information exchanged among the aircraft and...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a relatively new technology. Their application can often involve complex and unseen problems. For instance, they can work in a cooperative-based environment under the supervision of a ground station to speed up critical decision-making processes. However, the amount of information exchanged among the aircraft and...

In the last years, there has been an increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in video surveillance applications due to reduced risks to human life. In autonomous systems, algorithms are used for extracting important information from images and other sensor in order to reach the goals of the task. The performance of such algorithms ca...

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles applications have increased in the last decades due to their economic and technical feasibility. In this sense, several tasks require online objects tracking onboard of the vehicle as well as the knowledge of the object position in the real-world. An example of such task is the video surveillance with human activity rec...

Intelligent Transportation Systems are expected to contribute to reduce vehicle emissions. Solutions include user behavior changes, which are typically vehicle sharing programs and driving habits changes. To change driving habits, people need personalized feedback on their vehicle emissions in the routes they complete. In this work, we present a sm...

Shared control is a strategy used in assistive platforms to combine human and robot orders to achieve a goal. Collaborative control is a specific shared control approach, in which user’s and robot’s commands are merged into an emergent one in a continuous way. Robot commands tend to improve efficiency and safety. However, sometimes, assistance can...

The advanced use and the evolution of technologies regarding autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) have increased the availability of information and resources to perceive the environment, allowing its application in various activities, such as inspection and military. However, the intelligence level of these kind of systems needs to be improved...

Biologically inspired design consists in the creation of technological systems using as starting or inspirational point biological systems. Indeed, it has been used widely in robotics in different areas, such as mechanics, coordination or navigation. For example, in robot navigation, biomimetic algorithms can be specially useful in certain circumst...

Patient condition during rehabilitation has been traditionally assessed using clinical scales. These scales typically require the patient and/or the clinician to rate a number of condition related items to obtain a final score. This is a timeconsuming task, specially if a large number of patients is involved. Furthermore, during rehabilitation, use...

Some approaches to intelligence state that the brain works as a memory system which stores experiences to reflect the structure of the world in a hierarchical, organized way. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is well suited to test this view. In this work we propose a CBR based learning methodology to build a set of nested behaviors in a bottom up archit...

Autonomous mobile nodes in mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN) allow self-deployment and self-healing. In both cases, the goals are: (i) to achieve adequate coverage; and (ii) to extend network life. In dynamic environments, nodes may use reactive algorithms so that each node locally decides when and where to move. This paper presents a behavior...

Gait analysis can provide valuable information on a person’s condition and rehabilitation progress. Gait is typically captured using external equipment and/or wearable sensors. These tests are largely constrained to specific controlled environments. In addition, gait analysis often requires experts for calibration, operation and/or to place sensors...

The assistance to people during rehabilitation has to be adapted to their needs. Too little help can lead to frustration and stress in the user; an excess of help may lead to low participation and loss of residual skills. Robotic rollators may adapt assistance. The main challenge to cope with this issue is to estimate how much help is needed on the...

In mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN), nodes are allowed to move autonomously for deployment. This process is meant: (i) to achieve good coverage; and (ii) to distribute the communication load as homogeneously as possible. Rather than optimizing deployment, reactive algorithms are based on a set of rules or behaviors, so nodes can determine whe...

Deployment is important in large wireless sensor networks (WSN), specially because nodes may fall due to failure or battery issues. Mobile WSN cope with deployment and reconfiguration at the same time: nodes may move autonomously: (i) to achieve a good area coverage; and (ii) to distribute as homogeneously as possible. Optimal distribution is compu...

Gait analysis provides insightful information about people condition, progress of rehabilitation treatments and fall risk. This analysis is frequently performed in very specific conditions, because it often implies the use of treadmills, cameras and/or wearable sensors. Alternatively, gait can be analyzed using a smart rollator, equipped with a bas...

In reactive layers of robotic architectures, behaviors should learn their operation from experience, following the trends of modern intelligence theories. A Case Based Reasoning (CBR) reactive layer could achieve this goal but, as complexity of behaviors increases, the curse of dimensionality arises:too many cases in the behaviors casebases degrade...

One of the major risks of disability is a loss of autonomy that , in extreme, may lead to institutionalization. Lack of human resources for caregiving has led to designing robots to assist people in need. Assistive robotics are meant to help people cope with Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Most ADL are heavily affected by issues related to ambula...

This paper presents a novel shared control algorithm for robotized wheelchairs. The proposed algorithm is a new method to extend autonomous navigation techniques into the shared control domain. It reactively combines user’s and robot’s commands into a continuous function that approximates a classic Navigation Function (NF) by weighting input comman...

Mobility assistance for wheelchair navigation is typically based on the shared control paradigm. Traditionally, control swaps from user to machine depending either on a trigger mechanism or on a explicit user request. Alternatively, in collaborative control approaches both user and robot contribute to control at the same time. However, in this case...

In this paper, a new rhythm based game for tutored music learning is presented. The main differences with similar existing systems are: i) songs can be automatically extracted from any music file or printed score; ii) it works with multiple interfaces, ranging from any MIDI controller to most popular game controllers; iii) note sequences are obtain...

Assisted living environments involve a wide range of different devices. Most of them are commercially available, but typically associated to standard domotics buses not compatible with each other. Besides, in many cases it is desirable to integrate new devices to a system that might not support the installed bus protocol. Interconnection between de...

Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a very active and important research topic nowadays. One of the main problems of these systems is the large number of variables to take into account. Due to this, robot behaviors are sometimes learnt instead of calculated via analytical expressions. A typical learning mechanism, specially for biomimetic robots, is Lear...

Cooperative learning in a Engineering Teaching Framework: an introductory experience to Teamworking.Higher education in the area of Engineering has traditionally been oriented towards individual student work, though this attitude doesn’t help on the acquisition of one of the most appreciated abilities at the labour market, such as team work compete...

Mobility assistance is of key importance for people with disabilities to remain autonomous in their preferred environments. In severe cases, assistance can be provided by robotized wheelchairs that can perform complex maneuvers and/or correct the user’s commands. User’s acceptance is of key importance, as some users do not like their commands to be...

Assistive technologies have been of key importance for the last decades. There have been many approaches to assistance and different paradigms have been proposed. However, there is still a lack of standardization in the field, not because no scale or metrics exist, but rather because there are many and they serve different purposes. Besides, since...

Assisted wheelchair navigation is of key importance for persons with severe disabilities. The problem has been solved in different ways, usually based on the shared control paradigm. This paradigm consists of giving the user more or less control on a need basis. Naturally, these approaches require personalization: each wheelchair user has different...

Objective: Testing is a key stage in system development, particularly in systems such as a wheelchair, in which the final user is typically a disabled person. These systems have stringent safety requirements, requiring major testing with many different individuals. The best would be to have the wheelchair tested by many different end users, as eac...

Situations where machines and persons cooperate to achieve a common goal fall within the field of shared control [3][15][79][67]. As commented, it is medically advisable to give people just the amount of help needed, and not to provide too much, so that persons keep active and practise their skills. This approach avoids, at least partially, loss of...

Mobility assistive devices can roughly be categorized into two types: walkers and wheelchairs.Walkers are used by persons who can walk with some assistance. They are meant to give physical support and improve equilibrium. From a practical point of view, walkers imply a highly collaborative profile: if the walker tries to move in a different way tha...

Once upon a time, someone came up with the idea that, given some intelligence, machines could possibly make humans’ life easier. These machines would be called robots and, somewhat surprisingly, they were not born in the mind of Asimov, but in classic Greek culture: according to Homer’s Iliad, Hephaestus used robots to assist him in buildingAchille...

So, a couple of years after CARMEN was delivered in FSL, here we were with a fully working, tested system and several megas of data gathered through weeks of experiments that, fortunately, proved every hypothesis presented thus far. All in all, CARMEN was a success among users and doctors and it ranked the highest among all tested assistive devices...

Reducing Disagreement by trying to make the machine drive like a person does is, in the best of cases, far from easy. For a start, each person drives differently, even if they have the same goals and/or guidelines. Second, anyone’s way of driving is likely going to depend on experience, condition and state, as well as on the vehicle. Finally, most...

In previous episodes of our hospital series, we saw how collaborative control equalized the performance of persons with different cognitive and physical disabilities. In almost every case, they were able to finish mildly complex trajectories. However, it was only a matter of time until we found a person with disabilities so severe that assistance p...

And just when everything seems to be going so well, someone always asks, -so, what is so special about your system?-. For scientists, a simple it works does not seem enough, so -sooner or later- everyone stomps into the field of metrics . Inventing some metrics of your own, while obviously appealing, will just not do. Since words might do you no go...

At this point, we knew the protocols by heart, so we followed every step once more, only this time it was decided to work in a house-like environment [173][177]. This would provide a more realistic place to run our tests and, also, we could work with persons with higher disability indexes and not interfere with hospital activity. FSL kindly provide...

Mobility is of key importance for autonomous living. Persons with severe disabilities may be assisted by robotic wheelchairs when manual control is not possible. However, these persons should contribute to control as much as they can to avoid loss of residual skills and frustration. Traditionally, wheelchair shared control approaches either give co...

This work presents a new approach to proactive collaborative wheelchair control. The system is based on estimating how much help the person needs at each situation and providing just the correct amount. This is achieved by combining robot and human control commands in a reactive fashion after weighting them by their respective local efficiency. Thu...

In assisted wheelchair navigation it is important to optimize help: an excess may lead to loss of residual skills, whereas a lack may lead to failure in completing a trajectory. Help needed depends on diagnosis, condition, task and environment. This dissertation presents a new approach to personalize assistance through learning. It has been success...

To operate a wheelchair, people with severe physical disabilities may require assistance, which can be provided by robotization. However, medical experts report that an excess of assistance may lead to loss of residual skills, so that it is important to provide just the right amount of assistance. This work proposes a collaborative control system b...

Localization in multi-robot systems is a key problem in multi agent systems. In many cases, specially involving legged robots, like the Robocup soccer competition, it relies on predefined landmarks at known locations. However, when several objects are in motion, vision occlusions due to agents in the field of view make this kind of localization unf...

This work presents a new approach to shared control to assist wheelchair driving. Rather than swapping control from human to robot either by request or on a need basis, the system estimates how much help is needed in a reactive fashion and continuously produces an emergent motory command in combination with human input. To provide time stability an...

In todays aging society, many people require mobility assistance, that can be provided by robotized assistive wheelchairs with a certain degree of autonomy when manual control is unfeasible due to disability. Robot wheelchairs, though, are not supposed to be completely in control because lack of human intervention may lead to loss of residual capa...

This paper presents a new algorithm to extract a color graph from a real image so that it can be efficiently represented in a compact way. The proposal presents two main novelties. First, a new PCA-based color feature vector has been defined. This vector is resistant against illumination changes, noise and microtextures. Second, the image is segmen...

In this paper, we present the SHARE-it approach to the integration of agent technology with other existing technologies to build specific intelligent and semi-autonomous assistive devices for older persons and people with disabilities (both cognitive and/or motor). In particular, we explored the benefits of the concept of situated intelligence to b...

This paper presents a method for capture planning in view based 3D recognition. Views are represented by their contours, encoded into curvature functions, which are reduced into compact feature vectors by Principal Component Analysis. These vectors are very resistant against transformations, so they can be assumed to be distributed over the surface...

This paper presents an application capable of identifying hazardous spots in roads and dangerous situations caused by human mistakes or reckless driving. Our work relies on a mobile phone since most users already have one and usually take it with them everywhere they go, even when they travel by car. Specifically, we use a Nokia N95 because is prov...

This paper addresses a new collaborative control method for robotic wheelchairs. The original method was specifically designed for disabled people who are unable to drive a robotic wheelchair on their own. Its main novelty was that the wheelchair just provided the amount of help needed at each moment, to avoid loss of residual abilities. This wheel...

This work presents a new approach to shared control driving a robotic wheelchair for persons with disabilities. The proposal is based on weighting the robot and human commands by their respective efficiencies to obtain an emergent command in a reactive way. It was tested with a robotized Meyra wheelchair at Fondazione Santa Lucia (FSL) in Rome with...

In nowadays aging society, power wheelchairs provide assistance for non-pedestrian mobility, but inside narrow indoor spaces, holonomic ones are required. While they adapt well to complex environments, it is harder to control them via a conventional joystick. Thus, extra buttons and/or knobs are included to decide what to do. To make control more i...

In nowadays aging society, many people require assistance for non-pedestrian mobility. In some cases, assistive devices require a certain degree of autonomy when the persons’ disabilities difficult manual control. In this field, it is important to rate user performance to check how much help he/she needs. This paper presents an overview of common m...

In this contribution, an automatic system of song edition for Guitar Hero/Frets on Fire is presented. The system performs three fundamental stages: time analysis, frequency analysis and button allocation. The temporal analysis of the musical signal is used to obtain the rhythmic pattern of the song. The frequency analysis is perform on the basis of...

A traditional problem in robotics is adaptation of developed algorithms to different platforms and sensors, as each of them has its specifics and associated errors. Hierarchical control architectures deal with the problem through division of the system into layers, where deliberative processing is performed at high level and low level layers are in...

Autonomous robots are capable of navigating on their own. Shared control approaches, however, allow humans to make some navigation decisions. This is typically executed either by overriding the human or the robot control at some specific situations. In this paper, we propose a method to allow cooperation between humans and robots at each point of a...

This paper evaluates the learning capabilities of a new Case Based Reasoning based scheme for pure reactive navigation. The system only relies on sensor readings and goal direction at a given time instant. It acquires knowledge about how other systems, human or algorithms, handle reactive behaviors and also learns from its own experience. It has be...

This paper presents a novel approach to characterize and recognize places in unknown environments for behaviour-based navigation purposes. This recognition technique classifies a given robot position in three categories, wall, corridor or door. The technique allows the robot not only to select the behaviour that better fits that situation, but also...

Indoor localization is of key importance in many areas of application and market sectors. There are many approaches to solve the problem, based on optical, ultrasound or radiofrequency measurements. RF has been increasingly used with the deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based on standards like WiFi, Bluetooth or Zigbee, so that addition...

Agent technology has become a leading area of research in AI and computer science and the focus of a number of major initiatives [5]. The interest in applying Artificial Intelligence technologies first, and now Agent Technology to Healthcare has been a growing one. From the very seminal and inspiring work as the one of Huang et al. [1] and [2] the...

The goal of SHARE-it, an EU FP6 funded project, is to develop a scalable, adaptive system of add-ons to sensor and assistive technology so that they can be modularly integrated into an intelligent home environment to enhance the individuals autonomy. The system will be designed to inform and assist the user and his/her caregivers through monitoring...

In nowadays aging society, many people require mobility assistance. Autonomous wheelchairs may provide some help, but they are not supposed to overtake all control on human mobility, as this is reported to lead to loss of residual capabilities and frustration. Instead, persons and wheelchairs are expected to cooperate. Traditionally, shared control...

This paper presents a study on human performance when people are assisted by a purely reactive navigation control system. The goal of such a system is to achieve collaborative human/robot navigation, so that the human driver is always in control but his/her performance is improved by the machine. This Shared Control approach is meant to be implemen...

Evaluation of aerial pictures is of key importance for environ-mental analysis given the large extensions of land to study. This paper focuses on texture based segmentation of aerial images and character-isation of landscapes. Characterisation is achieved by means of a his-togram of microtexture LBP/C vectors. Segmentations is hierarchically perfor...

This paper presents a study on human performance when people are assisted by a purely reactive navigation control system. The goal of such a system isto achieve collaborative human/robot navigation, so that the human driver is always in control but his/her performance is improved by the machine. This SharedControl approach is meant to be implemente...

In this paper we propose a system where machine and human cooperate at every situation via a reactive emer- gent behavior, so that the person is always in charge of his/her own motion. Our approach relies on lo- cally evaluating the performance of the human and the wheelchair for each given situation. Then, both their motion commands are weighted a...

Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been a growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care. Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of...

Telemedicine systems have been progressively paying more and more attention to wireless technologies for personal area network (PAN). Depending on the features of the system to be developed, different technologies need to be deployed. These technologies are supposed to coexist, even though many of them operate in the same 2.4-GHz band. In case of i...

Autonomous robots are capable of navigating on their own. In some cases, though, it is interesting to allow humans to influence navigation. Shared control is typically achieved either by giving control to the human or the robot at some specific situations. In this work, we propose a method to share control between humans and robots at each point of...

This paper is about the key role of Personalization through Ambient Intelligence in the development of Assistive Technologies for the elders. Ambient Intelligence implies three relatively new technologies: Ubiquitous Computation, Ubiquitous Communication, and Intelligent User Interfaces. We also present our own ideas about the integration of intell...

Wireless sensor networks are being intensely used in health care environments to collect biometric signals from patients. This paper presents an augmented reality visual interface based on artiflcial markers intended to be used by medical stafi, to monitor real time information from difierent kind of sensors attached to the patients in care centers...

This paper presents a new approach to shared control. It consists of combining orders from a mobile and a human. The weight of these orders is obtained by evaluating their corresponding efficiencies but also of his/her condition, which is estimated by continuously monitoring attached biosensors. We rely on a hierarchical architecture where the reac...

This paper presents a new CBR navigation scheme based on three behaviours: wall following, corridor following and door crossing. The system switches among CBR behaviours depending on a local grid built around the robot from sonar sensor readings. The main advantage of the proposed system is that it can easily adapt to any robot and environment, lea...