Experimental Evaluation of Tactile Sensors for Compliant Robotic Hands

The sense of touch is a key aspect in the human capability to robustly grasp and manipulate a wide variety of objects. Despite many years of development, there is still no preferred solution for tactile sensing in robotic hands: multiple technologies are available, each one with different benefits depending on the application. This study compares the performance of different tactile sensors mounted on the variable stiffness gripper CLASH 2F, including three commercial sensors: a single taxel sensor from the companies Tacterion and Kinfinity, the Robotic Finger Sensor v2 from Sparkfun, plus a self-built resistive 3 × 3 sensor array, and two self-built magnetic 3-DoF touch sensors, one with four taxels and one with one taxel. We verify the minimal force detectable by the sensors, test if slip detection is possible with the available taxels on each sensor, and use the sensors for edge detection to obtain the orientation of the grasped object. To evaluate the benefits obtained with each technology and to assess which sensor fits better the control loop in a variable stiffness hand, we use the CLASH gripper to grasp fruits and vegetables following a published benchmark for pick and place operations. To facilitate the repetition of tests, the CLASH hand is endowed with tactile buttons that ease human–robot interactions, including execution of a predefined program, resetting errors, or commanding the full robot to move in gravity compensation mode.

Amor Mundi as Capability to Transcend: Hannah Arendt’s Conception of the Human

The paper aims at offering a phenomenological interpretation of the idea of ‘transcendence’ (as human capability) by reconceptualizing Hannah Arendt’s rather vague notion of amor mundi. Firstly, I show the paradoxical tension of amor mundi within her own writings. Then, I trace the origin of the problematic of love of the world from her doctoral dissertation (Arendt’s critic of Augustine’s ‘neighbor love’) by using Heidegger’s phenomenological method. Finally, I explicate a phenomenological approach toward amor mundi as human capability to transcend (regarding how ‘love’ and ‘world’ are presentable as ‘experience’ and ‘capability’) by further analyzing the distinction between ‘ontological’ claim and ‘political’ claim (regarding the human): the world which humans build and sustain together is to be shared, but that first-hand experience of the world is not particularly demonstrable or sharable.

Filsafat Kapabilitas dan Kemungkinan Politik Pengakuan yang Mutual (Merekonstruksi Filsafat Praktis Paul Ricoeur)

<p>This article focuses on <em>Capability Approach in Philosophy and the Possibility of Politics of Recognition: to reconstruct Ricoeur’s practical philosophy. </em>Based on his philosophical question: what is capable self? we search for the meaning of human capability which will imply an understanding of the self and the recognition of its basic personal capacities, from where proceeds mutual recognition. Since this is the main goal of Ricoeur, I choose to expose this part of his work with the objective of structuring its ethical aim, which is to live good life with and for others in just institutions. Here, love, justice and the poetics of the gift will play significant roles. This study is divided into three main parts. Part One is a discussion of the phenomenology of the capable self that aims to emphasize the meaning of personal capacities in terms of self’s ability. Part Two presents ethics and the politics of recognition in three sub-themes: self-esteem, solicitude for others and justice in institutions. This leads to the Part Three which completes the previous study by analyzing the relationship between love, justice and possibility of the politics of mutual recognition.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Capable self, Mutual Recognition, Ethical Aim and the Poetics of the Gift.</p>

Playing (Safely) with Fire

This chapter reviews the project’s argument, that social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages in embodied and discursive ways. Digitization has vastly expanded the encoding capabilities of everyday citizens, allowing them to render their expression of democratic voice visible, even as the ethical rules for visual expression are inchoate. The project’s case studies demonstrate the way grounded practices produce representations that support the authority of the criminal justice system, and together they invite three theoretical discussions: (1) on the way visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, (2) on the importance of image indexicality as a discursive affordance in the public sphere, and (3) on the digital public sphere as visual, and participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability. As a whole, the project offers insight into the construction of the criminal justice system’s literal and metaphorical image.

Filming Police

This chapter historicizes and theorizes the work of self-described “cop-watchers,” or police accountability activists based on interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis. This chapter describes the way police accountability organizations are proliferating, thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. The chapter describes the origins of such counternarrative “sousveillance” in the United States. Two women who founded the longest-running cop-watching group in the United States, Berkeley Copwatch, are among the subjects of the research, which spans multiple cities, organizations, and perspectives. The chapter explores the difference between sustained and organized cop-watching and the incidental or spontaneous filming of police, and argues that the true power of cop-watching lies not in its videos but its commitment to community surveillance and witnessing, and that participation in the visual public sphere can be theorized as an essential, democratic, human capability.

‘It is not good for the person to be alone’: The capabilities approach and the right to communicate

For decades, attempts have been made to define a ‘right to communicate’. The rise of media technologies, which are characterized by abundance of channels and information, interactivity, mobility, and multimediated messaging, has allowed to rethink this right in a context converging traditional media and telecommunications and referring to communicating as an essential human capability. Applying Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to communications, we argue that communicating is a capability required to realize such functionings as participating in political, cultural, social, educational, and commercial life and is essential to promote belonging to a collective. The ‘negative’ right to free speech should be replaced by a positive right to communicate, which should include free speech, access to information, privacy, and utilization of communications in order to belong to a community.