Countering Improvised explosive devices through a multi-point haptic teleoperation system

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are reported as the number one cause of injury and death for allied troops in the current theater of operation. Current stand-off technologies for Counter IED (CIED) tasks rely on robotic platforms that have not improved in capability over the past decade to combat the ever increasing threat of IEDs. While they provide operational capability, the effectiveness of these platforms is limited. This is because they primarily utilise video and audio feedback, and require extensive training and specialist operators. Recent operational experience has demonstrated the need for robotic systems that are highly capable, yet easily operable for high fidelity manipulation. Force feedback provides an operator with more intuitive control of a robotic system. This sense of touch allows an operator to obtain a sense of feel from a stand-off location of what the robot touches or grasps through a human-robot interface. This paper reports the design and development of a Haptically-Enabled Counter IED robotic system that was funded by the Australian Defence Force. The presented work focuses on the design methodology for the system, and provides the results of the manipulator analysis and trial outcomes.

Would the 'real' girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafes and the reformulation of the 'girl' gamer.

In this paper we consider the significance of cyber 'LAN' cafeacutes as sites where on and off-line practices meet in way that complicates binary notions of the gendered gamer. Existing research into computer games culture suggests a male dominated environment and points to girls' lower levels of competence and participation in games. Building on recent studies interested in the constitution of gender through engagement with online technologies, we draw on Judith Butler's politics of performative resignification, and conceptualise digital culture as a resource through which 'girl' gamers are mobilised and potentially reformulated, experiencing their gaming identities in contradictory ways, and fragmenting the category 'girl' in the very act of articulating their place in a male dominated gaming culture. It is argued that through the meeting of on and off-line practices, LAN cafeacutes operate as a location that is particularly amenable to reformulative work in relation to gendered gaming identities.