基于无线网络的足球机器人遥操作系统

设计并实现了基于Pocket PC的互联网遥操作机器人足球比赛系统,按照需求分析、系统设计与实现,以及实验结果的思路描述了整个过程,建立了无线网络环境下遥操作理论研究的实验平台,并以此为基础对遥操作机器人足球背景下的操作者策略与自主智能的融合作了一些探索。

BDI Agent的人机智能结合方法

在网络遥操作中存在着由于操作者的操作负担过重或长时间操作而引起的误操作问题,提出以著名的BDIAgent模型为基础,通过引入中断机制,将反映操作者智能决策的操作目标、操作意图与BDIAgent推理产生的目标、意图进行结合的方法,为解决Agent智能的局限性和操作者的误操作问题,提供了一种人机接口方法,实现了人机智能结合.给出了中断的引入方法和操作者操作目标、操作意图中断响应原理,用形式化模型描述了人机智能决策选取目标和意图的过程.该人机智能结合方法在网络遥操作RoboCup中型足球机器人系统中得到了应用.

基于评价选择策略的Internet多机器人协作控制研究

针对Internet多机器人系统中存在的操作指令延迟、工作效率低、协作能力差等问题,提出了多机器人神经元群网络控制模型。在学习过程中,来自不同功能区域的多类型神经元连接形成动态神经元群集,来描述各机器人的运动行为与外部条件、内部状态之间复杂的映射关系,通过对内部权值连接的评价选择,以实现最佳的多机器人运动行为协调。以互联网足球机器人系统为实验平台,给出了学习算法描述。仿真结果表明,己方机器人成功实现了配合射门的任务要求,所提模型和方法提高了多机器人的协作能力,并满足系统稳定性和实时性要求。

基于Internet的遥操作机器人足球系统设计

针对目前基于Internet的遥操作机器人系统普遍完成任务简单,复杂度低,影响力有限的状况,本文将遥操作技术和Internet技术应用于具有高动态性、高协作性和高对抗性的机器人足球系统中,建立了基于Internet的遥操作机器人足球系统的体系结构,提供了该系统的软件设计方法,并针对网络通信设计了应用UDP协议进行连接和数据传输的方法.实际建立的基于Internet的3对3遥操作机器人足球系统验证了系统设计方法的可行性和有效性.通过实验验证了应用UDP协议进行连接和数据传输相对于应用TCP协议的优越性.

The Computer as Coach: An Athletic Paradigm for Intellectual Education

Over the next five years, computer games will find their way into a vast number of American homes, creating a unique educational opportunity: the development of "computer coaches" for the serious intellectual skills required by some of these games. From the player's perspective, the coach will provide advice regarding strategy and tactics for better play. But, from the perspective of the coach, the request for help is an opportunity to tutor basic mathematical, scientific or other kinds of knowledge that the game exercises.

La trayectoria deportiva hacia el rendimiento en los deportes colectivos

¿Cómo es la trayectoria seguida por un jugador de fútbol desde que empieza a dar sus primeros pasos con el balón hasta que alcanza el rendimiento que le permita competir en la liga profesional de fútbol?, ¿cómo ocurre en el baloncesto o en el balonmano? Son muchos los factores que influirán sin duda alguna en dicho proceso. Entre dichos factores, en los últimos años, se ha considerado de forma detenida la influencia de la “practica deliberada” en el desarrollo del deportista. Sin embargo, son varios los autores y estudios que explican que no solo influye dicha practica, sino que también es muy importante la influencia del “juego deliberado”, bien en el mismo deporte, bien en otras especialidades deportivas, y que ambos tipos de practica son compatibles formando un continuum en el tiempo. Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar el estado de la arte en torno a este debate, en el ámbito de los deportes colectivos, analizando si en los deportes colectivos los deportistas se especializan al principio en un solo deporte o bien si practican varias disciplinas deportivas para finalmente dedicarse exclusivamente a un deporte. Los resultados apuntan a que no existe un único camino en el desarrollo del deportista, y que razones de carácter social y cultural son las que realmente condicionan dicho proceso

Agency and animation: the performance of interactive game characters

As an animator and practice-based researcher with a background in games development, I am interested in technological change in the video game medium, with a focus on the tools and technologies that drive game character animation and interactive story. In particular, I am concerned with the issue of ‘user agency’, or the ability of the end user to affect story development—a key quality of the gaming experience and essential to the aesthetics of gaming, which is defined in large measure by its interactive elements. In this paper I consider the unique qualities of the video game1 as an artistic medium and the impact that these qualities have on the production of animated virtual character performances. I discuss the somewhat oppositional nature of animated character performances found in games from recent years, which range from inactive to active—in other words, low to high agency. Where procedural techniques (based on coded rules of movement) are used to model dynamic character performances, the user has the ability to interactively affect characters in real-time within the larger sphere of the game. This game play creates a high degree of user agency. However, it lacks the aesthetic nuances of the more crafted sections of games: the short cut-scenes, or narrative interludes where entire acted performances are mapped onto game characters (often via performance capture)2 and constructed into relatively cinematic representations. While visually spectacular, cut-scenes involve minimal interactivity, so user agency is low. Contemporary games typically float between these two distinct methods of animation, from a focus on user agency and dynamically responsive animation to a focus on animated character performance in sections where the user is a passive participant. We tend to think of the majority of action in games as taking place via playable figures: an avatar or central character that represents a player. However, there is another realm of characters that also partake in actions ranging from significant to incidental: non-playable characters, or NPCs, which populate action sequences where game play takes place as well as cut scenes that unfold without much or any interaction on the part of the player. NPCs are the equivalent to supporting roles, bit characters, or extras in the world of cinema. Minor NPCs may simply be background characters or enemies to defeat, but many NPCs are crucial to the overall game story. It is my argument that, thus far, no game has successfully utilized the full potential of these characters to contribute toward development of interactive, high performance action. In particular, a type of NPC that I have identified as ‘pivotal’3—those constituting the supporting cast of a video game—are essential to the telling of a game story, particularly in genres that focus on story and characters: adventure games, action games, and role-playing games. A game story can be defined as the entirety of the narrative, told through non-interactive cut-scenes as well a interactive sections of play, and development of more complex stories in games clearly impacts the animation of NPCs. I argue that NPCs in games must be capable of acting with emotion throughout a game—in the cutscenes, which are tightly controlled, but also in sections of game play, where player agency can potentially alter the story in real-time. When the animated performance of NPCs and user agency are not continuous throughout the game, the implication is that game stories may be primarily told through short movies within games, making it more difficult to define video games animation as a distinct artistic medium.

The effect of a life development intervention on sports career transition adjustment

Lavallee, D. (2005). The effect of a life development intervention on sports career transition adjustment. The Sport Psychologist. 19(2), pp.193-202 RAE2008

Bezpieczeństwo państwa w Unii Europejskiej na przykładzie Polski. Analiza realistyczna i państwowo-centryczna

Poszukiwanie uniwersalnej definicji bezpieczeństwa Polski w niestabilnym systemie Unii Europejskiej opiera się głównie na odnalezieniu się w roli gracza i aktora, który jako samodzielny podmiot bierze aktywny udział w wielowymiarowym unijnym systemie negocjacji i przetargów (brokering between different interests). Polska musi mieć przygotowany swój program działania w UE o charakterze strategicznym i taktycznym włączając w niego państwo-centryczne priorytety horyzontalne i sektorowe, zarówno antykryzysowe jak i antagonistyczne i dysfunkcjonalne. Wymaga to perfekcyjnego przygotowania wykształconego zespołu ludzi zajmujących się bezpieczeństwem. Konieczne są bardzo wysokie umiejętności organizacyjne i wysoki stopień znajomości sposobu funkcjonowania państw w relacjach do całości i poszczególnych elementów UE. Wszystko to sprowadza się do konieczności wypracowywania specyficznego modus operandi polskiego bezpieczeństwa, na który poza znanymi już regułami i procedurami składa się ich interwencyjne zaplecze instytucjonalno-administracyjne oraz logistyczno-techniczne. Polska musi też posiąść zdolność do adaptacji do otaczającego świata (Europy) poprzez poszerzanie bazy funkcjonowania systemu integracyjnego. Wiąże się to bezpośrednio z dostosowywaniem do permanentnej zmiany w Unii Europejskiej i globalnym otoczeniu. Adaptacja jest również istotna z punktu widzenia potrzeby stabilizowania systemu. Pozwala neutralizować wszelkie próby zakłóceń funkcjonalnych jej struktury, pozycji i zbioru kompetencji. Adaptację powinna uzupełniać realistyczna innowacyjność i misyjność Polski widoczna przez wprowadzanie do środowiska (otoczenia) nowych reguł i mechanizmów bezpieczeństwa. Innowacyjność wiąże się z inicjowaniem nowego stylu/sposobu myślenia o bezpieczeństwie, a w związku z tym z nowatorstwem w zakresie wielopoziomowego (wieloprzestrzennego) ujmowania bezpieczeństwa. Na tak rozumiane bezpieczeństwo państwa składa się nie tylko zdolność obronna (militarna), ale także siła gospodarki oraz zasoby, którym Polska powinna dysponować. Misyjność sprowadza się natomiast do promowania i propagowania wartości przypisanych państwu narodowemu - niezapisanych w unijnych traktatach takich jak potęga, racja stanu i niepodległość.

Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.

An Invariant Representation for Matching Trajectories across Uncalibrated Video Streams

We introduce a view-point invariant representation of moving object trajectories that can be used in video database applications. It is assumed that trajectories lie on a surface that can be locally approximated with a plane. Raw trajectory data is first locally approximated with a cubic spline via least squares fitting. For each sampled point of the obtained curve, a projective invariant feature is computed using a small number of points in its neighborhood. The resulting sequence of invariant features computed along the entire trajectory forms the view invariant descriptor of the trajectory itself. Time parametrization has been exploited to compute cross ratios without ambiguity due to point ordering. Similarity between descriptors of different trajectories is measured with a distance that takes into account the statistical properties of the cross ratio, and its symmetry with respect to the point at infinity. In experiments, an overall correct classification rate of about 95% has been obtained on a dataset of 58 trajectories of players in soccer video, and an overall correct classification rate of about 80% has been obtained on matching partial segments of trajectories collected from two overlapping views of outdoor scenes with moving people and cars.

Wearable wireless inertial measurement for sports applications

A wearable WIMU (Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit) [1] system for sports applications based on Tyndall's 25mm mote technology [2] has been developed to identify tennis performance determining factors, giving coaches & players improved feedback [3, 4]. Multiple WIMUs transmit player motion data to a PC/laptop via a receiver unit. Internally the WIMUs consist of: an IMU layer with MEMS based sensors; a microcontroller/transceiver layer; and an interconnect layer with supplemental 70g accelerometers and a lithium-ion battery. Packaging consists of a robust ABS plastic case with internal padding, a power switch, battery charging port and status LED with Velcro-elastic straps that are used to attach the device to the player. This offers protection from impact, sweat, and movement of sensors which could cause degradation in device performance. In addition, an important requirement for this device is that it needs to be lightweight and comfortable to wear. Calibration ensures that misalignment of the accelerometer and magnetometer axes are accounted for, allowing more accurate measurements to be made.

The psychology of immersion and development of a quantitative measure of immersive response in games

This study sets out to investigate the psychology of immersion and the immersive response of individuals in relation to video and computer games. Initially, an exhaustive review of literature is presented, including research into games, player demographics, personality and identity. Play in traditional psychology is also reviewed, as well as previous research into immersion and attempts to define and measure this construct. An online qualitative study was carried out (N=38), and data was analysed using content analysis. A definition of immersion emerged, as well as a classification of two separate types of immersion, namely, vicarious immersion and visceral immersion. A survey study (N=217) verified the discrete nature of these categories and rejected the null hypothesis that there was no difference between individuals' interpretations of vicarious and visceral immersion. The primary aim of this research was to create a quantitative instrument which measures the immersive response as experienced by the player in a single game session. The IMX Questionnaire was developed using data from the initial qualitative study and quantitative survey. Exploratory Factor Analysis was carried out on data from 300 participants for the IMX Version 1, and Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted on data from 380 participants on the IMX Version 2. IMX Version 3 was developed from the results of these analyses. This questionnaire was found to have high internal consistency reliability and validity.

The brand-orientated play-community: toxic play in the marketplace

This ethnographic study makes a number of original contributions to the consumer identity projects and the marketplace cultures dimensions of consumer culture theory research. This study introduces the notion of the brand-orientated play-community, a novel consumption community form, which displays, as locus, a desire to play. This contributes to our understanding of the fluid relationship between subcultures of consumption, consumer tribes, and brand community. It was found that the brand-orientated play-community’s prime celebration, conceptualised as the ‘branded carnival’, displays characteristics of the archetypal carnival. The community access carnivalistic life and a world-upside-down ethos via the use and misuse of marketplace resources. The branded carnival is further supported by the community’s enactment of ‘toxic play’, which entails abnormal alcohol consumption, black market illegal resources, edgework activities, hegemonic masculinity and upsetting the public. This play-community is discussed in terms of a hyper-masculine playpen, as the play enacted has a direct relationship with the enactment of strong masculine roles. It was found that male play-ground members enact the extremes of contrasting masculine roles as a means to subvert the calculated and sedate ‘man-of-action-hero’ synthesis. Carnivals are unisex, and hence, women have begun entering the play-ground. Female members have successfully renegotiated their role within the community, from playthings to players – they have achieved player equality, which within the liminoid zone is more powerful than gender equality. However, while toxic play is essential to the maintenance of collective identity within the culture so too is the more serious form of play: the toxic sport of professional beer pong. The author conceptualises beer pong as a ‘toxic sport’, as it displays the contradictory play foundations of agon and corrupt ilinx: this is understood as a milestone step in the emergence of the postmodern sport era, in which spontaneity and the carnivalesque will dominate.

A social history of sport in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford, c. 1880-1930

This thesis seeks to explore the development of sport in Munster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing developments in three counties: Cork, Tipperary and Waterford. In particular this thesis considers the development of rugby and soccer in comparative perspective across these three counties, asking what local factors impacted on their uneven development in the region and considering the extent to which the traditional model of diffusion applies to the reception of these sports in the three counties. By giving consideration to these two particular non-indigenous sports, the thesis will, through answering that question, explore ideas of cultural reception, national identity and class as expressed at local level. These themes will be explored by placing the comparative analysis of these two sports into a wider context of sporting development regionally and nationally in the period, in particular the emerging commercialisation of sport, and also the diverse sporting culture of which these two sports were a part. Utilising a wide range of archival sources from local, national and sporting newspapers, to club records, official publications and ephemera this thesis builds a picture of sport in Munster that is deeply rooted in the community, and that forms an important facet of the social world of Cork, Tipperary and Waterford from 1880-1930.