Manipulation Actions Research Articles

Non-Prehensile Manipulation Actions and Visual 6D Pose Estimation for Fruit Grasping Based on Tactile Sensing

Robotic manipulation in cluttered environments is one of the challenges roboticists are currently facing. When the objects to handle are delicate fresh fruits, grasping is even more challenging. Detecting and localizing fruits with the accuracy necessary to grasp them is very difficult due to the large variability in the aspect and dimensions of each item. This paper proposes a solution that exploits a state-of-the-art neural network and a novel enhanced 6D pose estimation method that integrates the depth map with the neural network output. Even with an accurate localization, grasping fruits with a suitable force to avoid slippage and damage at the same time is another challenge. This work solves this issue by resorting to a grasp controller based on tactile sensing. Depending on the specific application scenario, grasping a fruit might be impossible without colliding with other objects or other fruits. Therefore, a non-prehensile manipulation action is here proposed to push items hindering the grasp of a detected fruit. The pushing from an initial location to a target one is performed by a model predictive controller taking into account the unavoidable delay in the perception and computing pipeline of the robotic system. Experiments with real fresh fruits demonstrate that the overall proposed approach allows a robot to successfully grasp apples in various situations.

Analisis Transparansi KPU Dalam Meloloskan Partai Ummat “Implementasi PKPU No 6 Tahun 2018”

One of the characteristics of democracy that is growing is the implementation of honest and fair elections. The 2024 election will certainly invite the political desire of many people to participate directly in it. Setting up a new party is one of the fastest ways to gain power. The emergence of the Ummah Party is one of the cases that is quite interesting to study, where previously the party was reported as TMS by the KPU and then, not so long ago, it was allowed to pass verification by the KPU, which of course leaves millions of questions unanswered to this day. The main question in this study is how the KPU is able to carry out the mandate of the law, especially on the issue of data and information transparency, and how the KPU is able to implement PKPU No. 6 of 2018 regarding data verification, which is suspected by many to be very deceptive and also suspected of fraud. As a result, the researchers' role here is to examine the transparency of data and information in the KPU's passage of the Ummah Party. The problems addressed in this study were addressed using descriptive qualitative methods as well as data analysis with reference to the enundang invitation regulations. From the results of the study, it was found that there were two manipulative actions associated with the lack of transparency of the KPU in providing data and information to the wider community, especially to the participants of new political parties.

Learning visual-based deformable object rearrangement with local graph neural networks

Goal-conditioned rearrangement of deformable objects (e.g. straightening a rope and folding a cloth) is one of the most common deformable manipulation tasks, where the robot needs to rearrange a deformable object into a prescribed goal configuration with only visual observations. These tasks are typically confronted with two main challenges: the high dimensionality of deformable configuration space and the underlying complexity, nonlinearity and uncertainty inherent in deformable dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose a novel representation strategy that can efficiently model the deformable object states with a set of keypoints and their interactions. We further propose local-graph neural network (GNN), a light local GNN learning to jointly model the deformable rearrangement dynamics and infer the optimal manipulation actions (e.g. pick and place) by constructing and updating two dynamic graphs. Both simulated and real experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that the proposed dynamic graph representation shows superior expressiveness in modeling deformable rearrangement dynamics. Our method reaches much higher success rates on a variety of deformable rearrangement tasks (96.3% on average) than state-of-the-art method in simulation experiments. Besides, our method is much more lighter and has a 60% shorter inference time than state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate that our method performs well in the multi-task learning scenario and can be transferred to real-world applications with an average success rate of 95% by solely fine tuning a keypoint detector. A supplementary video can be found at https://youtu.be/AhwTQo6fCM0.

Earnings management in socially responsible firms around seasoned equity offerings: Evidence from France, Germany, Italy and Spain

Earnings manipulation (EM) has been a matter of interest to researchers for decades. How this is measured or the motivations of managers to engage in such actions have been studied in detail. Some studies find that managers have incentives to manipulate the earnings that accompany financing activities such as seasoned equity offerings (SEO). Under the corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach, profit manipulation actions have been shown to be mitigated in socially responsible companies. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that analyse whether CSR mitigate EM actions in a SEO context. Our work contributes to filling this gap. We investigate whether socially responsible companies exhibit EM in periods prior to SEO. This study uses a panel data model of listed non-financial firms from countries with the same currency and similar accounting rules (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) between 2012 and 2020. Our results show that in all the countries analysed, except Spain, there is a manipulation of operating cash flows in the year prior to capital increases, and only in French companies is there a decrease in the management of this variable in companies with higher development of corporate social responsibility.

A Reconfigurable Data Glove for Reconstructing Physical and Virtual Grasps

In this work, we present a reconfigurable data glove design to capture different modes of human hand–object interactions, which are critical in training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents for fine manipulation tasks. To achieve various downstream tasks with distinct features, our reconfigurable data glove operates in three modes sharing a unified backbone design that reconstructs hand gestures in real time. In the tactile-sensing mode, the glove system aggregates manipulation force via customized force sensors made from a soft and thin piezoresistive material; this design minimizes interference during complex hand movements. The virtual reality (VR) mode enables real-time interaction in a physically plausible fashion: A caging-based approach is devised to determine stable grasps by detecting collision events. Leveraging a state-of-the-art finite element method, the simulation mode collects data on fine-grained four-dimensional manipulation events comprising hand and object motions in three-dimensional space and how the object’s physical properties (e.g., stress and energy) change in accordance with manipulation over time. Notably, the glove system presented here is the first to use high-fidelity simulation to investigate the unobservable physical and causal factors behind manipulation actions. In a series of experiments, we characterize our data glove in terms of individual sensors and the overall system. More specifically, we evaluate the system’s three modes by ① recording hand gestures and associated forces, ② improving manipulation fluency in VR, and ③ producing realistic simulation effects of various tool uses, respectively. Based on these three modes, our reconfigurable data glove collects and reconstructs fine-grained human grasp data in both physical and virtual environments, thereby opening up new avenues for the learning of manipulation skills for embodied AI agents.

Linguistic means of speech manipulation in the discourse of modern German-language media

The article touches upon the problem of identifying and analyzing speech manipulation in the texts of German-speaking media. Media determine linguistic and cultural pictures of the world, so the analysis of media language will help to establish trends of influence on the cognitive consciousness of society. In today’s geopolitical environment, the basic functions of the media transform as they use specific techniques of speech manipulation to achieve informational and emotive effectiveness, allowing for the distortion of the cognitive perception of information by the audience. The material for this study was German-language media texts, selected by means of a total sampling and semanticsyntactic analysis. The relevance of the study is in its linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The author states that in the conditions of information pollution all the participants of communication should be able to distinguish the speech manipulation in the text, to qualify information in terms of its significance or reliability, and to calculate the risks of facing manipulative actions. Taking into account the peculiarities of speech manipulation methods used in the modern German-language media texts, the recipient must have sufficient interpretational competence to allow him to overcome the barriers that prevent the identification and mental comprehension of the means of speech manipulation in the texts of foreign-language publications.The main purpose of the study is to remove some difficulties in the perception of information in the German-language media text by presenting signs of indirect pressure and speech manipulation in them. To this end, the article classifies the basic techniques of speech manipulation in terms of linguistic analysis, and also justifies the expediency of the formations of interpretative competence in the sphere of epistemic vigilance. The effectiveness of this competence in relation to leveling the negative impact of the discourse of German-language media on the cognitive consciousness of the audience is argued.

Singapore grouper iridovirus infection counteracts poly I:C induced antiviral immune response in vitro

Groupers are important mariculture fish in South China and Southeast Asian countries. However, the increasing frequency of infectious disease outbreaks has caused great economic losses in the grouper industry. Among these pathogens, Singapore grouper iridovirus (SGIV) infection causes high mortality in larval and juvenile stages of grouper. However, the mechanism underlying the action of viral manipulation on cellular immune response still remained largely uncertain. Here, using RNA-seq technology, we investigated the regulatory roles of SGIV infection on synthetic RNA duplex poly I:C induced immune response in vitro. Using reporter gene assays, we found that SGIV infection decreased poly I:C induced interferon promoter activation. Transcriptomic analysis showed that the mRNA expression levels of 2238 genes were up-regulated, while 1247 genes were down-regulated in poly I:C transfected grouper spleen (GS) cells. Interestingly, SGIV infection decreased the expression of 1479 up-regulated genes and increased the expression of 297 down-regulated genes in poly I:C transfected cells. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) down-regulated by SGIV were directly related to immune, inflammation and viral infection, and JUN, STAT1, NFKB1, MAPK14A, TGFB1 and MX were the 6 top hub genes in the down-regulated DEGs’ protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. Furthermore, quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) analysis confirmed that the interferon signaling and inflammatory-related genes, including cGAS, STING, TBK1, MAVS, TNF, IRAK4 and NOD2 were up-regulated by poly I:C stimulation, but all significantly down-regulated after SGIV infection. Thus, we speculated that SGIV infection counteracted poly I:C induced antiviral immune response and this ability helped itself to escape host immune surveillance. Together, our data will contribute greatly to understanding the potential immune evasion mechanism of iridovirus infection in vitro.

POMDP Planning Under Object Composition Uncertainty: Application to Robotic Manipulation

Manipulating unknown objects in a cluttered environment is difficult because segmentation of the scene into objects, that is, object composition, is uncertain. Due to the uncertainty, prior work has either identified the “best” object composition and decided on manipulation actions accordingly or tried to greedily gather information about the “best” object composition. We instead, first, use different possible object compositions in planning, second, utilize object composition information provided by robot actions, third, consider the effect of competing object hypotheses on the desired task. We cast the manipulation planning problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) that plans over possible object composition hypotheses. The POMDP chooses the action that maximizes long-term expected task-specific utility, and while doing so, considers informative actions and the effect of different object hypotheses on succeeding in the task. In simulation and physical robotic experiments, a probabilistic approach outperforms using the most likely object composition, and long term planning outperforms greedy decision making.

THE STRATEGY OF “POL’SHCHIZNA” IN THE ETHNO-CONFESSIONAL CONTEXT: SOCIOCULTURAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS (ON THE EXAMPLE OF BELARUS)

The author makes an attempt, based on the work of modern domestic and foreign researchers, to give a systematic description of the strategy of "pol'shchizna", to determine the specifics of its use in the modern Belarusian ethno-confessional context, as well to reveal the role of this strategy at the beginning of the XXI century. This strategy is considered as a long-term system of indirect actions, primarily of a humanitarian plan, which are designed to solve the tasks of the "eastern policy" of the modern Polish state in the format of a comprehensive promotion of "Polishness". The article traces the design of the concept of "pol'shchizna", identifies the goal-setting ideological characteristics and cultural and historical prerequisites of this strategy, and also examines the main directions and the most successful practices of its implementation in the ethno-confessional context of modern Belarus. It is concluded that in Belarus in the 1990s - the first decades of the 21stcentury, a pro-Polish-oriented part of the population was formed, which in many ways became a support for further manipulative actions already in political terms, which was clearly shown by the events around the presidential campaign of 2020. It is argued that referring to the specific experience of implementing this political strategy is useful in modern conditions from the point of view of evaluating the effectiveness of the project of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, as well as developing Russia's own strategy in relation to this region.

Recalling Unknown Manipulations by Spontaneously Sharing Actions with Similar Objects in Observation Based Learning

This paper proposes a method for a robot to recall multiple action candidates for an object by learning object manipulations based on observation of human actions. When learning, multiple answers to a single input in supervised regression manner, it is usually necessary to map all correct answers to the same input. However, only one action can be observed for an object at a time in observing object manipulations, and other possible actions are not always observed for the identical object. It is, therefore, important to automatically share various observed actions between similar-shaped objects by recognizing common shape cues among individual objects. The proposed method learns the code descriptions of object shapes by a variational auto-encoder (VAE) with an object image as input data, and the code descriptions of actions by a conditional VAE with object shape as a condition and an action as input data. Since the action is unknown recall target, it is desirable to obtain the code description of the action from only the object shape during recalling. The distribution of the code description of actions conditioned by input object shape on the obtained code description space is obtained by marginalization of the distribution learned by the encoder part of CVAE. However, since this marginalization is difficult to analytically and numerically operate, a deep regression model that “imitates” this marginal distribution is trained by using a maximum likelihood method based on sampling. Common actions of similar-shaped objects are shared among the similar objects in this “marginalization by imitation” process. Various possible actions for the input object shape can be recalled by repeatedly sampling from the imitated marginal distribution. This paper describes the results of experiment using actual object images and manipulation actions, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The Challenges of Social Media Platforms. Aspects of the Social Media War in Ukraine 2014-2022

Abstract The expansion of the Internet changed society and led to the emergence of new technologies such as social media platforms. They offer opportunities for data exchange at such a level, unimaginable before the information era. At the same time, the anonymity of online users opens new silent back doors for those who want to disrupt society through systematic manipulation of social networks. The paper analyzes a series of events and actions of manipulation, disinformation and propaganda directed against NATO member countries and allies, in which social media were used, including aspects of the current social media war in Ukraine.

Mapping out Liberating Traces of the Fun of Undisciplined Play: A Search for an Alternative Aesthetic in Graffiti

Aim. The present study primarily engages with graffiti as a tactic of the weak who find pleasure in scandalising the dominant discourse. The prime focus here will be on the pleasure as resistance, on the construction of an alternative space into the dominant space, and on the multiple forms of evasive and resisting techniques through which the subordinate asserts their power. Thus, Graffiti can be read as a popular text, a signifying construct of potential meanings and pleasures for the subordinate. Concept. Conceptualised as the undisciplined play of the subordinate people that resists or evades hegemonic forces and a radical reimagining of the neo-liberal spaces, Graffiti has become a major expression of popular culture in recent times. The paper uses many such stances where the lateral thinking of the power helps to challenge the disciplinary discourses of the dominant. Results and Conclusion. The paper offers a popular reading of graffiti that opens up the way to escape control, scandalise top-down power and to assert bottom-up power at the micro-level. The real pleasure lies in scandalising the dominant discourse. Graffiti is read here as self-assertion of the marginalised who acquire public visibility and power through graffiti creation. Originality. The originality of the study depends on reviewing the manipulative actions of people in everyday lives and how this undisciplined play provides them with the opportunity to subvert the system and to escape social control. It supports the idea that the subordinate possesses transgressive deviation in relation to the everyday continuum.

The Analysis and Discussion of Spectrum Auctions Based on Case Study

With the prevalence of technology, there is a growing demand for telecommunications, which has led to a scarcity of spectrum. In order to allocate the usage of the spectrum more rationally, many countries have started to use spectrum auctions that can maximize the utilization of limited spectrum resources. However, some potential risks, such as insecurity, might be caused during the process of auctioning the spectrum. This article analyzes the spectrum auctions based on a series of case studies, obtaining the advantages and disadvantages of the discussion. Besides, there is a need for more research to be carried out to investigate the fraudulent conduct of some auctioneers and the manipulative actions of bidders.

Factors of the psychological status in victims of radiation accidents, which mitigate development of psychosomatic disorders in the long term

Relevance. In terms of environmental and social dimensions, the Chernobyl accident is the largest in the history of Russia. Radiation-hazardous incidents also occurred on nuclear submarines. The leading medical consequences of various radiation accidents in the remote period were the presence of psychosomatic pathology among the liquidators of the consequences of accidents. Intention. To determine the leading factors of psychological status among liquidators of the consequences of radiation accidents, which mitigate the development of psychosomatic disorders in the long term. Methodology. In 2019, a comprehensive in-hospital examination of 101 male liquidators of the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was conducted. The examined persons were (65.2 ± 0.7) years old, the average radiation dose was 18 cSv. All surveyed liquidators had somatic pathology with an important contribution of psychogenic factors (hypertension, metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus, gastric/duodenum ulcer etc.). The psychological status was assessed using well-known tests. As a control, we used the reference indicators of the methods for similar gender and age groups. The information obtained was checked for normality of distribution. Arithmetic mean values and their errors (M ± m) are provided. Using the factor analysis with rotation of the array, the factors of psychological status were established. Results and Discussion. It turned out that the liquidators of the consequences of the accident have lowered indicators reflecting an active life position and quality of life. When the respective accident was mentioned, they showed irritability, a feeling of tension and alertness, which indicated their anxiety-phobic experience even in the remote period after the accident. Interest in life, its emotional saturation, and self-confidence were decreased. At the same time, indicators of manipulative and antisocial actions were lower vs the control group. In the factor analysis of psychological indicators using principal components with rotation, 5 factors were formed with a total variance of 58.6 %. Factors with higher association contained psychological signs that contributed to or mitigated psychosomatic disorders as follows: Factor 1, named as “Active life position”, accounted for 31.3 % of the total variance; Factor 2 “Negative socio-psychological consequences of a radiation accident” - 10.1%; Factor 3 “Quality of life” - 8.1 %; Factor 4 “Non-constructive models of behavior in a difficult life situation” - 4.9 %; Factor 5 “Mental health” - 4.1 %. Conclusion. The factor analysis of the results from liquidators of the radiation accident helped identify the leading positive qualities and maladjustment problems that can be targets for psycho-prophylaxis.

The Role of Anthocyanin Substances from Dragon Fruit Skin Extract in Formalin Content Testing in White Tofu

One of the high-quality processed vegetable food ingredients is tofu. Tofu is made from processed soy milk with a thick texture and molded according to the right nutritional amount. White tofu is the most popular of the various forms of tofu available. Today, tofu producers have taken manipulative actions to anticipate production losses by including preservatives in the mix of ingredients used to make tofu. Most of the tofu production centers provide additional ingredients in the form of preservatives such as formalin to reduce losses from damage to the tofu they produce. The presence or absence of formalin in food can be detected using a unique component found in dragon fruit peel called anthocyanins. The methodology applied in this research is a simple and direct one, with primary data collected in the form of testing samples of white tofu collected from numerous traditional markets in the Banten area (up to ten samples). The aim of the research is to identify formalin in white tofu discovered in numerous traditional markets in Banten using natural component extracts, including dragon fruit peel extract. The results stated that there were two positive samples containing formalin and eight negative samples; the presence of formalin in tofu was indicated by a red color on the tissue. Sellers or customers can detect formalin simply by utilizing dragon fruit, allowing them to avoid formin which is harmful to health, with a simple and low-cost method.

Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Affordances for Grasping and Manipulation

Robust vision-based grasping and manipulation of unknown objects in unstructured scenes requires the extraction of action candidates based on visual information while taking into account noise and occlusions in such scenes. We address this problem by combining the concept of affordances and <i>Bayesian Recursive State Estimation</i>. We propose to extract affordances using heuristics on the averaged local surface information of supervoxels in a point cloud. Based on a local, geometry-aware coordinate frame, we define a uniform state for different affordances. Using Bayesian statistics, this state is fused across multiple observations of the scene to improve the estimates for the pose and existence certainty of actions. This facilitates the extraction of robust grasping and manipulation actions independent of the segmentation of a scene. The proposed approach is evaluated in grasping experiments with more than 900 grasp executions using the humanoid robot ARMAR-6 in an unstructured scene with a variable number of unknown objects. The experimental results show that the grasping success rate is improved by over 10&#x0025; compared to a state-of-the-art approach.

INTEREST RATE BENCHMARK REFORMS IN EURO ZONE AND UNITED STATES

The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of implementing reforms in the bank lending market and its consequences. During the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, there was a decrease in confidence and thus a decline in the turnover in the bank lending market. Consequently, the benchmark interest rates did not present the conditions for lending funds between banks, but were a reflection of manipulative actions by participants. This reduced liquidity in the bank lending market, as well as the unreliability of the methods of calculating benchmark interest rates, became a source of financial vulnerability and endangering the stability and security of operations for all participants in the financial market. For this reason, in 2012, the process of reforming benchmark interest rates at the global level began, which represents the most significant change in the global financial market in recent history. The reforms were implemented with the aim of increasing transparency in the calculation of benchmark interest rates, which increases their reliability of calculation and prevents the possibility of manipulation while protecting investors and users of all financial services. Of great importance is the analysis of the consequences of benchmark reforms and the impact on all participants in the financial market.

Marine Robotics for Deep-Sea Specimen Collection: A Taxonomy of Underwater Manipulative Actions.

In order to develop a gripping system or control strategy that improves scientific sampling procedures, knowledge of the process and the consequent definition of requirements is fundamental. Nevertheless, factors influencing sampling procedures have not been extensively described, and selected strategies mostly depend on pilots’ and researchers’ experience. We interviewed 17 researchers and remotely operated vehicle (ROV) technical operators, through a formal questionnaire or in-person interviews, to collect evidence of sampling procedures based on their direct field experience. We methodologically analyzed sampling procedures to extract single basic actions (called atomic manipulations). Available equipment, environment and species-specific features strongly influenced the manipulative choices. We identified a list of functional and technical requirements for the development of novel end-effectors for marine sampling. Our results indicate that the unstructured and highly variable deep-sea environment requires a versatile system, capable of robust interactions with hard surfaces such as pushing or scraping, precise tuning of gripping force for tasks such as pulling delicate organisms away from hard and soft substrates, and rigid holding, as well as a mechanism for rapidly switching among external tools.

Broca's cerebral asymmetry reflects gestural communication's lateralisation in monkeys (Papio anubis).

Manual gestures and speech recruit a common neural network, involving Broca's area in the left hemisphere. Such speech-gesture integration gave rise to theories on the critical role of manual gesturing in the origin of language. Within this evolutionary framework, research on gestural communication in our closer primate relatives has received renewed attention for investigating its potential language-like features. Here, using in vivo anatomical MRI in 50 baboons, we found that communicative gesturing is related to Broca homologue's marker in monkeys, namely the ventral portion of the Inferior Arcuate sulcus (IA sulcus). In fact, both direction and degree of gestural communication's handedness - but not handedness for object manipulation are associated and correlated with contralateral depth asymmetry at this exact IA sulcus portion. In other words, baboons that prefer to communicate with their right hand have a deeper left-than-right IA sulcus, than those preferring to communicate with their left hand and vice versa. Interestingly, in contrast to handedness for object manipulation, gestural communication's lateralisation is not associated to the Central sulcus depth asymmetry, suggesting a double dissociation of handedness' types between manipulative action and gestural communication. It is thus not excluded that this specific gestural lateralisation signature within the baboons' frontal cortex might reflect a phylogenetical continuity with language-related Broca lateralisation in humans.

Фінансовий моніторинг на ринку цінних паперів України

The purpose of the article is to study the current status of financial monitoring carried out in the securities market of Ukraine. The article analyzes the activities of the entities of the State-based financial monitoring and primary financial monitoring in the stock market of Ukraine. Their main functions and tasks in the financial monitoring system are distinguished. Based on the carried out research, it is concluded that securities are often used in illegal schemes (withdrawal of assets outside Ukraine, minimization of tax liabilities, tax evasion, etc.) that precede the laundering of criminal income. One of the risky instruments of the financial market was also the purchase and sale of domestic government bonds. On the one hand, this type of securities can be considered one of the most reliable financial instruments due to its high liquidity and wide range of applications. At the same time, the high demand and peculiarities of execution of contracts concluded on the stock exchange for the purchase/sale of domestic government bonds make them attractive in schemes of legalization of illegal income, especially for public figures who must declare their wealth. Considering the nature of reports of violations of securities transactions, it can be concluded that there is a high proportion of possible schemes for legalizing dirty funds. Under martial law, there have been significant changes in the process of identification and verification of clients of the primary financial monitoring entities in order to simplify the purchase of government securities. Thus it is worth noting that the largest share of violations of financial legislation falls on government bonds, which have become available to various categories of investors (including individuals). This fact may contribute to the emergence of new schemes for laundering (legalization) of proceeds from crime. Therefore, the entities of the State-based financial monitoring should develop a system of hedging risks regarding the placement of government bonds among different categories of investors. This is especially true of the over-the-counter market. It is worth noting that this segment of the stock market is under the partial control of the national depository of the NBU. Therefore, it is proposed to create an entity in the securities market that would adopt the functions of controlling and preventing fraudulent and manipulative actions with securities.