Automation is one of the key solutions proposed and adopted by international Air Transport research programs to meet the challenges of increasing air traffic. For automation to be safe and usable, it needs to be suitable to the activity it supports, both when authoring it and when operating it. Here we present Vizir, a Domain-Specific Graphical Language and an Environment for authoring and operating airport automations. We used a participatory-design process with Air Traffic Controllers to gather requirements for Vizir and to design its features. Vizir combines visual interaction-oriented programming constructs with activity-related geographic areas and events. Vizir offers explicit human-control constructs, graphical substrates and means to scale-up with multiple automations. We propose a set of guidelines to inspire designers of similar usable hybrid human-automation systems.

A method of regrasp planning for humanoid robot manipulation is proposed. We adopt pivoting manipulation for the humanoid robot to move a bulky object without lifting in a stable and dexterous manner. In order to carry the object to a desired place, the humanoid should sometimes move through narrow areas surrounded by obstacles. We propose a roadmap multiplexing planning to allow the robot to leave the object near narrow places and to regrasp it from another position to continue carrying. We utilize visibility probabilistic roadmap (PRM) method as a preprocessing to capture the critical configurations for regrasping. Then a diffusion method is employed to plan the overall manipulation path including regrasping. The proposed method is verified through planning simulation including whole-body motions.

This paper emphasizes on the capacity of a humanoid robot to perform tasks that are difficult for other types of robots. It deals with manipulation of bulky objects. Such tasks require complicated manipulations involving the whole-body and fine coordination between legs, arms and torso motions. We introduce here a whole-body motion planner that allows a humanoid robot to autonomously plan a pivoting strategy that accounts for the various constraints: collision avoidance, legs-arms coordination and stability control. Based on a previous result by the authors [1] proving the small-time controllability of a pivoting system, the planner is proven to inherit from the probabilistic completeness of the samplingbased motion planning method it is built on. The geometric and kinematic capacity of the proposed planner is mainly demonstrated through simulations and experiments.

Pivoting manipulation has such advantages as dexterity and safety over other methods to move bulky or heavy objects. In this paper we aim to show that a polyhedral object can be displaced to arbitrary position and orientation on a plane (i.e. such a pivoting system is controllable). More than that we show it is small time controllable, i.e. the reachable space from a starting point contains always a neighbor no matter how cluttered the environment is. As a consequence of this analysis, we propose a steering method to plan a manipulation path to be performed by a humanoid robot: first we use a classical nonholonomic path planner that accounts for the robot motion constraints, and then we transform that path into a sequence of pivoting operations. While the feasibility of elementary pivoting tasks has been already experienced by the humanoid robot HRP-2, we present here the very first simulations of the plans generated by our steering method.