This paper presents an I/O interface with Xtalk Minimizing Affine Signaling (XMAS), which is designed to support high-speed data transmission in high-density interconnects susceptible to crosstalk. The operating principles of XMAS are elucidated through rigorous analyses, and its advantages over existing signaling are validated through numerical experiments. XMAS not only demonstrates exceptional crosstalk removing capabilities but also exhibits robustness against noise, especially simultaneous switching noise. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the prototype XMAS transceiver achieves a wire density of 3.6TB/s/mm and an energy efficiency of 0.65pJ/b. Compared to the single-ended signaling, the crosstalk-induced peak-to-peak jitter of the received eye with XMAS is reduced by 75% at 10GS/s/pin data rate, and the horizontal eye opening extends to 0.2UI at a bit error rate$\lt 10{^{-12}}$.

This paper presents a new, multidisciplinary robotics programming course, reports initial results, and describes subsequent improvements. With equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics, the course teaches students how software engineering applies to robotics. Students learn independently and interactively and gain hands-on experience by implementing robotics algorithms on a real robot. To understand the effects of the course, we conducted an exit and an 8-month survey and measured software quality of the students' solutions. The analysis shows that the hands-on experience helped everyone learn and retain robotics well, but the students' knowledge gain in software engineering depended on their prior programming knowledge. Based on these findings, we propose improvements to the course. Lastly, we reflect our experience on andragogy, minimalism, and interactive learning.

This paper presents SmartWalker and evaluates the appropriateness and usefulness of the walker and its gesture-based interface for the elderly. As a high-tech extension of a regular walker, the SmartWalker aims to assist its user intelligently and navigate around its environment autonomously. Equipped with sensors and actuators, the prototype accepts gesture commands and navigates around accordingly. The gesture-based interface uses a k-nearest neighbours classifier with dynamic time warping to recognize gestures and the Viola and Jones face detector to locate the user. We evaluated the walker with 23 residents and eight staff members at five different retirement homes in Zurich. The elderly found the SmartWalker useful and exciting, but few were willing to replace their walkers by robotic walkers. Their reluctance may stem from the walker's size and weight and their unfamiliarity with technology.

Software design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software development. Growing complexity of robotics software increases the importance of applying proper software engineering principles and methods such as design patterns to robotics. Concurrency design patterns are particularly interesting to robotics because robots often have many components that can operate in parallel. However, there has not yet been any established set of reusable concurrency design patterns for robotics. For this purpose, we choose six known concurrency patterns - Future, Periodic timer, Invoke later, Active object, Cooperative cancellation, and Guarded suspension. We demonstrate how these patterns could be used for solving common robotic coordination tasks. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of the patterns and how existing robotics programming frameworks can support them.

Concurrency is inherent to robots, and using concurrency in robotics can greatly enhance performance of the robotics applications. So far, however, the use of concurrency in robotics has been limited and cumbersome. This paper presents Roboscoop, a new robotics framework based on Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming (SCOOP). SCOOP excludes data races by construction, thereby eliminating a major class of concurrent programming errors. Roboscoop utilizes SCOOP's concurrency and synchronization mechanisms for coordination in robotics applications. We demonstrate Roboscoop's simplicity by comparing Roboscoop to existing middlewares and evaluate Roboscoop's usability by employing it in education.

We implemented single-session workshops using the Thymio-II--a small, self-contained robot designed for young students, and VPL--a graphical software development environment based upon event handling. Our goal was to investigate if the students could learn this core computer science concept while enjoying themselves in the robotics context. A visual questionnaire was developed based upon the combined Bloom and SOLO taxonomies, although it proved difficult to construct a questionnaire appropriate for young students. We found that--despite the short duration of the workshop--all but the youngest students achieved the cognitive level of Unistructural Understanding, while some students achieved higher levels of Unistructural Applying. and Multistructural Understanding and Applying.

We present a novel approach for unsupervised discovery of repetitive objects from 3D point clouds. Our method assumes that objects are non-deformable and uses multiple occurrences of an object as the evidence for its existence. We segment input range data by superpixel segmentation and extract features for each segment. We search for a group of segments where each segment matches a segment in another group using a joint compatibility test. The discovered objects are then verified by the Iterative Closest Point algorithm to remove false matches. The presented method was tested on real data of complex objects. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of finding objects that occur multiple times in a scene and distinguish apart those objects of different types.

This paper proposes an object classification framework based on a geometric grammar aimed for mobile robotic applications. The paper first discusses the geometric grammar as a compact representation form for object categories with primitive parts as its constituent elements. The paper then discusses the object classification implemented as parsing of primitive parts. In particular, two approaches are discussed that constrain the search space in order to render the parsing of the primitive parts practical. The two approaches are experimentally verified, first, for a generic object category of chair applied to real range images acquired with a range camera mounted on a mobile robot and, second, for multiple generic object categories applied to synthetic range images. The experimental results show the practicability of the framework.