Sex dolls are passively jointed human-like structures. Their limited but non negligible dissemination may suggest future new modes of sexual and affective relationships with sex robots. Understanding the quality of the relationship between a owner and his/her sex doll could help us to anticipate the social consequences of future sex robots. In this framework, we propose, from available testimonies reporting a large range of behaviors including sexual relationships, destructive behaviors, or installation of the doll in the daily life of the owner, or romance with the doll generally expressed by photographies, to interpret the sex doll as a new form of transitional object in the words of Winnicott. Moreover, the hyper-sexualized appearance of the doll makes easier its fetishization as a "labor of signification" according to Baudrillard’s semiotic theory. If to cherish a transitional object in adulthood can be an indicator of depressive syndromes or borderline personality disorder, no emotional disorder is necessary linked to its private use. Further studies about sex dolls and robots could so take advantage of work that was already done with other forms of transitional objects for adults.

Pneumatic actuators have inherent compliance and hence they are very interesting for applications involving interaction with environment or human. But controlling such kind of actuators is not trivial. The paper presents an implementation of iterative Linear Quadratic regulator (iLQR) based optimal control framework to control an anthropomorphic arm with each joint actuated by an agonist-antagonistic pair of Mckibben artificial muscles. The method is applied to positioning tasks and generation of explosive movements by maximizing the link speed. It is then compared to traditional control strategies to justify that optimal control is effective in controlling the position in highly non-linear pneumatic systems. Also the importance of varying compliance is highlighted by repeating the tasks at different compliance level. The algorithm validation is reported here by several simulations and hardware experiments in which the shoulder and elbow flexion are controlled simultaneously.

Heider's balance is applied to the development of a method for analyzing the opinion-changes during a robotization process in a social activity. The main idea of the approach consists in distinguishing the mental representation of the function to robotize from the mental representation of the robot dedicated to the task.

This study focuses on biomimetic sensory motor control of a robotic arm. We have developed a command circuit that was mathematically deduced from physical and mathematical constraints describing the function of cerebellar pathways. The control circuit contains an internal predictive model of the direct biomechanical function of the limb placed in a closed loop, so that the circuit computes an approximate inverse function. The structure of the model resembles the anatomic connectivity of the cerebellar pathways. In this paper, we present an application of this model to the control of a 2-link robotic arm actuated by four single-joint McKibben muscles and report the results obtained by simulation and real-time learning of 2 degrees of freedom pointing movements.

For new robot applications, as medical robots, safety has became a major concern. The human sharing the working area with the robot led to integrate the field of human factors in the development. Hence, the human component has to be integrated in the early steps of the development process. Regards to the complexity of today's robotic application, and to the requirements of a teamwork, we choose UML as the language. This paper focuses on the UML modeling contribution to the human factors analysis of a medical robot. A first section presents the function allocation and task analysis step, and a second section deals with human error. Each section is illustrated by a case study of a system for robotic tele-echography (ultrasound scan examination).

This paper presents the principal functionalities of robot-manipulator controllers and a comparative study of two development methods for real-time systems applied to this controller. The selected techniques are SART and the unified method associated to UML, because they represent two classical types of modelling techniques: structured design with functional decomposition and object-oriented methodology. We analyse seven design issues associated to the robot controller development process and its utilisation comparing these two methods.