Training in virtual environments: transfer to real world tasks and equivalence to real task training

Virtual environments (VEs) are extensively used in training but there have been few rigorous scientific investigations of whether and how skills learned in a VE are transferred to the real world. This research aimed to measure and evaluate what is transferring from training a simple sensorimotor task in a VE to real world performance. In experiment 1, real world performances after virtual training, real training and no training were compared. Virtual and real training resulted in equivalent levels of post-training performance, both of which significantly exceeded task performance without training. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether virtual and real trained real world performances differed in their susceptibility to cognitive and motor interfering tasks (experiment 2) and in terms of spare attentional capacity to respond to stimuli and instructions which were not directly related to the task (experiment 3). The only significant difference found was that real task performance after training in a VE was less affected by concurrently performed interference tasks than was real task performance after training on the real task. This finding is discussed in terms of the cognitive load characteristics of virtual training. Virtual training therefore resulted in equivalent or even better real world performance than real training in this simple sensorimotor task, but this finding may not apply to other training tasks. Future research should be directed towards establishing a comprehensive knowledge of what is being transferred to real world performance in other tasks currently being trained in VEs and investigating the equivalence of virtual and real trained performances in these situations.     

Training in virtual environments: transfer to real world tasks and equivalence to real task training

Virtual environments (VEs) are extensively used in training but there have been few rigorous scientific investigations of whether and how skills learned in a VE are transferred to the real world. This research aimed to measure and evaluate what is transferring from training a simple sensorimotor task in a VE to real world performance. In experiment 1, real world performances after virtual training, real training and no training were compared. Virtual and real training resulted in equivalent levels of post-training performance, both of which significantly exceeded task performance without training. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether virtual and real trained real world performances differed in their susceptibility to cognitive and motor interfering tasks (experiment 2) and in terms of spare attentional capacity to respond to stimuli and instructions which were not directly related to the task (experiment 3). The only significant difference found was that real task performance after training in a VE was less affected by concurrently performed interference tasks than was real task performance after training on the real task. This finding is discussed in terms of the cognitive load characteristics of virtual training. Virtual training therefore resulted in equivalent or even better real world performance than real training in this simple sensorimotor task, but this finding may not apply to other training tasks. Future research should be directed towards establishing a comprehensive knowledge of what is being transferred to real world performance in other tasks currently being trained in VEs and investigating the equivalence of virtual and real trained performances in these situations.     

The classification of vigilance tasks in the real world

The ability to generalise vigilance research to operational environments has been questioned, largely due to differences between laboratory research and real-world settings. The taxonomy of vigilance tasks proposed by Parasuraman and Davies (1977) represents an attempt to classify vigilance tasks so that tasks with similar information-processing demands can be compared and the ability to generalise results enhanced. Although the taxonomy originally included complexity, the term specifically referred to multiple sources of information. Complexity has been overlooked in much of the traditional vigilance literature, although it is included in more recent studies of jobs such as air traffic control. In this paper, the taxonomy is evaluated in relation to two vigilance intensive jobs - closed circuit television surveillance operators and air traffic controllers. In its present form, the existing taxonomy of experimental settings has limited applicability to these operational settings. Therefore, recommendations for expanding the taxonomy to include more aspects of complexity are made. It is argued that the revised taxonomy be used in conjunction with situation awareness, which makes provision for the cognitive processes involved in these jobs.     

The classification of vigilance tasks in the real world

The ability to generalise vigilance research to operational environments has been questioned, largely due to differences between laboratory research and real-world settings. The taxonomy of vigilance tasks proposed by Parasuraman and Davies (1977 Parasuraman, R. and Davies, D. R. 1977. “A taxonomic analysis of vigilance performance”. In Vigilance: Theory, operational performance, and physiological correlates, Edited by: Mackie, R. R. 559–574. New York: Plenum. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) represents an attempt to classify vigilance tasks so that tasks with similar information-processing demands can be compared and the ability to generalise results enhanced. Although the taxonomy originally included complexity, the term specifically referred to multiple sources of information. Complexity has been overlooked in much of the traditional vigilance literature, although it is included in more recent studies of jobs such as air traffic control. In this paper, the taxonomy is evaluated in relation to two vigilance intensive jobs – closed circuit television surveillance operators and air traffic controllers. In its present form, the existing taxonomy of experimental settings has limited applicability to these operational settings. Therefore, recommendations for expanding the taxonomy to include more aspects of complexity are made. It is argued that the revised taxonomy be used in conjunction with situation awareness, which makes provision for the cognitive processes involved in these jobs.     

Survey-based exploration of attitudes to participatory sensing tasks in location-based gaming communities

An increasing number of participatory sensing applications have been developed in recent years. However, most of them are still in the early adoption phase and count only few users as compared to the billions of devices that could be leveraged. On the other side, existing location-based games, such as geocaching or Ingress, gain in popularity and attract up to millions of users worldwide. Since the players of location-based games are already exploring their environment, one approach could be to especially address these communities in order to increase the user base of participatory sensing applications. To this end, we conduct a preliminary questionnaire-based study involving 337 participants to investigate the possible attitudes of such players towards participatory sensing applications. In particular, we analyze the potential interests of our participants in sensing tasks based on their demographics, played games, and sensing modalities. Our results show that our participants would prefer contributing to sensing tasks when integrated in geocaching. Moreover, a point-based reward system would not significantly motivate them and could even have negative consequences.     

Multimodal sensing and active continuous closed‐loop feedback for achieving reliable manipulation in the outdoor physical world

The use of field robots can greatly decrease the amount of time, effort, and associated risk compared to if human workers were to carryout certain tasks such as disaster response. However, transportability and reliability remain two main issues for most current robot systems. To address the issue of transportability, we have developed a lightweight modularizable platform named AeroArm. To address the issue of reliability, we utilize a multimodal sensing approach, combining the use of multiple sensors and sensor types, and the use of different detection algorithms, as well as active continuous closed‐loop feedback to accurately estimate the state of the robot with respect to the environment. We used Challenge 2 of the 2017 Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition as an example outdoor manipulation task, demonstrating the capabilities of our robot system and approach in achieving reliable performance in the fields, and ranked fifth place internationally in the competition.     

Connecting the physical world with pervasive networks

This article addresses the challenges and opportunities of instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks of sensor-rich, embedded computation. The authors present a taxonomy of emerging systems and outline the enabling technological developments.     

Planning of sensing tasks in an assembly environment

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of past and recent work on planning sensing strategies for vision sensors. To achieve an economic use of robots in manufacturing, their programs must provide a high degree of fault-tolerance, security, and robustness to prevent unforeseen errors. Model errors (also termed uncertainties) are one of the most frequent reasons for such undesirable events. Robot systems can be made more reliable and fault-tolerant by providing them with capabilities of error detection and recovery, or error prevention. The latter may be achieved by reducing model errors using tactile and non-tactile sensors. The quality of a robot program synthesized by a task-level programming system depends on the accuracy of the model, since all information that is not explicitly given by the programmer must be derived from it. This means that the following questions have to be answered by the automatic task planner in order to plan non-tactile sensing strategies: (1) When do I have to use sensors to reduce uncertainty about the real world? (2) What do I have to use them for? (3) How do I have to use them to achieve the necessary information within an acceptable period of time? There are very few systems which deal broadly with the problem of robust robot programs, whereas there are numerous works on detail aspects of the field. The main approaches will be introduced and discussed in more detail. Finally, a new concept for generating sensor-integrated robust robot programs will be proposed.     

Performance of physical tasks in pregnancy.

Two hundred women in the third trimester of a first pregnancy were interviewed, and 50 of them were interviewed again at 4 months post partum. They were asked whether they experienced greater current difficulty in performing 46 common tasks than they did before pregnancy and were asked to grade their responses. Additional information concerning specific factors affecting each activity, such as discomfort and fatigue, was obtained, together with data concerning socioeconomic status and stress perception. The data were analysed to identify the activities whose performance was most and least affected by pregnancy, indicating that the pregnant condition affects perceived difficulty of performance in many activities. Although some activities are not amenable to ergonomic intervention, the study highlighted some in which equipment design and selection could improve the match between a task and the pregnant.     

Performance evaluation of pure-motion tasks for mobile robots with respect to world models

The evaluation of the performance of robot motion methods and systems is still an open challenge, although substantial progress has been made in the field over the years. On the one hand, these techniques cannot be evaluated off-line, on the other hand, they are deeply influenced by the task, the environment and the specific representation chosen for it. In this paper we concentrate on “pure-motion tasks”: tasks that require to move the robot from one configuration to another, either being an independent sub-task of a more complex plan or representing a goal by itself. After characterizing the goals and the tasks, we describe the commonly-used problem decomposition and different kinds of modeling that can be used, from accurate metric maps to minimalistic representations. The contribution of this paper is an evaluation framework that we adopt in a set of experiments showing how the performance of the motion system can be affected by the use of different kinds of environment representations.     

Optimizing the stretch of independent tasks on a cluster: From sequential tasks to moldable tasks

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling non-preemptive moldable tasks to minimize the stretch of the tasks in an online non-clairvoyant setting. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this problem has never been studied before. To tackle this problem, first the sequential subproblem is studied through the lens of the approximation theory. An algorithm, called DASEDF, is proposed and, through simulations, it is shown to outperform the first-come, first-served scheme. Furthermore, it is observed that machine availability is the key to getting good stretch values. Then, the moldable task scheduling problem is considered, and, by leveraging the results from the sequential case, another algorithm, DBOS, is proposed to optimize the stretch while scheduling moldable tasks. This work is motivated by a task scheduling problem in the context of parallel short sequence mapping which has important applications in biology and genetics. The proposed DBOS algorithm is evaluated both on synthetic data sets that represent short sequence mapping requests and on data sets generated using log files of real production clusters. The results show that the DBOS algorithm significantly outperforms the two state-of-the-art task scheduling algorithms on stretch optimization.     

The virtual world gets physical: perspectives on personalization

MusicFX and GroupCast illustrate some benefits possible from extending the personalization of electronic content in the virtual world to applications in the physical world. Utilizing individual preferences in the physical world, particularly in public spaces, infringes on people's privacy more than it does in the virtual world, where it is easier to maintain different addresses and aliases that can shield or mask personal details from online interactions. However, the use of these preferences in a group context, where some degree of plausible deniability exists, may diminish people's concerns. If sufficient benefits are provided - think of a world without "elevator music" - people might even embrace the technologies that will make adaptive environments possible     

移动群智感知中的空间任务分配机制

在移动群智感知的空间任务分配问题中用户与任务的空间距离直接影响完成任务所需的成本,而现有的研究在这方面却考虑不足,因此以最小化感知成本为目标设计了移动群智感知中的空间任务分配机制。首先,以感知成本最小为目标,基于遗传算法和贪心算法设计了一种高效的任务分配方法;其次,针对用户感知质量的随机性,基于用户的历史感知情况和当前任务的执行情况设计了用户感知质量的更新机制。为验证所提机制的效果,通过仿真实验与两种基准的任务分配方法作比较。实验结果表明,所提机制在感知总成本和用户执行任务所移动的总距离等方面均有更好的效果,因此该空间任务分配机制具有很好的应用前景。     

An efficient pricing strategy of sensing tasks for crowdphotographing

The Journal of Supercomputing - The advancement of mobile Internet and ubiquitous computing is facilitating various crowdsourcing services in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and...     

Cyber–physical systems: Extending pervasive sensing from control theory to the Internet of Things

Essentially, the emerging term “Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS)” is an architectural paradigm in which the pervasive sensing technologies represent a fundamental part. Originally defined in the computer sciences domain, the term Cyber–Physical Systems has been adapted to very different domains such as the control theory or electronic engineering. Even, some authors understand CPS as a particular scenario of the Internet of Things (IoT) based on pervasive sensing. Furthermore, recently, some works propose a definition for CPS including all the features described in the different domains. In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the nature and characteristics of the different proposals, discuss the recent attempts to standardize CPS, and review the state-of-the-art on CPS for each technological domain. We compare those different proposals on CPS, discuss about some related terms and technologies and conclude by describing the main research challenges in the area.     

Online credit card fraud outpaces physical world

Figures don’t lie. E-commerce on retail Web sites is on the rise. But worryingly so is online credit card fraud… And it outpaces fraud in the physical world 12-fold.     

Development of physical selection procedures for the British Army. Phase 2: relationship between physical performance tests and criterion tasks

This paper is the second in a series of three to describe the development of physical selection standards for the British Army. The first paper defined criterion tasks (single lift, carry, repetitive lift and carry, and loaded march tasks) and set standards on the criterion tasks for all British Army trades. The principal objective was to determine which combination of physical performance tests could be best used to predict criterion task performance. Secondary objectives included developing so-called 'gender-free' and 'gender-unbiased' models. The objectives were met by analysing performance data on the criterion tasks and a large battery of physical performance tests collected from 379 trained soldiers (mean age 23.5 (SD 4.45) years, stature 1734 (SD 79.5) mm, body mass 71.4 (SD 10.58) kg). Objective 1 was met: the most predictive physical performance tests were identified for all criterion tasks. Both single lift tasks were successfully modelled using muscle strength and fat free mass scores. The carry model incorporated muscle endurance and body size data, but the errors of prediction were large. The repetitive lift models included measures of muscle strength and endurance, and body size, but errors of prediction were also large. The loaded march tasks were successfully modelled incorporating indices of aerobic fitness, supplemented by measures of strength, endurance or body size and composition. The secondary objectives were partially fulfilled, though limitations in the data hampered the process. Although only one model (a loaded march) was gender-free, three models were gender-related (i.e. contained 'gender' explicitly in the model). The remaining six were gender-specific (i.e. were appropriate for men or for women). Owing to both a lower accuracy of prediction in women's scores and a greater tendency for the women's scores to be distributed around the pass standards, a greater percentage of women than men were misclassified as passing or failing, resulting in indirect discrimination. A validation of the models in a separate sample of the user population of recruits is reported in the third paper in this series.     

Development of physical selection procedures for the British Army. Phase 2: Relationship between physical performance tests and criterion tasks

This paper is the second in a series of three to describe the development of physical selection standards for the British Army. The first paper defined criterion tasks (single lift, carry, repetitive lift and carry, and loaded march tasks) and set standards on the criterion tasks for all British Army trades. The principal objective was to determine which combination of physical performance tests could be best used to predict criterion task performance. Secondary objectives included developing so-called ‘gender-free’ and ‘gender-unbiased’ models. The objectives were met by analysing performance data on the criterion tasks and a large battery of physical performance tests collected from 379 trained soldiers (mean age 23.5 (SD 4.45) years, stature 1734 (SD 79.5) mm, body mass 71.4 (SD 10.58) kg). Objective 1 was met: the most predictive physical performance tests were identified for all criterion tasks. Both single lift tasks were successfully modelled using muscle strength and fat free mass scores. The carry model incorporated muscle endurance and body size data, but the errors of prediction were large. The repetitive lift models included measures of muscle strength and endurance, and body size, but errors of prediction were also large. The loaded march tasks were successfully modelled incorporating indices of aerobic fitness, supplemented by measures of strength, endurance or body size and composition. The secondary objectives were partially fulfilled, though limitations in the data hampered the process. Although only one model (a loaded march) was gender-free, three models were gender-related (i.e. contained ‘gender’ explicitly in the model). The remaining six were gender-specific (i.e. were appropriate for men or for women). Owing to both a lower accuracy of prediction in women's scores and a greater tendency for the women's scores to be distributed around the pass standards, a greater percentage of women than men were misclassified as passing or failing, resulting in indirect discrimination. A validation of the models in a separate sample of the user population of recruits is reported in the third paper in this series.     

Relationship between fire fighting suppression tasks and physical fitness.

This investigation evaluated the relationship between physical fitness and performance of fire suppression tasks. The following mean +/- SD values were associated with 91 fire fighters: age 31.69 +/- 7.39 years, height 177.29 +/- 6.38 cm, weight 83.97 +/- 10.86 kg, % fat 13.78 +/- 4.31, fat free weight (FFW) 71.52 +/- 7.66 kg, pull-ups 9.03 +/- 4.79, push-ups 41.02 +/- 14.08, 1.5 mile run 737.60 +/- 108.11 s, sit and reach 32.00 +/- 8.5 cm, sit-ups 39.88 +/- 7.75, and total grip strength 116.75 +/- 17.67 kg. The physical performance assessment (PPA) consisted of the following: stair climb, hoist, forcible entry, hose advance, and victim rescue. Significant correlations (p < 0.01) were found between the PPA and the following: total grip strength (r = -0.54), FFW (r = -0.47), height (r = -0.40), pull-ups (r = -0.38), push-ups (r = -0.38), 1.5 mile run (r = 0.38), sit-ups (r = -0.32), weight (r = -0.30) and % fat (r = 0.30). Multiple regression analysis indicated that the best multiple predictor of PPA was the 1.5 mile run, FFW, and pull-ups, r = 0.73, p < 0.001. This investigation shows the importance of physical fitness as related to performance of fire suppression job tasks.