Developing behaviours for interaction with objects close to the body is a primary goal for any organism to survive in the world. Being able to develop such behaviours will be an essential feature in autonomous humanoid robots in order to improve their integration into human environments. Adaptable spatial abilities will make robots safer and improve their social skills, human-robot and robot-robot collaboration abilities. This work investigated how a humanoid robot can explore and create action-based representations of its peripersonal space, the region immediately surrounding the body where reaching is possible without location displacement. It presents three empirical studies based on peripersonal space findings from psychology, neuroscience and robotics. The experiments used a visual perception system based on active-vision and biologically inspired neural networks. The first study investigated the contribution of binocular vision in a reaching task. Results indicated the signal from vergence is a useful embodied depth estimation cue in the peripersonal space in humanoid robots. The second study explored the influence of morphology and postural experience on confidence levels in reaching assessment. Results showed that a decrease of confidence when assessing targets located farther from the body, possibly in accordance to errors in depth estimation from vergence for longer distances. Additionally, it was found that a proprioceptive arm-length signal extends the robot’s peripersonal space. The last experiment modelled development of the reaching skill by implementing motor synergies that progressively unlock degrees of freedom in the arm. The model was advantageous when compared to one that included no developmental stages. The contribution to knowledge of this work is extending the research on biologically-inspired methods for building robots, presenting new ways to further investigate the robotic properties involved in the dynamical adaptation to body and sensing characteristics, vision-based action, morphology and confidence levels in reaching assessment.

Mémoire (M.E.S.R.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2002. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (M A(Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Partant du constat de la nature encore relativement ambiguë du concept de développement territorial, cette thèse en propose uneapproche à la fois plus rigoureuse et plus large que la simple identification de ce dernier avec le développement économique. Le chemind’analyse choisi s’articule en quatre phases, chacune traitée dans un chapitre différent.Tout d’abord, par le biais d’une brève analyse historique des relations entre la pensée politique, au sens de la gestion des affaires dela cité, et la pensée économique, ce travail met en lumière les raisons qui ont permis au fur et à mesure à la sphère économique de s’imposer,et de revêtir ainsi le rôle de finalité du développement quittant celui de simple instrument. Et, en effet, à certaines conditions, l’amalgamepeut être justifié, notamment en présence d’insuffisance des moyens de chacun pour assurer la couverture de ses propres besoins.Puisque le fait de faire reposer le développement des territoires sur l’aspect économique conduit implicitement à considérer commepérenne cette condition d’insuffisance, nous avons souhaité vérifier si les approches les plus courantes de la théorie économique étaient enmesure de prendre en compte les situations d’opulence. À cette fin, nous avons relâché l’hypothèse de non-satiété, qui est implicite tant dansla convexité des courbes d’indifférence en microéconomie que dans la « loi psychologique » de la Théorie Générale de Keynes.L’élargissement de la théorie économique à la condition de satiété, creusée sur le plan théorique et confrontée à la réalité au cours dela thèse, conduit à avoir un regard très éloigné des représentations habituelles des faits économiques. Et, une fois l’analyse élargie auxrelations entre territoires différents, on peut démontrer, à partir d’une perspective purement économique, la nature contradictoire des finalitéséconomiques du développement.Enfin, adoptant l’optique des territoires comme « construits sociaux », la thèse avance une proposition alternative, fondée sur leslibertés d’être et de faire et leur élargissement progressif, selon une logique voisine de l’approche par les capabilités d’A.Sen, sans pourautant s’y réduire. Cette démarche permet de mettre en cohérence l’économique et le non économique, dans une perspective qui intègrepleinement le concept de durabilité selon la proposition du Rapport Brundtland de 1987 et qui se cristallise dans un nouvel indicateursynthétique de développement, la « création d’espace de développement ». / As the concept of “territorial development” is still relatively ambiguous, this thesis proposes both a more rigorous and widerapproach than merely identifying it with the “economic development on a local area”. Our analysis goes through four distinct phases, each ofthem being dealt with in a different chapter.First, a brief historical analysis of relations between economic and political thoughts, in the sense of community affairsmanagement, emphasizes the reasons which allowed the economic sphere to progressively become more and more influential to the point toestablish itself as the finality of development and go over its status of a “tool”. Indeed, upon certain conditions, this shift can be justified,namely in presence of some scarcity of means in order to satisfy one’s own needs.Because making the concept of territorial development rely only on the economic aspect leads to implicitly consider the condition ofscarcity as permanent, we wished to verify if the current approaches to the economic theory were capable of taking into account the affluenceof developed countries. To this purpose, we relaxed the non-satiety hypothesis, which is implicit both in the convexity of the indifferencecurves in microeconomics and in the “psychological law” of Keynes’ General Theory.The extension of the economic theory to the condition of satiety, which was deeply looked into theoretically and checked against thereality all through the thesis, makes us gain a very unusual insight into economic phenomena. And, once the analysis was opened to therelations between different territories, we were able to demonstrate, from a purely economic point of view, the contradictory nature of theeconomic goals of development.Finally, taking territories as “social constructs”, the thesis suggests an alternative proposition, based on the freedoms to be and tomake, and their progressive enlargement, in a way close to Sen’s capability approach, yet not being a reduction of it. The proposed approachcouples coherently the economic and the non-economic spheres, in a development perspective which integrates completely the concept ofsustainability according to the proposition of the Brundtland Report, 1987, and it is summarized by a new synthetic development index, the“development space creation”.

The centralised control over curriculum framing and pedagogy, the generally poor quality of teaching with little sensitivity to children’s sociocultural environment; and very high drop out rates, even at the primary school level, are some of the challenges facing school education in many of the regions of India. However, one of the successful approaches to these challenges has been the Digantar school system, working in rural communities. The study is based in one Digantar School in Rajasthan and employs concepts derived from the Vygotskian tradition to interrogate the methods employed in Digantar school system. The study took Edwards’ (2010a, 2011, 2012) idea of common knowledge and Hedegaard’s (2008, 2012, 2013) idea of institutional demand in practices as conceptual lenses through which to investigate the components of the pedagogical practices that help Digantar teachers to align the motives of the school with those of the child in classroom activities. In doing so it analyses the institutional practices that lead to the development of common knowledge that in turn facilitates how teachers engage pupils as learners. Data were gathered over six months and comprised around 120 hours of school-based video data together with interviews and detailed observations with teachers and community members. Data were gathered in classrooms, teacher meetings, meetings between parents and teachers and at school-community meetings. Analyses focused on the construction of common knowledge and the use made of it by the school to achieve a mutual alignment of motives between the practices of the school with the community and the families. The study has revealed that teachers’ engagement with the knowledge and motives of other teachers and community members helped to create common knowledge, i.e. an understanding of what mattered for each participating group, which facilitated teaching-learning in the school. The analysis also points towards a form of democracy, which enhances children’s participation in their learning. It was found that building and sharing of common knowledge and creating a socially articulated ‘space of reasons’ (Derry 2008) produced a pedagogical model that engaged children in creating their social situation of development, seeking and recognising the curriculum demands being placed on them.

The analysis of METU-Technopolis buildings and their space organizations indicates that there are two kinds of designing and planning tendencies in METU-Tech. One of them is Northern European and other one is North American Type of office which are also known as two important office designing approaches in the world. Northern European and North American Type of office organizations have different approaches in shaping office space. While Northern European type places far more emphasis on using office space to support staff morale and thus to add value to organizational performance, North American type tends to overestimate cost minimizations. These two types of designing tendencies in the world have had enormous effects on METU-Tech building design. While some buildings like Silicon Block and Silver block give importance to functions in space, and cost minimizations, others like Twin Building gives more importance to space quality and occupancy needs. The aim of this study is to introduce these two different kinds of office design approaches in METU-Technopolis by examining Silicon Block, Silver Block and Twin buildings. These buildings have been examined in three main scales which begin with urban design scale, Macro-Scale development, then Middle-Scale development and finally Micro-Scale development and buildings activities in architectural scale. In macro scale, Urban Design Studio&rsquo / s METU-Tech workings, and in middle- micro scale, advantages and disadvantages of these two space organizations manner have been introduced in detail on Silicon Block, Silver Block and Twin Building. Furthermore, all these three building&rsquo / s statistical information, capacities, and design specifications have been presented in drawings, graphics, and photos.