Cyber-Physical-Social System Between a Humanoid Robot and a Virtual Human Through a Shared Platform for Adaptive Agent Ecology

Two artificial agents(a humanoid robot and a virtual human) are enriched with various similar intelligence,autonomy, functionalities and interaction modalities. The agents are integrated in the form of a cyber-physical-social system(CPSS) through a shared communication platform to create a social ecology. In the ecology, the agents collaborate(assist each other) to perform a real-world task(search for a hidden object)for the benefits of humans. A robot-virtual human bilateral trust model is derived and a real-time trust measurement method is developed. The role of taking initiative in the collaboration is switched between the agents following a finite state machine model triggered by bilateral trust, which results in a mixedinitiative collaboration. A scheme is developed to evaluate the performance of the agents in the ecology through the CPSS.The results show that the robot and the virtual human perform satisfactorily in the collaboration through the CPSS. The results thus prove the effectiveness of the real-world ecology between artificial agents of heterogeneous realities through a shared platform based on trust-triggered mixed-initiatives. The results can help develop adaptive social ecology comprising intelligent agents of heterogeneous realities to assist humans in various tasks through collaboration between the agents in the form of a CPSS.

The Skin Deformation of a 3D Virtual Human

This paper presents a skin deformation algorithm for creating 3D characters or virtual human models. The algorithm can be applied to rigid deformation, joint dependent localized deformation, skeleton driven deformation, cross contour deformation, and free-form deformation （FFD）. These deformations are computed and demonstrated with examples and the algorithm is applied to overcome the difficulties in mechanically simulating the motion of the human body by club-shape models. The techniques described in this article enables the reconstruction of dynamic human models that can be used in defining and representing the geometrical and kinematical characteristics of human motion.

Application of Question and Answering on Virtual Human Dialogue:a Review and Prediction

Nowadays,virtual human(VH) is becoming a hot research topic in virtualization.VH dialogue can be categorized as an application of natural language processing(NLP) technology,since it is relational to question and answering(QA) technologies.In order to integrate these technologies,this paper reviews some important work on VH dialogue,and predicts some research points on the view of QA technologies.

Intelligent Interfaces: Pedagogical Agents and Virtual Humans

Little by little, we are entering the new era, intelligent interfaces are absorbing us more and more every day, and artificial intelligence makes its presence in a stealthy way. Virtual humans that represent an evolution of autonomous virtual agents;they are computer programs and in the future capable of carrying out different activities in certain environments. They will give the illusion of being human;they will have a body, and they will be immersed in an environment. They will have a set of senses that will allow them: 1) Sensations and therefore associated expressions;2) Communication;3) Learning;4) Remembering events, among others. By integrating the above, they will have a personality and autonomy, so they will be able to plan with respect to objectives;allowing them to decide and take actions with their body, in other words, they will count on awareness. The applications will be focused on environments that they will inhabit, or as interfaces that will interact with other systems. The application domains will be multiple;one of them being education. This article shows the design of OANNA like an avatar with the role of pedagogical agent. It was modeled as an affective-cognitive structure related to the teaching-learning process linked to a pedagogical agent that represents the interface of an artilect. OANNA, has the necessary animations for intervention within the teaching-learning process.

Recent advances on virtual human synthesis

Virtual human is a digital representation of the geometric and behavioral property of human beings in the virtual environment generated by computer. The research goal of virtual human synthesis is to generate realistic human body models and natural human motion behavior. This paper introduces the development of the related researches on these two topics, and some progresses on example based human modeling and motion synthesis, and their applications in Chinese sign language teaching, computeraided sports training and public safety problem studying. Finally, some hot research topics in virtual human synthesis are presented.

Human Centered Design in Multi-agent Virtual Environment

The efficient and reliable human centered design of products and processes is a major goal in manufacturing industries for numerous human factors must be taken into account during the entire life cycle of products. A multi-agents intelligent design system is presented for manufacturing process simulation and products＇ ergonomic analysis. In virtual design environment, the virtual human with high-level intelligence performs tasks＇ operation autonomously and shows optimum posture configuration with ergonomic assessment results in real time. The functions are realized by intelligent agents architecture based on a modem approach derived from fuzzy multi-objects decision-making theory. A case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested methodology.

Creating Autonomous, Perceptive and Intelligent Virtual Humans in a Real-Time Virtual Environment

Creating realistic virtual humans has been a challenging objective in computer science research for some time. This paper describes an integrated framework for modeling virtual humans with a high level of autonomy. The framework seeks to reproduce human-like believable behavior and movement in virtual humans in a virtual environment. The framework includes a visual and auditory information perception module, a decision network based behavior decision module, and a hierarchical autonomous motion control module. These cooperate to model realistic autonomous individual behavior for virtual humans in real-time interactive virtual environments. The framework was tested in a simulated virtual environment system to demonstrate the ability of the framework to create autonomous, perceptive and intelligent virtual humans in real-time virtual environments.

Forecasting display technique of human in network virtual environment

The simulation of human in the distributed virtual environment is different from the simulation of vehicle. Due to the human’s many joints, to implement the real time performance of the interaction between the virtual human and the environment, the quantity of information broadcasted in the network will be increased. So with the growing of the quantity of virtual human added to the network, the network burthen would augment rapidly. Therefore, for the simulation of virtual human this paper divides organically the motion parts of the body, which makes those body parts that often interact with the environment are described according to the joints while other parts are described according to the action information. Simultaneity, this paper adopts Dead Reckoning to reduce the quantity of information needed by maintaining the reality motion of virtual human. The experiment indicates that the forecasting display technique can efficiently reduce the network burthen and enhance the interaction of virtual human.

Real-time interactive motion control of virtual human in virtual maintenance based on limited information

In order to provide a simple and efficient approach to perform the real-time interactive motion control of virtual human in virtual maintenance environment(VME),the motion control method of virtual human based on limited input information is proposed.With the space position tracking system with only one sensor the action sequences and motion models of virtual human,the human motions and hand actions in VME are driven by the sensor data in stages and in real time through the transmission condition control in the process of maintenance operation.And the input data and information is processed based on the method of Kalman filtering and wavelet transforming to improve the control effects.An experimental VME is also established to validate the control efficiency,and the experiment results show that the space motion control of virtual human in VME can be performed based on limited information with proposed control strategy.

Fatigue Analysis and Evaluation Method of Ergonomic Virtual Human

The ergonomic digital design and evaluation of man-machine system is the main application fields of virtual human technology. Because of the complexity of physical person and uncertainty of fatigue generation mechanism, it is difficult to express a nd evaluate the Virtual Human's fatigue state. This paper summarizes the characteristics of virtual human's fatigue evaluation, such as undeterminable, invisible, the constraint conditions can been used. Viewed from the strengths and weaknesses of preexisting models, metabolic energy expenditure model, dynamic muscle fatigue model and a model to assess fatigue at joint-level using the half-joint concept, this paper puts forward the future development trend that the combination of subjective and objective,diversificationoftheanalyzablemotion,real-timeandvisualexpression.

Emotion model of interactive virtual humans on the basis of MDP

Emotion plays an essential role in the adaptation and social communication of organisms.Similarly,an appro-priately timed and clearly expressed emotion is a central requirement for believable interactive virtual humans.Presently,incorporating emotion into virtual humans has gained increasing attention in the academia and industry.This strong interest is driven by a wide spectrum of promising applications in many areas such as virtual reality,e-learning,entertainment,etc.This paper introduces an emotion model of artificial psychology,in which the transition of emotion can be viewed as a Markov process and the relation of emotion,external incentive and personality can be described by a Markov decision process(MDP).In order to demonstrate the approach,this paper integrates the emotion model into a system composed of voice recognition and a realistic facial model.Thus,the model could be used for generating a variety of emotional expressions of autonomous,interactive virtual human beings.

STUDY ON HUMAN-COMPUTER SYSTEM FOR STABLE VIRTUAL DISASSEMBLY

The cooperative work between human being and computer based on virtual reality (VR) is investigated to plan the disassembly sequences more efficiently. A three-layer model of human-computer cooperative virtual disassembly is built, and the corresponding human-computer system for stable virtual disassembly is developed. In this system, an immersive and interactive virtual disassembly environment has been created to provide planners with a more visual working scene. For cooperative disassembly, an intelligent module of stability analysis of disassembly operations is embedded into the human-computer system to assist planners to implement disassembly tasks better. The supporting matrix for stability analysis of disassembly operations is defined and the method of stability analysis is detailed. Based on the approach, the stability of any disassembly operation can be analyzed to instruct the manual virtual disassembly. At last, a disassembly case in the virtual environment is given to prove the validity of above ideas.

Human Friendly Interface Design for Virtual Fitting Room Applications on Android Based Mobile Devices

This paper presents an image processing design flow for virtual fitting room (VFR) applications, targeting both personal computers and mobile devices. The proposed human friendly interface is implemented by a three-stage algorithm: Detection and sizing of the user's body, detection of reference points based on face detection and augmented reality markers, and superimposition of the clothing over the user's image. Compared to other existing VFR systems, key difference is the lack of any proprietary hardware components or peripherals. Proposed VFR is software based and designed to be universally compatible as long as the device has a camera. Furthermore, JAVA implementation on Android based mobile systems is computationally efficient and it can run in real-time on existing mobile devices.

虚拟数字人的传播风险与社会行动者治理

虚拟数字人日益嵌入社会结构当中,加剧当下社会的媒介化程度,在其迅速应用于内容生产领域的同时,还出现了内容失当和传播伦理等问题。虚拟数字人是非人之物(non-human),但该场景中的社会行动者——中之人既是自然人,又为内容把关模式的创新提供一个可行的视角。中之人被视为法律责任的主体之一,作为新型把关主体,其隐匿于后台,把关的创新体现在主体、对象、策略和价值引导等方面,呈现出中介化和弥散化的特点,相关主体性的建构还需与主流文化同频共振,以求把关主体的价值观和“善治”有机融合。

虚实相融与价值共创:虚拟数字人技术赋能图书馆智慧服务

虚拟数字人是元宇宙的核心数字资产和交互载体入口,已在泛娱乐、医疗、金融等诸多行业落地发展,图书馆界尽早研究和开展虚拟数字人服务,有助于推进图书馆元宇宙生态构建。文章在系统梳理虚拟数字人理论与实践进展的基础上,分析虚拟数字人对图书馆服务的影响,提出虚拟宣讲、参考咨询、用户教育、沉浸阅读和“阅读疗愈”等五大图书馆虚拟数字人智慧服务场景,探讨虚拟数字人在图书馆智慧服务中的应用障碍与发展对策。

基于虚拟仿真技术的服装智能制造应用研究

由于传统的服装制造不能很好地满足市场需求,因此对虚拟仿真技术在服装智能制造中的应用进行研究,实现服装企业转型升级,确保企业健康发展。服装虚拟设计包括仿真人体建模、虚拟服装建模、3D仿真优化和构建应用平台。采用非接触式测量获取人体三维数据,构建虚拟三维人体模型,同时将服装设计师的设计意图进行深层次挖掘,获得三维虚拟服装模型。通过纹理特征映射、碰撞检测、真实感增强和场景构建来优化服装设计过程,并将其应用于服装个性化设计与虚拟试穿中,对提升服装企业的智能制造水平和市场竞争力具有一定的参考价值。

基于贪婪算法的云计算数据块节能存储仿真

针对云数据储存能量消耗大的问题,提出基于贪婪算法的云计算数据块节能存储方法。建立具有用户访问层、核心服务层和服务管理层的云计算架构,了解数据块产生过程和储存环境;将物理机利用率、能源消耗量和主机储存能力作为节能储存的约束条件,将待储存的数据块封装为虚拟机,利用贪婪算法描述虚拟机部署问题,构建贪婪算法下虚拟机分配环境;计算单个物理机和整个数据中心的数据块储存能力和资源请求能力,综合考虑虚拟机分配的相关向量,运算数据储存时的能量消耗;以总体能量最小为目标函数,将虚拟机分为主模块与备用模块,通过设置虚拟机状态转换规则来减少储存开销,实现节能储存。实验结果表明,上述方法在数据储存过程中能够有效减少服务器开启数量,节省储存功率,达到节能目的。

图书馆虚拟数字人:内涵特征、信息模型与应用场景研究

图书馆数字化转型必然要求信息技术与图书馆业务的深度融合,而虚拟数字人作为元宇宙技术的重要应用,如何创新图书馆服务已成为学界重点关注的问题。在概述数字人概念、特征、技术、现状的基础上,提出图书馆虚拟数字人的概念,并阐述图书馆虚拟数字人的内涵特征、信息模型、应用场景。图书馆虚拟数字人以“数字替身”的身份为图书馆知识服务和资源利用等提供更智能化和人性化的途径,在替代馆员、知识组织、服务提供、智能咨询、阅读推广、情境陪伴、素养提升、品牌塑造等方面有广泛的应用前景,为用户带来全新体验,有效提升图书馆的智慧化程度和服务质量。

AI虚拟数字人技术在汽车专业线上教学中的前沿实践

在人工智能、智能语音及虚拟成像等技术持续快速发展的背景下,职业院校传统教学模式难以跟上新产业和新经济的发展步伐。为强化学生理论知识,丰富课堂和线上教学资源,在传统职业教育的基础上,结合AI虚拟数字人技术提出了一种新的在线课程数字视频资源的制作方法。该文通过介绍数字人课件制作路径,讲述了一种将虚拟数字人技术应用于线上课程视频教学资源制作的方法。目的在于丰富教学资源,提升教师制作线上课程教学资源的效率和能力,对现有教与学的模式进行更新补充,培养符合现代科技背景新领域的专业技能人才。