This study was undertaken to examine body image distortion among female adolescents and identify related factors. Raw data from the 14th Korean Youth Health Behavior Survey were used. The proportion of participants exhibiting body image distortion was 39.5%, with the ratio being higher among female students of normal weight as compared to underweight female students. Logistic regression revealed that the risk of having a distorted body image was higher among high school females than in middle school females having lower subjective academic performance and household economic status. In addition, the risk of having a distorted body image was higher for students who drank alcohol when compared to students who did not drink, for the group engaging vigorously in physical activity (exercise) more than three times per week as opposed to the group exercising less than three times per week, and for the group consuming less than one serving of fruit per day as compared to the group consuming more than one serving of fruit per day. Taken together, the results of this study indicate that continuous nutrition education needs to be provided so that adolescents can correctly perceive their body images and form desirable eating habits.

This paper presents a new behavior planning scheme for autonomous robots, allowing them to handle various objects used in our daily lives. The key idea underlying the proposed scheme is to use affordance concepts that provide a robot with action possibilities triggered by a relation between the robot and objects around it. Specifically, the robot attempts to find the affordances and to determine the most adequate action among them. Through a series of the perception processes, robot motions can be planned and performed to complete assigned tasks. What is of particular importance from the practical point of view is a decision making capability to determine the best choice by comparing the human’s body characteristics and behavioral patterns as criteria with action possibilities as alternatives. For this, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique is employed to systematically evaluate the correlation between the criteria and the alternatives. Moreover, the alternatives arranged in order of priority through the decision making process enable the robot to have redundant solutions for the assigned task, resulting in flexible motion generation. The effectiveness and validity of the proposed scheme are verified by performing extensive simulations using objects of our daily use.

This paper presents a decentralized coordination for a small-scale mobile robot teams performing a task through cooperation. Robot teams are required to generate and maintain various geometric patterns adapting to an environment and/or a task in many cooperative applications. In particular, all robots must continue to strive toward achieving the team’s mission even if some members fail to perform their role. Toward this end, given the number of robots in a team, an effective coordination is investigated for decentralized formation control strategies. Specifically, all members are required first to reach agreement on their coordinate system and have an identifier (ID) for role assignment in a self-organizing way. Then, employing IDs on individual robots within a common coordinate system, a decentralized neighbor-referenced formation control is realized to generate, keep, and switch between different geometric shapes. This approach is verified using an in-house simulator and physical mobile robots. We detail and evaluate the formation control approach, whose common features include self-organization, robustness, and flexibility.

Robots need to understand as much as possible about their environmental situation and react appropriately to any event that provokes changes in their behavior. In this paper, we pay attention to topological relations between spatial objects and propose a model of robotic cognition that represents and infers temporal relations. Specifically, the proposed model extracts specified features of the co-occurrence matrix represents from disparity images of the stereo vision system. More importantly, a habituation model is used to infer intrinsic spatial relations between objects. A preliminary experimental investigation is carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method under real test condition.