1,721,003 research outputs found
Digital Human in Engineering and Bioengineering Applications
No full textHuman centered engineering today is deeply integrated into the product lifecycle in the fields of aerospace, aging, health care, IT and transportation, among others. Human fac-tors are involved in several steps of product life (design, manufacture, maintenance, etc.) and the capability to keep them into account effectively is a key point for a winning prod-uct on the market. During the last decade, Digital Human Models - DHM are becoming more and more popular in different industrial domains because of their broad applicability within the product development process. Virtual humans can represent a valid tool to sup-port the design team during the product development process from the early phases to the disposal, by decreasing the development time, reducing the need of physical prototypes, lowering costs and improving the quality and safety of the products. In this chapter we consider the use of digital human modeling techniques and virtual ergonomics along the product development process. We first introduce the scientific background related to digi-tal human modeling also referring to outcomes from last CIE conferences; them we pre-sent a synthesis of authors’ research activities related to the application of DHM within the product development process as well as practical examples developed in various in-dustrial contexts. Final considerations about potential and current trends conclude the chapter
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
An Agent-Based Approach to the Design of Rapidly Deployable Fault Tolerant Manipulators
No full textThis thesis was submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for author Chris Paredis' degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.There exists a need for manipulators that are more flexible and reliable than the current fixed
configuration manipulators. Indeed, robot manipulators can be easily reprogrammed to perform
different tasks, yet the range of tasks that can be performed by a manipulator is limited
by its mechanical structure. In remote and hazardous environments, such as a nuclear facility
or a space station, the range of tasks that may need to be performed often exceeds the
capabilities of a single manipulator. Moreover, it is essential that critical tasks be executed
reliably in these environments.
To address this need for a more flexible and reliable manipulator, we propose the concept of
a rapidly deployable fault tolerant manipulator system. Such a system combines a Reconfigurable
Modular Manipulator System (RMMS) with support software for rapid programming,
trajectory planning, and control. This allows the user to rapidly configure a fault
tolerant manipulator custom-tailored for a given task. This thesis investigates all aspects
involved in such a system. It describes an RMMS prototype which consists of seven manipulator
modules with a total of four degrees-of-freedom. The reconfigurability of the hardware
is made transparent to the user by the supporting control software that automatically
adapts itself to the current manipulator configuration. To achieve high reliability, a global
fault tolerant trajectory planning algorithm is introduced. This algorithm guarantees that a
manipulator can continue its task even when one of the manipulator joints fails and is immobilized. Finally, all these aspects are considered simultaneously in the task based design
software, that determines the manipulator configuration, its base position, and the fault tolerant
joint space trajectory that are optimally suited to perform a given task.
The most important contribution of this thesis is a novel agent-based approach to solve the
task based design problem. The approach is based on a genetic algorithm for which the
modification and evaluation operations are implemented as autonomous asynchronous
agents. Specific design knowledge about the task based design problem has been included in
the agents, resulting in a significant reduction of the size of the design space and of the cost
of evaluating a candidate design. Furthermore, thanks to their autonomous and asynchronous
nature, these agents can be easily executed distributedly on a network of workstations.
The flexibility and performance of the agent-based implementation, combined with the
problem specific knowledge included in the modification and evaluation agents results in a
powerful new approach to task based design of rapidly deployable fault tolerant manipulators.
Finally, the thesis presents a performance analysis of the agent-based design framework by
comparing its results with those of exhaustive search, random search, and multiple restart
statistical hill-climbing. This analysis is performed for three examples, including a comprehensive
example of a satellite docking operation with a fault tolerant modular manipulator
mounted in the cargo bay of the space shuttle.Department of Energy (Grant #DE-F902-
89ER14042)Sandia National Laboratories (Contract #AL–3020)The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon Universit
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Using domain specific languages to capture design knowledge for model-based systems engineering
No full textDesign synthesis is a fundamental engineering task that involves the creation of structure from a desired functional specification; it involves both creating a system topology as well as sizing the system's components. Although the use of computer tools is common throughout the design process, design synthesis is often a task left to the designer. At the synthesis stage of the design process, designers have an extensive choice of design alternatives that need to be considered and evaluated.
Designers can benefit from computational synthesis methods in the creative phase of the design process. Recent increases in computational power allow automated synthesis methods for rapidly generating a large number of design solutions. Combining an automated synthesis method with an evaluation framework allows for a more thorough exploration of the design space as well as for a reduction of the time and cost needed to design a system. To facilitate computational synthesis, knowledge about feasible system configurations must be captured. Since it is difficult to capture such synthesis knowledge about any possible system, a design domain must be chosen. In this thesis, the design domain is hydraulic systems.
In this thesis, Model-Driven Software Development concepts are leveraged to create a framework to automate the synthesis of hydraulic systems will be presented and demonstrated. This includes the presentation of a domain specific language to describe the function and structure of hydraulic systems as well as a framework for synthesizing hydraulic systems using graph grammars to generate system topologies. Also, a method using graph grammars for generating analysis models from the described structural system representations is presented. This approach fits in the context of Model-Based Systems Engineering where a variety of formal models are used to represent knowledge about a system. It uses the Systems Modeling Language developed by The Object Management Group (OMG SysML™) as a unifying language for model definition.M.S
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