A survey of dextrous manipulation

technical reportThe development of mechanical end effectors capable of dextrous manipulation is a rapidly growing and quite successful field of research. It has in some sense put the focus on control issues, in particular, how to control these remarkably humanlike manipulators to perform the deft movement that we take for granted in the human hand. The kinematic and control issues surrounding manipulation research are clouded by more basic concerns such as: what is the goal of a manipulation system, is the anthropomorphic or functional design methodology appropriate, and to what degree does the control of the manipulator depend on other sensory systems. This paper examines the potential of creating a general purpose, anthropomorphically motivated, dextrous manipulation system. The discussion will focus on features of the human hand that permit its general usefulness as a manipulator. A survey of machinery designed to emulate these capabilities is presented. Finally, the tasks of grasping and manipulation are examined from the control standpoint to suggest a control paradigm which is descriptive, yet flexible and computationally efficient1

Access to information, concerns, myths and truths on food safety during COVID-19: an overview of Portuguese population

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic raised questions and concerns about the possibility of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via foods. While cases of COVID were rapidly rising, information related to the virus and ways of prevention was also increasing, with much of this information being provided by the media and the general population. In this context, this study had two main objectives: 1) To understand the doubts and concerns of the Portuguese population related to food safety during the first wave of COVID-19 and how they clarified these issues and 2) to analyze the population's opinion on myths and truths related to the transmission of the infection. Methods & Materials: A survey including questions about a) concerns and information on food safety during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic; b) myths and truths about COVID-1 and c) respondents’ profile. The survey was released online between June and October of 2020.Results: The main doubt of the respondents was related to the manipulation of food (40,7%) followed by the possibility of transmission of COVID-19 through food (12,6%) and which foods should be avoided due to the pandemic (12,6%). 33,3% of the participants stated that television was the main mean of information accessed to clarify these doubts, followed by a Guideline launched by the Directorate-General of Health (31,8%). However, 50,3% said that they had only found answers to some of their questions. 50% of the respondents with higher level of education and 30% of the respondents with lower level of education had doubts about the possibility of the transmission of COVID-19 through food. Also, most of the survey participants disagreed with the affirmations regarding popular ways of disinfecting food to prevent infection. Conclusion: COVID-19 pandemic raised several doubts, however when related to food safety, the main doubt was about the manipulation of food due to the concern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Most respondents do not believe myths about COVID-19 and food safety, but this was dependent on the level of education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Quality Outdoor Recreation Component in Multi-Purpose Conservation Areas: A User Assessment Devised, and Applied to Pinehurst Lake Conservation Area

Recreational demand for out-of-doors space and facilities continues to increase into the 1980’s. Accordingly, multi-purpose conservation areas, by the nature of their designations, require ongoing assessment of the attributes which determine the quality of the recreational experience they afford. A problem with the master planning process for these multi-use areas is that in the past, little or no consideration has been given to user-recreationist input in the development stages of the master plans. The purpose of this study is to devise a method of assessing user satisfaction towards the recreational quality available at multi-use conservation areas, and to show how this data can be applied to evaluate existing master plans for these conservation areas. Results of a survey at Pinehurst Lake Conservation Area in southern Ontario are compared to the statements of managerial objectives and priorities in the current master plan for that Area. Results of the study indicate that the general recreationist is satisfied with the recreational activities available at Pinehurst Lake but not with the maintenance of the amenity facilities provided to accommodate those activities. Visitors to Pinehurst Lake indicated that future management priorities should be directed more to the development of the natural landscape and setting of the Area, rather than to the development of further recreational facilities. This case study identified problems specific to Pinehurst Lake and also to multi-purpose conservation areas generally. Resolving such problems involves three areas, manipulation of visitors, manipulation of the physical environment, and reduction of negative attributes. Methodologically, the study was able to measure visitor satisfaction with their recreational experience, and to suggest six areas for future research which included conflicts of value priorities, motivation of non-visitors, cause-effect relationship, zone specific carrying capacity, user impact, and alternate data-source techniques

Growth Potential in Relationships: A Promotion-Focus Perspective

Relationship research has long emphasized the importance of felt security for interpersonal wellbeing, but has focused less on how opportunities for growth influence relationship well-being. The present research investigates whether people’s motivational states may influence the extent to which people value growth in their romantic relationships. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, which distinguishes between promotion (concerned with advancement) and prevention (concerned with security) self-regulatory orientations, it was hypothesized that promotion-focused individuals would be more satisfied with relationships that offered greater opportunity for growth than with those that offered greater opportunity for security. In three experimental studies, participants evaluated others’ (Study 1; N = 110) and their own (Study 2; N =141 and 3: N = 103) relationships after we manipulated beliefs about whether those relationships had high or low potential for future growth. Results revealed that promotion-focused participants rated theirs and another person’s relationship more positively when the relationship portrayed high growth potential rather than when it portrayed low growth potential. These results have meaningful implications for marriage courses and in clinical settings for defense against reinforcement erosion

Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator

General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe

Physiotherapy students\u27 perceptions and experiences of clinical prediction rules

Objectives: Clinical reasoning can be difficult to teach to pre-professional physiotherapy students due to their lack of clinical experience. It may be that tools such as clinical prediction rules (CPRs) could aid the process, but there has been little investigation into their use in physiotherapy clinical education. This study aimed to determine the perceptions and experiences of physiotherapy students regarding CPRs, and whether they are learning about CPRs on clinical placement. Design: Cross-sectional survey using a paper-based questionnaire. Participants: Final year pre-professional physiotherapy students (n=371, response rate 77%) from five universities across five states of Australia. Results: Sixty percent of respondents had not heard of CPRs, and a further 19% had not clinically used CPRs. Only 21% reported using CPRs, and of these nearly three-quarters were rarely, if ever, learning about CPRs in the clinical setting. However most of those who used CPRs (78%) believed CPRs assisted in the development of clinical reasoning skills and none (0%) was opposed to the teaching of CPRs to students. The CPRs most commonly recognised and used by students were those for determining the need for an X-ray following injuries to the ankle and foot (67%), and for identifying deep venous thrombosis (63%). Conclusions: The large majority of students in this sample knew little, if anything, about CPRs and few had learned about, experienced or practiced them on clinical placement. However, students who were aware of CPRs found them helpful for their clinical reasoning and were in favour of learning more about them

Thrust Joint Manipulation Utilization by Us Physical Therapists

Study Design: Online survey study. Objective: To determine physical therapists’ utilization of thrust joint manipulation (TJM) and their comfort level in using TJM between the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar regions of the spine. We hypothesized that physical therapists who use TJM would report regular use and comfort providing it to the thoracic and lumbar spines, but not so much for the cervical spine. Background: Recent surveys of first professional physical therapy degree programs have found that TJM to the cervical spine is not taught to the same degree as to the thoracic and lumbar spines. Methods: We developed a survey to capture the required information and had a Delphi panel of 15 expert orthopedic physical therapists reviewed it and provide constructive feedback. A revised version of the survey was sent to the same Delphi panel and consensus was obtained on the final survey instrument. The revised survey was made available to any licensed physical therapists in the USA using an online survey system, from October 2014 through June 2015. Results: Of 1014 responses collected, 1000 completed surveys were included for analysis. There were 478 (48%) males; the mean age of respondents was 39.7 ± 10.81 years (range 24 – 92); and mean years of clinical experience was 13.6 ± 10.62. A majority of respondents felt that TJM was safe and effective when applied to lumbar (90.5%) and thoracic (91.1%) spines; however, a smaller percentage (68.9%) felt that about the cervical spine. More therapists reported they would perform additional screening prior to providing TJM to the cervical spine than they would for the lumbar and thoracic spine. Therapists agreed they were less likely to provide and feel comfortable with TJM in the cervical spine compared to the thoracic and lumbar spine. Finally, therapists who are male; practice in orthopedic spine setting; are aware of manipulation clinical prediction rules; and have manual therapy certification, are more likely to use TJM and be comfortable with it in all 3 regions. Conclusion: Results indicate that respondents do not believe TJM for the cervical spine to be as safe and efficacious as that for the lumbar and thoracic spines. Further, they are more likely to perform additional screening, abstain from and do not feel comfortable performing TJM for the cervical spine. Clinical Relevance: Our research reveals there is a discrepancy between utilization of TJM at different spinal levels. This research provides an opportunity to address variability in clinical practice among physical therapists utilizing TJM

Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge

This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn about each team's background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each team's success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned based on survey results and the authors' personal experiences during the challenge

Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation Skills with Guided Policy Search

Autonomous learning of object manipulation skills can enable robots to acquire rich behavioral repertoires that scale to the variety of objects found in the real world. However, current motion skill learning methods typically restrict the behavior to a compact, low-dimensional representation, limiting its expressiveness and generality. In this paper, we extend a recently developed policy search method \cite{la-lnnpg-14} and use it to learn a range of dynamic manipulation behaviors with highly general policy representations, without using known models or example demonstrations. Our approach learns a set of trajectories for the desired motion skill by using iteratively refitted time-varying linear models, and then unifies these trajectories into a single control policy that can generalize to new situations. To enable this method to run on a real robot, we introduce several improvements that reduce the sample count and automate parameter selection. We show that our method can acquire fast, fluent behaviors after only minutes of interaction time, and can learn robust controllers for complex tasks, including putting together a toy airplane, stacking tight-fitting lego blocks, placing wooden rings onto tight-fitting pegs, inserting a shoe tree into a shoe, and screwing bottle caps onto bottles

A survey of partial differential equations in geometric design

YesComputer aided geometric design is an area where the improvement of surface generation techniques is an everlasting demand since faster and more accurate geometric models are required. Traditional methods for generating surfaces were initially mainly based upon interpolation algorithms. Recently, partial differential equations (PDE) were introduced as a valuable tool for geometric modelling since they offer a number of features from which these areas can benefit. This work summarises the uses given to PDE surfaces as a surface generation technique togethe