Animating Virtual Human for Virtual Batik Modeling

This research paper describes a development of animating virtual human for virtual batik modeling project. The objectives of this project are to animate the virtual human, to map the cloth with the virtual human body, to present the batik cloth, and to evaluate the application in terms of realism of virtual human look, realism of virtual human movement, realism of 3D scene, application suitability, application usability, fashion suitability and user acceptance. The final goal is to accomplish an animated virtual human for virtual batik modeling. There are 3 essential phases which research and analysis (data collection of modeling and animating technique), development (model and animate virtual human, map cloth to body and add a music) and evaluation (evaluation of realism of virtual human look, realism of virtual human movement, realism of props, application suitability, application usability, fashion suitability and user acceptance). The result for application usability is the highest percentage which 90%. Result show that this application is useful to the people. In conclusion, this project has met the objective, which the realism is achieved by used a suitable technique for modeling and animating

Wearable Sensors in the Evaluation of Gait and Balance in Neurological Disorders

The aging population and the increased prevalence of neurological diseases have raised the issue of gait and balance disorders as a major public concern worldwide. Indeed, gait and balance disorders are responsible for a high healthcare and economic burden on society, thus, requiring new solutions to prevent harmful consequences. Recently, wearable sensors have provided new challenges and opportunities to address this issue through innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Accordingly, the book “Wearable Sensors in the Evaluation of Gait and Balance in Neurological Disorders” collects the most up-to-date information about the objective evaluation of gait and balance disorders, by means of wearable biosensors, in patients with various types of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and cerebellar ataxia. By adopting wearable technologies, the sixteen original research articles and reviews included in this book offer an updated overview of the most recent approaches for the objective evaluation of gait and balance disorders

Analysis of pattern recognition techniques for in-air signature biometrics

As a result of advances in mobile technology, new services which benefit from the ubiquity of these devices are appearing. Some of these services require the identification of the subject since they may access private user information. In this paper, we propose to identify each user by drawing his/her handwritten signature in the air (in-airsignature). In order to assess the feasibility of an in-airsignature as a biometric feature, we have analysed the performance of several well-known patternrecognitiontechniques—Hidden Markov Models, Bayes classifiers and dynamic time warping—to cope with this problem. Each technique has been tested in the identification of the signatures of 96 individuals. Furthermore, the robustness of each method against spoofing attacks has also been analysed using six impostors who attempted to emulate every signature. The best results in both experiments have been reached by using a technique based on dynamic time warping which carries out the recognition by calculating distances to an average template extracted from several training instances. Finally, a permanence analysis has been carried out in order to assess the stability of in-airsignature over time

Authentication in mobile devices through hand gesture recognition

This article proposes an innovative biometric technique based on the idea of authenticating a person on a mobile device by gesture recognition. To accomplish this aim, a user is prompted to be recognized by a gesture he/she performs moving his/her hand while holding a mobile device with an accelerometer embedded. As users are not able to repeat a gesture exactly in the air, an algorithm based on sequence alignment is developed to correct slight differences between repetitions of the same gesture. The robustness of this biometric technique has been studied within 2 different tests analyzing a database of 100 users with real falsifications. Equal Error Rates of 2.01 and 4.82% have been obtained in a zero-effort and an active impostor attack, respectively. A permanence evaluation is also presented from the analysis of the repetition of the gestures of 25 users in 10 sessions over a month. Furthermore, two different gesture databases have been developed: one made up of 100 genuine identifying 3-D hand gestures and 3 impostors trying to falsify each of them and another with 25 volunteers repeating their identifying 3- D hand gesture in 10 sessions over a month. These databases are the most extensive in published studies, to the best of our knowledge

Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

2009 Formula SAE Race Car

Design and fabrication of the 2009 Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) race car focuses on developing a simple, lightweight and easily operated vehicle. Compliance with SAE rules is compulsory and governs a significant portion of the objectives. Aspects of ergonomics, safety, ease of manufacture, and reliability are incorporated into the design specifications. Analyses are conducted on all major components to optimize strength and rigidity, improve vehicle performance, and to reduce complexity and manufacturing costs

Concurrent design and motion planning in robotics using differentiable optimal control

Robot design optimization (what the robot is) and motion planning (how the robot moves) are two problems that are connected. Robots are limited by their design in terms of what motions they can execute – for instance a robot with a heavy base has less payload capacity compared to the same robot with a lighter base. On the other hand, the motions that the robot executes guide which design is best for the task. Concurrent design (co-design) is the process of performing robot design and motion planning together. Although traditionally co-design has been viewed as an offline process that can take hours or days, we view interactive co-design tools as the next step as they enable quick prototyping and evaluation of designs across different tasks and environments. In this thesis we adopt a gradient-based approach to co-design. Our baseline approach embeds the motion planning into bi-level optimization and uses gradient information via finite differences from the lower motion planning level to optimize the design in the upper level. Our approach uses the full rigid-body dynamics of the robot and allows for arbitrary upper-level design constraints, which is key for finding physically realizable designs. Our approach is also between 1.8 and 8.4 times faster on a quadruped trotting and jumping co-design task as compared to the popular genetic algorithm covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES). We further demonstrate the speed of our approach by building an interactive co-design tool that allows for optimization over uneven terrain with varying height. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm to analytically take the derivative of nonlinear optimal control problems via differential dynamic programming (DDP). Analytical derivatives are a step towards addressing the scalability and accuracy issues of finite differences. We further compared with a simultaneous approach for co-design that optimizes both motion and design in one nonlinear program. On a co-design task for the Kinova robotic arm we observed a 54-times improvement in computational speed. We additionally carry out hardware validation experiments on the quadruped robot Solo. We designed longer lower legs for the robot, which minimize the peak torque used during trotting. Although we always observed an improvement in peak torque, it was less than in simulation (7.609% versus 28.271%). We discuss some of the sim-toreal issues including the structural stability of joints and slipping of feet that need to be considered and how they can be addressed using our framework. In the second part of this thesis we propose solutions to some open problems in motion planning. Firstly, in our co-design approach we assumed fixed contact locations and timings. Ideally we would like the motion planner to choose the contacts instead. We solve a related, but simpler problem, which is the control of satellite thrusters, which are similar to robot feet but do not have the constraint of having to be in contact with the ground to exert force on the robot. We introduce a sparse, L1 cost on control inputs (thrusters) and implement optimization via DDP-style solvers. We use full rigid-body dynamics and achieve bang-bang control via optimization, which is a difficult problem due to the discrete switching nature of the thrusters. Lastly, we present a method for planning and control of a hybrid, wheel-legged robot. This is a difficult problem, as the robot needs to always actively balance on the wheel even when not driving or jumping forward. We propose the variablelength wheeled inverted pendulum (VL-WIP) template model that captures only the necessary dynamic interactions between wheels and base. We embedded this into a model-predictive controller (MPC) and demonstrated highly dynamic behaviors, including swinging-up and jumping over a gap. Both of these motion planning problems expand the ability of our motion planning tools to new domains, which is an integral part also of the co-design algorithms, as co-design aims to optimize both design, and motion, together

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. A continuing bibliography (Supplement 226)

This bibliography lists 129 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1981