Meta-Routing: Synergistic Merging of Message Routing and Link Maintenance

The maintenance of network connectivity is essential for effective and efficient mobile team operations. Achieving robust mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) connectivity requires a capable link maintenance mechanism especially if the network experiences expected intermittent connectivity due to a hostile environment. One applicable example of such network scenarios is multi-robot exploration for urban search and rescue (USAR). With the proliferation of these robotic networks, communication problems such as the link maintenance problem are subject to be raised quickly. Although various routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have been proposed, they solve the problems of message routing and link maintenance separately, resulting in additional overhead costs and long latency in network communication. Traditional routing protocols discover existing links, connect these links, find the best path and minimize the path cost. The limitation of previous routing protocols motivates us to develop a new concept of routing mechanism for a robotic network. This routing mechanism is named Meta-Routing. Meta-Routing expands current routing protocols to include not only the normal routing of packets, but also the maintenance of links in mobile agent scenarios. Thus, Meta-Routing minimizes the communication path cost and the overhead cost, the latter of which results from discovering a route, repairing a link or establishing a new communication path between nodes. This dissertation presents a method to achieve Meta-Routing by controlling robot motion based on the radio frequency (RF) environment recognition method and gradient descent method. Mobile robot controlled motion can effectively improve network performance by driving robots to favorable locations with strong links. Moreover, the gradient descent method is used in driving the robots into the direction of favorable positions for maximizing broken or failing links and maintaining network connectivity. The main accomplished goals of this thesis are summarized as follows: firstly, the Meta-Routing protocol, which integrates link maintenance into the normal message routing protocol cost function; secondly, the dissertation examines the unification of the syntax of message routing protocol and the link maintenance process through physical configuration of mobile network nodes by controlling their movement in the field; finally, the dissertation demonstrates that the utilization of the RF environment recognition and classification method improves route repair estimation for achieving link maintenance in the presented Meta-Routing protocol. The numerical experimental results demonstrate promising RF environment recognition and node controlled motion results, as well as confirm their abilities in robot movement control for link maintenance and reduction of the total path cost

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Core-bored search-and-rescue applications for an agile limbed robot

A custom version of the TerminatorBot is described for corebored inspection during search-and-rescue operations. “Corebored inspection ” refers to visual inspection of a void by passing a small camera through an access hole into the void. This is the classic “camera-on-a-stick ” approach. Sometimes the access hole occurs naturally. Sometimes a suspected void has no access hole. To gain access, a hole is bored through the rubble with a coring tool, hence the term “core-bored inspection. ” In either case, the camera, once inside, can articulate to look around, but is limited to line-of-sight. Occlusions can prevent a thorough inspection or force using/boring another hole. A small, agile robotic device could augment the use of such cameras. We propose the TerminatorBot as as a prototype limbed robot for studying such applications

The Irresistible Animacy of Lively Artefacts

This thesis explores the perception of ‘liveliness’, or ‘animacy’, in robotically driven artefacts. This perception is irresistible, pervasive, aesthetically potent and poorly understood. I argue that the Cartesian rationalist tendencies of robotic and artificial intelligence research cultures, and associated cognitivist theories of mind, fail to acknowledge the perceptual and instinctual emotional affects that lively artefacts elicit. The thesis examines how we see artefacts with particular qualities of motion to be alive, and asks what notions of cognition can explain these perceptions. ‘Irresistible Animacy’ is our human tendency to be drawn to the primitive and strangely thrilling nature of experiencing lively artefacts. I have two research methodologies; one is interdisciplinary scholarship and the other is my artistic practice of building lively artefacts. I have developed an approach that draws on first-order cybernetics’ central animating principle of feedback-control, and second-order cybernetics’ concerns with cognition. The foundations of this approach are based upon practices of machine making to embody and perform animate behaviour, both as scientific and artistic pursuits. These have inspired embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended notions of cognition. I have developed an understanding using a theoretical framework, drawing upon literature on visual perception, behavioural and social psychology, puppetry, animation, cybernetics, robotics, interaction and aesthetics. I take as a starting point, the understanding that the visual cortex of the vertebrate eye includes active feature-detection for animate agents in our environment, and actively constructs the causal and social structure of this environment. I suggest perceptual ambiguity is at the centre of all animated art forms. Ambiguity encourages natural curiosity and interactive participation. It also elicits complex visceral qualities of presence and the uncanny. In the making of my own Lively Artefacts, I demonstrate a series of different approaches including the use of abstraction, artificial life algorithms, and reactive techniques

A galaxy of wor(l)ds: the translation of fictive vernacular in the Star Wars transmedia narrative in Brazil

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, Florianópolis, 2020.Com as recentes mudanças de cenário nas publicações de materiais da saga Star Wars no Brasil (que começou com a mudança do titular da propriedade intelectual em 2012), a franquia tornou-se uma narrativa transmídia no país. Diante desse contexto, a presente pesquisa tem como objetivo descrever as práticas tradutórias adotadas para lidar com materiais de Star Wars. Considerando que uma narrativa transmídia é um todo composto formado pela expansão narrativa em múltiplos episódios em diferentes plataformas midiáticas, a presente pesquisa visa, em última instância, investigar as práticas de tradução adotadas e seus impactos para a integridade dessa narrativa transmídia no Brasil. A investigação das práticas de tradução centra-se no dispositivo narrativo baseado na linguagem verbal denominado Vernáculo Fictício, um conceito proposto nesta tese. Os Estudos Descritivos da Tradução ofereceram as bases teóricas para analisar os pares selecionados de textos fontes e suas traduções. Os Estudos de Tradução com base em Corpus fornecem os procedimentos e ferramentas teóricas e metodológicas para conduzir a análise dos dados, para cujo fim foi criado um corpus paralelo computadorizado. O corpus paralelo é composto por pares alinhados de textos fontes e traduções nas mídias livro, quadrinho e filme (apenas os componentes verbais das duas últimas mídias são incluídos no corpus paralelo). Ele é composto por dois pares por mídia, totalizando seis títulos e doze textos. A análise revela duas tendências principais nas práticas adotadas para traduzir o Vernáculo Fictício no corpus. A primeira tendência envolve imprimir a composição de itens fictícios fonte nos textos de chegada. A segunda diz respeito ao aproveitamento dos recursos da língua-alvo para traduzir itens fictícios, mesmo às custas de, ocasionalmente, anular sua função de criação de mundo.Abstract: With the recent change in the publication scenario of materials from the Star Wars saga in Brazil (upon the change of intellectual property holder in 2012), the franchise has become a transmedia narrative in the country. In view of this context, the present research aims to describe the translation practices adopted to deal with Star Wars materials. Considering that a transmedia narrative is a composite whole formed by narrative expansion across multiples instalments in different media platforms, the present research ultimately aims to investigate the adopted translation practices and their impact on the wholeness of the transmedia narrative in Brazil. The investigation of translation practices focuses on the language-based narrative device called Fictive Vernacular, a concept developed in this thesis. Descriptive Translation Studies offered the theoretical foundations to analyse the selected pairs of source and translated texts. Corpus-based Translation Studies provide the theoretical and methodological procedures and tools to conduct the data analysis, for which end a computerised parallel corpus was created. The parallel corpus is composed of aligned pairs of source and target books, comics and films (only the verbal components of the last two are included in the parallel corpus). It comprises of two pairs per media, adding up to six instalments and twelve texts in total. Analysis reveals two main tendencies in the practices of translating the Fictive Vernacular in the corpus. The first tendency involves imprinting the makeup of source fictive items into the target texts. The second concerns drawing on the resources of the target language to render fictive items, even at the expense of occasionally irrupting their world-building function

Proust\u27s Medusa: Ovid, Evolution, and Modernist Metamorphosis

Ovid\u27s Metamorphoses has served as an indispensable text for Modernism, not least for such foundational Modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. This dissertation examines how these writers characteristically employ Ovidian metamorphoses with a specifically evolutionary inflection, particularly in a post- Darwinian world informed by varying -often authoritarian- notions of biological adaptation, as well as an increasing emphasis on Mendalian genetics as the determining factor in what would become known as the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory. Using the theoretical platforms of both Queer Theory and Object Ontology, this dissertation proposes that a more pluralized, less authoritative appreciation of Darwinian change can be seen in the very different Ovidianism of Marcel Proust\u27s A la recherche du temps perdu, especially in the well-known English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Primarily concerned with the importance of Ovid\u27s idiosyncratic version of the Medusa- Perseus myth to Proust\u27s project, this study argues that Proust\u27s Albertine serves as a singularly Ovidian Medusa, yet one with specifically biological and evolutionary resonances that queer the more rigid and narrow Darwinism of The Men of 1914

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies

Bowdoin Orient v.61, no.1-27 (1931-1932)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1930s/1001/thumbnail.jp

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed