Soft Gloves: A Review on Recent Developments in Actuation, Sensing, Control and Applications

Interest in soft gloves, both robotic and haptic, has enormously grown over the past decade, due to their inherent compliance, which makes them particularly suitable for direct interaction with the human hand. Robotic soft gloves have been developed for hand rehabilitation, for ADLs assistance, or sometimes for both. Haptic soft gloves may be applied in virtual reality (VR) applications or to give sensory feedback in combination with prostheses or to control robots. This paper presents an updated review of the state of the art of soft gloves, with a particular focus on actuation, sensing, and control, combined with a detailed analysis of the devices according to their application field. The review is organized on two levels: a prospective review allows the highlighting of the main trends in soft gloves development and applications, and an analytical review performs an in-depth analysis of the technical solutions developed and implemented in the revised scientific research. Additional minor evaluations integrate the analysis, such as a synthetic investigation of the main results in the clinical studies and trials referred in literature which involve soft gloves

Application of an automatically designed fuzzy logic decision support system to connection admission control in ATM networks

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The role of letter features in visual-word recognition: Evidence from a delayed segment technique

Available online 9 June 2016Do all visual features in aword's constituent letters have the same importance during lexical access? Herewe examined whether some components of a word's letters (midsegments, junctions, terminals) are more important than others. To that end,we conducted two lexical decision experiments using a delayed segment techniquewith lowercase stimuli. In this technique a partial previewappears for 50ms and is immediately followed by the target item. In Experiment 1, the partial preview was composed of terminals+junctions,midsegments+junctions, or midsegments + terminals — a whole preview condition was used as a control. Results only revealed an advantage of the whole preview condition over the other three conditions. In Experiment 2, the partial preview was composed of the whole word except for the deletion of midsegments, junctions, or terminals — we again employed a whole preview condition as a control. Results showed the following pattern in the latency data: whole preview = delay of terminals b delay of junctions b delay of midsegments. Thus, some components of a word's constituent letters are more critical for word identification than others. We examine how the present findings help adjust current models of visual word identification or develop new ones.The research reported in this article has been partially supported by Grant PSI2014- 53444-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.We thank William Berkson for manipulating the fonts to provide us with our stimuli, and for discussion of scientific methodology and terminology

Mathematical Modelling and Analysis of Vehicle Frontal Crash using Lumped Parameters Models

A full-scale crash test is conventionally used for vehicle crashworthiness analysis. However, this approach is expensive and time-consuming. Vehicle crash reconstructions using different numerical modelling approaches can predict vehicle behavior and reduce the need for multiple full-scale crash tests, thus research on the crash reconstruction has received a great attention in the last few decades. Among modelling approaches, lumped parameters models (LPM) and finite element models (FEM) are commonly used in the vehicle crash reconstruction. This thesis focuses on developing and improving the LPM for vehicle frontal crash analysis. The study aims at reconstructing crash scenarios for vehicle-to-barrier (VTB), vehicleoccupant (V-Occ), and vehicle-to-vehicle (VTV), respectively. In this study, a single mass-spring-damper (MSD) is used to simulate a vehicle to-barrier or a wall. A double MSD is used to model the response of the chassis and passenger compartment in a frontal crash, a vehicle-occupant, and a vehicle-tovehicle, respectively. A curve fitting, state-space, and genetic algorithm are used to estimate parameters of the model for reconstructing the vehicle crash kinematics. Further, the piecewise LPM is developed to mimic the crash characteristics for VTB, VO, and VTV crash scenarios, and its predictive capability is compared with the explicit FEM. Within the framework, the advantages of the proposed methods are explained in detail, and suggested solutions are presented to address the limitations in the study.publishedVersio

Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Their Applications

The present book contains 20 articles collected from amongst the 53 total submitted manuscripts for the Special Issue “Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Loigic and Their Applications” of the MDPI journal Mathematics. The articles, which appear in the book in the series in which they were accepted, published in Volumes 7 (2019) and 8 (2020) of the journal, cover a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of fuzzy systems and their extensions and generalizations. This range includes, among others, management of the uncertainty in a fuzzy environment; fuzzy assessment methods of human-machine performance; fuzzy graphs; fuzzy topological and convergence spaces; bipolar fuzzy relations; type-2 fuzzy; and intuitionistic, interval-valued, complex, picture, and Pythagorean fuzzy sets, soft sets and algebras, etc. The applications presented are oriented to finance, fuzzy analytic hierarchy, green supply chain industries, smart health practice, and hotel selection. This wide range of topics makes the book interesting for all those working in the wider area of Fuzzy sets and systems and of fuzzy logic and for those who have the proper mathematical background who wish to become familiar with recent advances in fuzzy mathematics, which has entered to almost all sectors of human life and activity

Objective and automated assessment of surgical technical skills with IoT systems: A systematic literature review

The assessment of surgical technical skills to be acquired by novice surgeons has been traditionally done by an expert surgeon and is therefore of a subjective nature. Nevertheless, the recent advances on IoT, the possibility of incorporating sensors into objects and environments in order to collect large amounts of data, and the progress on machine learning are facilitating a more objective and automated assessment of surgical technical skills. This paper presents a systematic literature review of papers published after 2013 discussing the objective and automated assessment of surgical technical skills. 101 out of an initial list of 537 papers were analyzed to identify: 1) the sensors used; 2) the data collected by these sensors and the relationship between these data, surgical technical skills and surgeons' levels of expertise; 3) the statistical methods and algorithms used to process these data; and 4) the feedback provided based on the outputs of these statistical methods and algorithms. Particularly, 1) mechanical and electromagnetic sensors are widely used for tool tracking, while inertial measurement units are widely used for body tracking; 2) path length, number of sub-movements, smoothness, fixation, saccade and total time are the main indicators obtained from raw data and serve to assess surgical technical skills such as economy, efficiency, hand tremor, or mind control, and distinguish between two or three levels of expertise (novice/intermediate/advanced surgeons); 3) SVM (Support Vector Machines) and Neural Networks are the preferred statistical methods and algorithms for processing the data collected, while new opportunities are opened up to combine various algorithms and use deep learning; and 4) feedback is provided by matching performance indicators and a lexicon of words and visualizations, although there is considerable room for research in the context of feedback and visualizations, taking, for example, ideas from learning analytics.This work was supported in part by the FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades;Agencia Estatal de Investigación, through the Smartlet Project under Grant TIN2017-85179-C3-1-R, and in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the e-Madrid-CM Project under Grant S2018/TCS-4307, a project which is co-funded by the European Structural Funds (FSE and FEDER). Partial support has also been received from the European Commission through Erasmus + Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education projects, more specifically through projects LALA (586120-EPP-1-2017-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), InnovaT (598758-EPP-1-2018-1-AT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), and PROF-XXI (609767-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP)

Challenges for engineering students working with authentic complex problems

Engineers are important participants in solving societal, environmental and technical problems. However, due to an increasing complexity in relation to these problems new interdisciplinary competences are needed in engineering. Instead of students working with monodisciplinary problems, a situation where students work with authentic complex problems in interdisciplinary teams together with a company may scaffold development of new competences. The question is: What are the challenges for students structuring the work on authentic interdisciplinary problems? This study explores a three-day event where 7 students from Aalborg University (AAU) from four different faculties and one student from University College North Denmark (UCN), (6th-10th semester), worked in two groups at a large Danish company, solving authentic complex problems. The event was structured as a Hackathon where the students for three days worked with problem identification, problem analysis and finalizing with a pitch competition presenting their findings. During the event the students had workshops to support the work and they had the opportunity to use employees from the company as facilitators. It was an extracurricular activity during the summer holiday season. The methodology used for data collection was qualitative both in terms of observations and participants’ reflection reports. The students were observed during the whole event. Findings from this part of a larger study indicated, that students experience inability to transfer and transform project competences from their previous disciplinary experiences to an interdisciplinary setting