Locomation strategies for amphibious robots-a review

In the past two decades, unmanned amphibious robots have proven the most promising and efficient systems ranging from scientific, military, and commercial applications. The applications like monitoring, surveillance, reconnaissance, and military combat operations require platforms to maneuver on challenging, complex, rugged terrains and diverse environments. The recent technological advancements and development in aquatic robotics and mobile robotics have facilitated a more agile, robust, and efficient amphibious robots maneuvering in multiple environments and various terrain profiles. Amphibious robot locomotion inspired by nature, such as amphibians, offers augmented flexibility, improved adaptability, and higher mobility over terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial mediums. In this review, amphibious robots' locomotion mechanism designed and developed previously are consolidated, systematically The review also analyzes the literature on amphibious robot highlighting the limitations, open research areas, recent key development in this research field. Further development and contributions to amphibious robot locomotion, actuation, and control can be utilized to perform specific missions in sophisticated environments, where tasks are unsafe or hardly feasible for the divers or traditional aquatic and terrestrial robots

Deep reinforcement learning-based pitch attitude control of a beaver-like underwater robot

The foot paddling of an underwater robot causes continuous changes of the water flow field, which results in the unbalanced hydrodynamic force to change the robot's posture continuously. As the water environment and robot swimming are nonlinear and strongly coupled systems, it is difficult to establish an accurate model. This paper presents an underwater robot, which adopts the synchronous and alternate swimming trajectory of a beaver. Its pitch stability control model is established by using deep reinforcement learning algorithm and its self-learning control system is constructed for stable control of pitch attitude. Experiments are conducted to show that the pitch attitude of the beaver-like underwater robot can be stabilized while maintaining a certain swimming speed. The control method does not need to establish a complex and high-order model of webbed paddling hydrodynamics, which provides a new idea for stable swimming control of underwater robots. This work aims to find an excellent control method for underwater bionic robots. The ocean has the richest natural resources and the most diverse species on Earth. The underwater environment is complex and variable, imposing higher demands on the performance of underwater robots. Increasingly, new concept marine equipment is being researched for scientific exploration, and among these, underwater robots designed based on bionic principles are a growing trend. Currently, most underwater robots still use propellers as their propulsion system. Propellers have advantages such as simple control, high mechanical efficiency, and powerful propulsion, but they also have drawbacks including severe water flow disturbance during operation, high noise, poor concealment, and limited adaptability in complex water environments. Finding a propulsion system with better overall performance is a crucial way to enhance the motion capabilities of underwater robots. Underwater robots often have complex structures, and there are numerous factors influencing their movement in the underwater environment, making fluid dynamics modeling and optimization challenging. Reinforcement learning, as an optimization algorithm, can circumvent the aforementioned difficulties

Analysis of the backpack loading efects on the human gait

Gait is a simple activity of daily life and one of the main abilities of the human being. Often during leisure, labour and sports activities, loads are carried over (e.g. backpack) during gait. These circumstantial loads can generate instability and increase biomechanicalstress over the human tissues and systems, especially on the locomotor, balance and postural regulation systems. According to Wearing (2006), subjects that carry a transitory or intermittent load will be able to find relatively efficient solutions to compensate its effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Design and Development of a Mobile Colonoscopy Robot

The conventional colonoscopy is a common procedure used to access the colon. Despite it being considered the Gold Standard procedure for colorectal cancer diagnosis and treatment, it has a number of major drawbacks, including high patient discomfort, infrequent but serious complications and high skill required to perform the procedure. There are a number of potential alternatives to the conventional colonoscopy, from augmenting the colonoscope to using Computed Tomography Colonography (CTC) - a completely non-invasive method. However, a truly effective, all-round alternative has yet to be found. This thesis explores the design and development of a novel solution: a fully mobile colonoscopy robot called “RollerBall”. Unlike current passive diagnostic capsules, such as PillCam, this device uses wheels at the end of adjustable arms to provide locomotion through the colon, while providing a stable platform for the use of diagnostic and therapeutic tools. The work begins by reviewing relevant literature to better understand the problem and potential solutions. RollerBall is then introduced and its design described in detail. A robust prototype was then successfully fabricated using a 3D printing technique and its performance assessed in a series of benchtop experiments. These showed that the mechanisms functioned as intended and encouraged the further development of the concept. Next, the fundamental requirement of gaining traction on the colon was shown to be possible using hexagonal shaped, macro-scale tread patterns. A friction coefficient ranging between 0.29 and 0.55 was achieved with little trauma to the tissue substrate. The electronics hardware and control were then developed and evaluated in a series of tests in silicone tubes. An open-loop strategy was first used to establish the control algorithm to map the user inputs to motor outputs (wheel speeds). These tests showed the efficacy of the locomotion technique and the control algorithm used, but they highlighted the need for autonomy. To address this, feedback was included to automate the adjusting of the arm angle and amount of force applied by the device; a forward facing camera was also used to automate the orientation control by tracking a user-defined target. Force and orientation control were then combined to show that semi-autonomous control was possible and as a result, it was concluded that clinical use may be feasible in future developments

The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change

Abstract The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated as a painterly or photographic poet, a naturalist and geographer, and yet she was a subtly exquisite musician of wordplay attuned to subvocal effects. This dissertation examines a network of Bishop\u27s affinities and aesthetic commitments, including her wish to say the most difficult things and be funny, if possible. One surprising claim regarding the poet\u27s variously called All Eye, the famous eye, etc., is that her sense of the spiritual is rather antithetical to an ocular regime: even those extremely fluid, revising, surprising land and seascapes for which she is celebrated, are but the tip of the seas we are to attend. Tracing her more properly experimental challenge to her explorations at Vassar, humoring her interest to get an intense sense of consciousness in the tongue, in sensational revisionary moments, I argue that she is a much more radical: and witty) poet than has been granted, and that even those taking her up in a postmodern vein have underappreciated this. Hers is the Emersonian/Pragmatist challenge of transition, and she positioned it particularly in the surface sounds of her words, profoundly attuned as she was to the liminal fringes of a Jamesian stream of thought. Her wish to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking is a commonplace in the criticism, whereas the discussion of the phonotextual creations of sound by way of breath, gestures of transformation, and the affirmation of play, are less lit up. Her poems early to late, and comments outside them, assert her Transcendentalist and Pragmatist affinities, folding them into a radical aesthetic she called the proliferal style. Though her use of religious imagery and language are often believed to evince nostalgic longings, or signal her entrapment in outmoded forms of thinking, I argue that, as part of this project, she made a canny and rigorous effort to adapt her religious inheritance toward the Darwininan understandings of proliferation, error and the ear-rational, pleasure and the chances of change

Epidemiology of Injury in English Women's Super league Football: A Cohort Study

INTRODUCTION: The epidemiology of injury in male professional football has been well documented (Ekstrand, Hägglund, & Waldén, 2011) and used as a basis to understand injury trends for a number of years. The prevalence and incidence of injuries occurring in womens super league football is unknown. The aim of this study is to estimate the prevalence and incidence of injury in an English Super League Women’s Football squad. METHODS: Following ethical approval from Leeds Beckett University, players (n = 25) signed to a Women’s Super League Football club provided written informed consent to complete a self-administered injury survey. Measures of exposure, injury and performance over a 12-month period was gathered. Participants were classified as injured if they reported a football injury that required medical attention or withdrawal from participation for one day or more. Injuries were categorised as either traumatic or overuse and whether the injury was a new injury and/or re-injury of the same anatomical site RESULTS: 43 injuries, including re-injury were reported by the 25 participants providing a clinical incidence of 1.72 injuries per player. Total incidence of injury was 10.8/1000 h (95% CI: 7.5 to 14.03). Participants were at higher risk of injury during a match compared with training (32.4 (95% CI: 15.6 to 48.4) vs 8.0 (95% CI: 5.0 to 10.85)/1000 hours, p 28 days) of which there were three non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. The epidemiological incidence proportion was 0.80 (95% CI: 0.64 to 0.95) and the average probability that any player on this team will sustain at least one injury was 80.0% (95% CI: 64.3% to 95.6%) CONCLUSION: This is the first report capturing exposure and injury incidence by anatomical site from a cohort of English players and is comparable to that found in Europe (6.3/1000 h (95% CI 5.4 to 7.36) Larruskain et al 2017). The number of ACL injuries highlights a potential injury burden for a squad of this size. Multi-site prospective investigations into the incidence and prevalence of injury in women’s football are require

You are the Land, the Land is You: Encounters with spiritually-affective landscapes

Far from being a neutral backdrop or innocent bystander, landscape exerts a powerful emotional as well as physical agency over the lives of those who dwell therein, influencing not just where we live but how we go about living: we shape the land, the land shapes us. Making extensive use of autoethnography and experimental methodologies, this research explores the relationship between landscape, walking and spirituality through the lens of deep topography, incorporating elements of liberative theological thinking, and relating to personal encounters with the landscape walking several branches of the Camino de Santiago over a period of four years. It examines how landscapes evoke emotional, spiritual or religious experiences and assesses the crucial role of walking as a performative act in co-producing affect and emotion. Of principal interest is the idea of ‘landscape experience’ which I describe as a two way process in which there is no subject or object but a fusion between two active agencies. It’s this interaction – this transition from being to becoming – which opens up affective potentialities, from moments of fleeting sublimity to life-changing Damascene conversions. I turn to pilgrimage as a means to develop further these dynamic themes, acknowledging and accounting for the influence of time and space in both momentary and cumulative form. Following Mandoki (1997), I suggest that the Camino de Santiago, a politically, culturally and religiously contested sacred space loaded with over a thousand years of human experience has the Camino have the capacity to ‘bend’ time and space. Put simply, the landscapes of the Camino can ‘do’ things other landscapes can’t. Furthermore, it’s the journey, not the destination that exerts this affective energy. Finally I consider the wider theological implications of this transformative human/landscape encounter. If the spiritual or religious is indeed numinously present, is this experience restricted to the individual or personal spiritualities or does it have the capability to effect wider social and political change

Compact Anthology of World Literature II: Volumes 4, 5, and 6

The Compact Anthology of World Literature, Parts 4, 5, and 6 is designed as an e-book to be accessible on a variety of devices: smart phone, tablet, e-reader, laptop, or desktop computer. Students have reported ease of accessibility and readability on all these devices. To access the ePub text on a laptop, desktop, or tablet, you will need to download a program through which you can read the text. We recommend Readium, an application available through Google. If you plan to read the text on an Android device, you will need to download an application called Lithium from the App Store. On an iPhone, the text will open in iBooks. Affordable Learning Georgia has also converted the .epub files to PDF. Because .epub does not easily convert to other formats, the left margin of the .pdf is very narrow. ALG recommends using the .epub version. Although the text is designed to look like an actual book, the Table of Contents is composed of hyperlinks that will take you to each introductory section and then to each text. The three parts of the text are organized into the following units: Part 4—The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Unit I: The Age of Reason Unit II: The Near East and Asia Part 5—The Long Nineteenth Century Unit I Romanticism Unit II Realism Part 6—The Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature Unit I Modernism Unit II Postcolonial Literature Unit III Contemporary Literature Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain--those published or translated before 1923--are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. In those cases, we have provided a link to a stable site that includes the text. Thus, in Part 6, most of the texts are accessible in the form of links to outside sites. In every case, we have attempted to connect to the most stable links available. The following texts have been prepared with the assistance of the University of North Georgia Press in its role as Affordable Learning Georgia\u27s Partner Press. Affordable Learning Georgia partners with the University of North Georgia Press to assist grantees with copyright clearance, peer review, production and design, and other tasks required to produce quality Open Educational Resources (OER). The University Press is a peer-reviewed, academic press. Its mission is to produce scholarly work that contributes to the fields of innovative teaching, textbooks, and Open Educational Resources. Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant funds may be used for services provided by the Press. To determine how the University Press can assist ALG grantees or anyone interested in developing OER with ALG, the University Press will provide advance free consultations. Please contact the Press at 706-864-1556 or [email protected]. “Textbook Transformation Grants” from Affordable Learning Georgia Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/1018/thumbnail.jp

The fisheries and fishery industries of the United States, Part 1

Fishery Industry of the U.S. 18 July. SMD 124 (pts. 1-7), 47-1, v6-11, 3569p. [1998-2003] Indian porpoise, sea-otter, and whale hunting; Indian shell middens; use of mussels, shell-fish, clams, and oysters; sealing by Makah Indians