21,527 research outputs found
Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study
Developing robot agnostic software frameworks involves synthesizing the
disparate fields of robotic theory and software engineering while
simultaneously accounting for a large variability in hardware designs and
control paradigms. As the capabilities of robotic software frameworks increase,
the setup difficulty and learning curve for new users also increase. If the
entry barriers for configuring and using the software on robots is too high,
even the most powerful of frameworks are useless. A growing need exists in
robotic software engineering to aid users in getting started with, and
customizing, the software framework as necessary for particular robotic
applications. In this paper a case study is presented for the best practices
found for lowering the barrier of entry in the MoveIt! framework, an
open-source tool for mobile manipulation in ROS, that allows users to 1)
quickly get basic motion planning functionality with minimal initial setup, 2)
automate its configuration and optimization, and 3) easily customize its
components. A graphical interface that assists the user in configuring MoveIt!
is the cornerstone of our approach, coupled with the use of an existing
standardized robot model for input, automatically generated robot-specific
configuration files, and a plugin-based architecture for extensibility. These
best practices are summarized into a set of barrier to entry design principles
applicable to other robotic software. The approaches for lowering the entry
barrier are evaluated by usage statistics, a user survey, and compared against
our design objectives for their effectiveness to users
Design of a fast computer-based partial discharge diagnostic system
Partial discharges cause progressive deterioration of insulating materials working in high voltage conditions and may lead ultimately to insulator failure. Experimental findings indicate that deterioration increases with the number of discharges and is consequently proportional to the magnitude and frequency of the applied voltage. In order to obtain a better understanding of the mechanisms of deterioration produced by partial discharges, instrumentation capable of individual pulse resolution is required. A new computer-based partial discharge detection system was designed and constructed to conduct long duration tests on sample capacitors. This system is capable of recording large number of pulses without dead time and producing valuable information related to amplitude, polarity, and charge content of the discharges. The operation of the system is automatic and no human supervision is required during the testing stage. Ceramic capacitors were tested at high voltage in long duration tests. The obtained results indicated that the charge content of partial discharges shift towards high levels of charge as the level of deterioration in the capacitor increases
Nanopore direct RNA sequencing maps the complexity of Arabidopsis mRNA processing and m6A modification
Understanding genome organization and gene regulation requires insight into RNA transcription, processing and modification. We adapted nanopore direct RNA sequencing to examine RNA from a wild-type accession of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and a mutant defective in mRNA methylation (m6A). Here we show that m6A can be mapped in full-length mRNAs transcriptome-wide and reveal the combinatorial diversity of cap-associated transcription start sites, splicing events, poly(A) site choice and poly(A) tail length. Loss of m6A from 3’ untranslated regions is associated with decreased relative transcript abundance and defective RNA 30 end formation. A functional consequence of disrupted m6A is a lengthening of the circadian period. We conclude that nanopore direct RNA sequencing can reveal the complexity of mRNA processing and modification in full-length single molecule reads. These findings can refine Arabidopsis genome annotation. Further, applying this approach to less well-studied species could transform our understanding of what their genomes encode
The VVDS data reduction pipeline: introducing VIPGI, the VIMOS Interactive Pipeline and Graphical Interface
The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS), designed to measure 150,000 galaxy
redshifts, requires a dedicated data reduction and analysis pipeline to process
in a timely fashion the large amount of spectroscopic data being produced. This
requirement has lead to the development of the VIMOS Interactive Pipeline and
Graphical Interface (VIPGI), a new software package designed to simplify to a
very high degree the task of reducing astronomical data obtained with VIMOS,
the imaging spectrograph built by the VIRMOS Consortium for the European
Southern Observatory, and mounted on Unit 3 (Melipal) of the Very Large
Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory (Chile). VIPGI provides the astronomer
with specially designed VIMOS data reduction functions, a VIMOS-centric data
organizer, and dedicated data browsing and plotting tools, that can be used to
verify the quality and accuracy of the various stages of the data reduction
process. The quality and accuracy of the data reduction pipeline are comparable
to those obtained using well known IRAF tasks, but the speed of the data
reduction process is significantly increased, thanks to the large set of
dedicated features. In this paper we discuss the details of the MOS data
reduction pipeline implemented in VIPGI, as applied to the reduction of some
20,000 VVDS spectra, assessing quantitatively the accuracy of the various
reduction steps. We also provide a more general overview of VIPGI capabilities,
a tool that can be used for the reduction of any kind of VIMOS data.Comment: 10 pages, submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysic
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