190,580 research outputs found
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
Cloud Storage and Bioinformatics in a private cloud deployment: Lessons for Data Intensive research
This paper describes service portability for a private cloud deployment, including a detailed case study about Cloud Storage and bioinformatics services developed as part of the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). Our Cloud Storage design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture and user support. Experiments for data services (backup automation, data recovery and data migration) are performed and results confirm backup automation is completed swiftly and is reliable for data-intensive research. The data recovery result confirms that execution time is in proportion to quantity of recovered data, but the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. The data migration result confirms execution time is in proportion to disk volume of migrated data, but again the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. In addition, benefits of CCAF are illustrated using several bioinformatics examples such as tumour modelling, brain imaging, insulin molecules and simulations for medical training. Our Cloud Storage solution described here offers cost reduction, time-saving and user friendliness
Low Power Processor Architectures and Contemporary Techniques for Power Optimization – A Review
The technological evolution has increased the number of transistors for a given die area significantly and increased the switching speed from few MHz to GHz range. Such inversely proportional decline in size and boost in performance consequently demands shrinking of supply voltage and effective power dissipation in chips with millions of transistors. This has triggered substantial amount of research in power reduction techniques into almost every aspect of the chip and particularly the processor cores contained in the chip. This paper presents an overview of techniques for achieving the power efficiency mainly at the processor core level but also visits related domains such as buses and memories. There are various processor parameters and features such as supply voltage, clock frequency, cache and pipelining which can be optimized to reduce the power consumption of the processor. This paper discusses various ways in which these parameters can be optimized. Also, emerging power efficient processor architectures are overviewed and research activities are discussed which should help reader identify how these factors in a processor contribute to power consumption. Some of these concepts have been already established whereas others are still active research areas. © 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting from airflow in HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems
This study focuses on the design and wind tunnel testing of a high efficiency Energy Harvesting device, based on piezoelectric materials, with possible applications for the sustainability of smart buildings, structures and infrastructures. The development of the device was supported by ESA (the European Space Agency) under a program for the space technology transfer in the period 2014-2016. The EH device harvests the airflow inside Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, using a piezoelectric component and an appropriate customizable aerodynamic appendix or fin that takes advantage of specific airflow phenomena (vortex shedding and galloping), and can be implemented for optimizing the energy consumption inside buildings. Focus is given on several relevant aspects of wind tunnel testing: different configurations for the piezoelectric bender (rectangular, cylindrical and T-shaped) are tested and compared, and the effective energy harvesting potential of a working prototype device is assessed
Mixed Initiative Systems for Human-Swarm Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges
Human-swarm interaction (HSI) involves a number of human factors impacting
human behaviour throughout the interaction. As the technologies used within HSI
advance, it is more tempting to increase the level of swarm autonomy within the
interaction to reduce the workload on humans. Yet, the prospective negative
effects of high levels of autonomy on human situational awareness can hinder
this process. Flexible autonomy aims at trading-off these effects by changing
the level of autonomy within the interaction when required; with
mixed-initiatives combining human preferences and automation's recommendations
to select an appropriate level of autonomy at a certain point of time. However,
the effective implementation of mixed-initiative systems raises fundamental
questions on how to combine human preferences and automation recommendations,
how to realise the selected level of autonomy, and what the future impacts on
the cognitive states of a human are. We explore open challenges that hamper the
process of developing effective flexible autonomy. We then highlight the
potential benefits of using system modelling techniques in HSI by illustrating
how they provide HSI designers with an opportunity to evaluate different
strategies for assessing the state of the mission and for adapting the level of
autonomy within the interaction to maximise mission success metrics.Comment: Author version, accepted at the 2018 IEEE Annual Systems Modelling
Conference, Canberra, Australi
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