New Condition for Tofu Stable Grasping with Fluid Fingertips

Tofu shows the following compression behavior. First, the behavior is non-linear; subsequently, the behavior becomes elastic/linear, followed by yielding and fracture. A linear behavior indicates that there is no fracture, but further increase of compression can cause yielding or fracture. The compression in the region of linear behavior then can be regarded as maximum. With this in mind, this paper presented a grasping condition of controlling the amount of compression so that the compression behavior can be linear. This condition is applied to the previously proposed fluid fingertip that utilizes a rubber bag filled with a viscoelastic fluid and having a rigid layer inside the fluid. In addition, this paper presents a methodology for checking whether the grasping condition is held, based on our previously developed phase change detection method of comparing the fitting accuracies of different approximation models. Additionally, this paper presents the reason behind the behavioral change of fluid pressure. Before phase change, the fluid fingertip behaves like a rigid fingertip, while after phase change, the contact pressure is transmitted to the fluid pressure and can be observed by the fluid pressure. The validity of the approach was shown through experiments

Variable-grasping-mode underactuated soft gripper with environmental contact-based operation

A novel robotic gripper with soft surfaces and underactuated joints was proposed. The soft surface was fabricated from a deformable rubber bag filled with incompressible fluid and a microgripper inside the fluid. A ratchet was installed at the underactuated joint so that the joint\u27s rotation caused by contact with an environment, such as a supporting surface, can be preserved, and the actions of scooping and enveloping an object are realized. With one actuator, the gripper realized three modes, i.e., parallel gripper, pinching, and enveloping. The range of graspable objects was wide and included soft, rigid, deformable, fragile, small (boundary length less than 30 mm), large (more than 80 mm long), thin (less than 0.5 mm), and heavy (more than 3 kg) objects.INSPEC Accession Number: 1671251

The relationships between context and conceptual access.

147 p.An important question in the cognitive neuroscience of language regards the nature of the conceptual representations that make up semantic memory. Amodal accounts argue that conceptual representations of objects and their processing is functionally distinct from sensory or motor brain systems whereas sensorimotor theories maintain that they involve the same perceptual and action brain areas active in experience. In a break from current orthodoxy, this thesis seeks to explore if concepts and semantic processing are best considered as functionally grounded in sensorimotor systems and contextually sensitive. We report four studies using behavioural-psycholinguistic and neuroimaging techniques in healthy and clinical populations. In part 1 we show that online perceptual processing in the visual and olfactory modalities can interact with language comprehension, that lifetime sensory experience shapes the representational structure of object concepts, and that the outcome of semantic processing differs depending on an interaction of personal experience and people¿s immediate perceptual context. In part 2, we examine whether motor system degradation due to Parkinson's disease leads to impairments in processing manipulable objects compared to healthy controls. Counter to our predictions we do not observe behavioural differences in the way Parkinson's disease patients access the representations of manipulable objects, however, we report neuroimaging evidence suggesting that changes in people's motor capacities lead to measurable alterations in the way that they process action semantics, at the neural level. Taken together this thesis provides evidence that the content and format of the conceptual representations of objects is multimodal and grounded in sensory and motor brain systems and people's lifetime sensory and motor experience with objects shapes their representations in deeply personal ways. Therefore, contrary to amodal accounts, there is functional overlap between sensorimotor and semantic processing, such that sensory, motor and semantic processes mutually interact with context (at many levels). This suggests that exploring the relationship between concepts and context is both necessary and vital in order to properly understand the semantic representations underlying noun words.Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Languag

Guideline on therapeutic dentistry for the 5-th term

РУКОВОДСТВАСТОМАТОЛОГИЯ ЛЕЧЕБНО-ВОССТАНОВИТЕЛЬНАЯСТОМАТОЛОГИЯ ТЕРАПЕВТИЧЕСКАЯИНОСТРАННЫЕ СТУДЕНТЫУЧЕБНО-МЕТОДИЧЕСКИЕ ПОСОБИЯПособие составлено в соответствии с учебной программой для медицинских вузов по терапевтической стоматологии. Предназначено для внутреннего использования

Covering health: healthworlds of first-generation Chinese immigrants in Boston Chinatown

This study examines the healthworlds of first-generation Chinese immigrants in Boston's Chinatown. Through participant observation and interviews conducted within a local church and a local park community, three key issues emerged: how the space of Chinatown influences people's post-immigration healthworlds; the dynamics of community health supports and health challenges; and the daily health lives of these immigrant individuals within their respective families. Likewise, complex understandings of health coverage emerge that include not only health insurance, but also social forms of insurance. Community integration becomes not only a cultural tradition, but also how health resources and health support are linked and provided. This social form of insurance makes it possible for community members to reach out cultural and religious health resources and support in the context of everyday life

The Ramparts Sublime: A Novel

The prevailing concerns throughout this work of fiction are the questions of Who is family? and Where is home? It is a narrative which explores questions of identity in the context of modern American cultural mobility, wherein the boundaries of identity have been variously blurred, blended, and occupied by the forces of modernity and globalization. The narrative seeks to examine the usefulness of such boundaries within individual human relationships and, in particular, explores the potential for the blues as an art form to foster human relationships that are familial in nature, not in spite of its historical context but rather because of it. That the narrator himself is uncomfortably self-conscious of his own narration is representative of the novel's preoccupation with the problems of white discourse on race and cultural identity and the limits of language in general in attempts to explore and transcend such issues