Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 406)

This bibliography lists 346 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during Oct. 1995. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and physiology, life support systems and man/system technology, protective clothing, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, planetary biology, and flight crew behavior and performance

TOWARDS A NOVEL RESILIENT ROBOTIC SYSTEM

Resilient robotic systems are a kind of robotic system that is able to recover their original function after partial damage of the system. This is achieved by making changes on the partially damaged robot. In this dissertation study, a general robot, which makes sense by including active joints, passive joints, passive links, and passive adjustable links, was proposed in order to explore its resilience. Note that such a robot is also called an under-actuated robot. This dissertation presents the following studies. First, a novel architecture of robots was proposed, which is characterized as under-actuated robot. The architecture enables three types of recovery strategy, namely (1) change of the robot behavior, (2) change of the robot state, and (3) change of the robot configuration. Second, a novel docking system was developed, which allows for the realization of real-time assembly and disassembly and passive joint and adjustable passive link, and this thus enables the realization of the proposed architecture. Third, an example prototype system was built to experiment the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and to demonstrate the resilient behavior of the robot. Fourth, a novel method for robot configuration synthesis was developed, which is based on the genetic algorithm (GA), to determine the goal configuration of a partially damaged robot, at which the robot can still perform its original function. The novelty of the method lies in the integration of both discrete variables such as the number of modules, type of modules, and assembly patterns between modules and the continuous variables such as the length of modules and initial location of the robot. Fifth, a GA-based method for robot reconfiguration planning and scheduling was developed to actually change the robot from its initial configuration to the goal configuration with a minimum effort (time and energy). Two conclusions can be drawn from the above studies. First, the under-actuated robotic architecture can build a cost effective robot that can achieve the highest degree of resilience. Second, the design of the under-actuated resilient robot with the proposed docking system not only reduces the cost but also overcomes the two common actuator failures: (i) an active joint is unlocked (thus becoming a passive joint) and (ii) an active joint is locked (thus becoming an adjustable link). There are several contributions made by this dissertation to the field of robotics. The first is the finding that an under-actuated robot can be made more resilient. In the field of robotics, the concept of the under-actuated robot is available, but it has not been considered for reconfiguration (in literature, the reconfiguration is mostly about fully actuated robots). The second is the elaboration on the concept of reconfiguration planning, scheduling, and manipulation/control. In the literature of robotics, only the concept of reconfiguration planning is precisely given but not for reconfiguration scheduling. The third is the development of the model along with its algorithm for synthesis of the goal reconfiguration, reconfiguration planning, and scheduling. The application of the proposed under-actuated resilient robot lies in the operations in unknown or dangerous environments, for example, in rescue missions and space explorations. In these applications, replacement or repair of a damaged robot is impossible or cost-prohibited

A Novel Approach to Analyze Fashion Digital Archive from Humanities

Fashion styles adopted every day are an important aspect of culture, and style trend analysis helps provide a deeper understanding of our societies and cultures. To analyze everyday fashion trends from the humanities perspective, we need a digital archive that includes images of what people wore in their daily lives over an extended period. In fashion research, building digital fashion image archives has attracted significant attention. However, the existing archives are not suitable for retrieving everyday fashion trends. In addition, to interpret how the trends emerge, we need non-fashion data sources relevant to why and how people choose fashion. In this study, we created a new fashion image archive called Chronicle Archive of Tokyo Street Fashion (CAT STREET) based on a review of the limitations in the existing digital fashion archives. CAT STREET includes images showing the clothing people wore in their daily lives during the period 1970--2017, which contain timestamps and street location annotations. We applied machine learning to CAT STREET and found two types of fashion trend patterns. Then, we demonstrated how magazine archives help us interpret how trend patterns emerge. These empirical analyses show our approach's potential to discover new perspectives to promote an understanding of our societies and cultures through fashion embedded in consumers' daily lives.Comment: In Proceedings of 'The 23rd International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries' 17 pages, 8 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2009.1339

On adaptive robot systems for manufacturing applications

System adaptability is very important to current manufacturing practices due to frequent changes in the customer needs. Two basic concepts that can be employed to achieve system adaptability are flexible systems and modular systems. Flexible systems are fixed integral systems with some adjustable components. Adjustable components have limited ranges of parameter changes that can be made, thus restricting the adaptability of systems. Modular systems are composed of a set of pre-existing modules. Usually, the parameters of modules in modular systems are fixed, and thus increased system adaptability is realized only by increasing the number of modules. Increasing the number of modules could result in higher costs, poor positioning accuracy, and low system stiffness in the context of manufacturing applications. In this thesis, a new idea was formulated: a combination of the flexible system and modular system concepts. Systems developed based on this new idea are called adaptive systems. This thesis is focused on adaptive robot systems. An adaptive robot system is such that adaptive components or adjustable parameters are introduced upon the modular architecture of a robot system. This implies that there are two levels to achieve system adaptability: the level where a set of modules is appropriately assembled and the level where adjustable components or parameters are specified. Four main contributions were developed in this thesis study. First, a General Architecture of Modular Robots (GAMR) was developed. The starting point was to define the architecture of adaptive robot systems to have as many configuration variations as possible. A novel application of the Axiomatic Design Theory (ADT) was applied to GAMR development. It was found that GAMR was the one with the most coverage, and with a judicious definition of adjustable parameters. Second, a system called Automatic Kinematic and Dynamic Analysis (AKDA) was developed. This system was a foundation for synthesis of adaptive robot configurations. In comparison with the existing approach, the proposed approach has achieved systemization, generality, flexibility, and completeness. Third, this thesis research has developed a finding that in modular system design, simultaneous consideration of both kinematic and dynamic behaviors is a necessary step, owing to a strong coupling between design variables and system behaviors. Based on this finding, a method for simultaneous consideration of type synthesis, number synthesis, and dimension synthesis was developed. Fourth, an adaptive modular Parallel Kinematic Machine (PKM) was developed to demonstrate the benefits of adaptive robot systems in parallel kinematic machines, which have found many applications in machine tool industries. In this architecture, actuators and limbs were modularized, while the platforms were adjustable in such a way that both the joint positions and orientations on the platforms can be changed