Development of an elastic path controller for collaborative robot

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

Autonomous wheelchair with a smart driving mode and a Wi-Fi positioning system

Wheelchairs are an important aid that enhances the mobility of people with several types of disabilities. Therefore, there has been considerable research and development on wheelchairs to meet the needs of the disabled. Since the early manual wheelchairs to their more recent electric powered counterparts, advancements have focused on improving autonomy in mobility. Other developments, such as Internet advancements, have developed the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a promising area that has been studied to enhance the independent operation of the electrical wheelchairs by enabling autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance. This dissertation describes shortly the design of an autonomous wheelchair of the IPL/IT (Instituto Politécnico de Leiria/Instituto de Telecomunicações) with smart driving features for persons with visual impairments. The objective is to improve the prototype of an intelligent wheelchair. The first prototype of the wheelchair was built to control it by voice, ocular movements, and GPS (Global Positioning System). Furthermore, the IPL/IT wheelchair acquired a remote control feature which could prove useful for persons with low levels of visual impairment. This tele-assistance mode will be helpful to the family of the wheelchair user or, simply, to a health care assistant. Indoor and outdoor positioning systems, with printed directional Wi-Fi antennas, have been deployed to enable a precise location of our wheelchair. The underlying framework for the wheelchair system is the IPL/IT low cost autonomous wheelchair prototype that is based on IoT technology for improved affordability

Development of a new elastic path controller for the collaborative wheelchair assistant

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A cross-linguistic study of the lexis of locomotion in learners of second language English

The lexical development of second language learners can be seen to involve them in a process of recategorization. This is also a lifelong, though progressively attenuated, feature in the first language. For the second language learner, however, the process is complicated by the possibility of lexico-semantic interaction between the first and later languages learned.The lexical focus of the study is on the semantic domain of locomotion, which is seen in cognitive semantic terms as a realization of the Source-PathGoal schema. Talmy's typology of motion events provides the linguistic framework for the research programme. According to this typology, languages will tend to have a characteristic verb lexicalization pattern in which motion is conflated with either a Path or a Manner component.The language-learning context is one of learners of English as a second language in a multilingual African country - Kenya. The subjects in the study were drawn from three different first language communities — Luo, Nandi and Lunyore — the first two being Nilotic languages and the third a Bantu language. There were also two levels of L2 proficiency - intermediate and advanced.Four tasks were used to investigate the mental lexicon of the subjects in order to clarify the role of the Ll in lexical organization and use. Two tasks, involving story retelling and sentence completion, considered productive lexical usage and two, using sentence judging and card sorting, looked at receptive usage. Individual verb use was examined as well as Talmy's typology.The results support the view that the mother tongue does influence L2 vocabulary use, both receptive and productive, in quite subtle ways, such as lexicalization patterns, frequency of use of particular verbs, the understanding and acceptance of certain verbs. The influence will vary according to the nature of the task and between individuals. It also tends to decline with greater proficiency, although an established local variety of the L2 is likely to reinforce certain features

Impoliteness as a vehicle for humour in dramatic discourse

This study aims to investigate the proposed complementary relationship between impoliteness (as a form of aggression), and humour (as a form of entertainment). Taking the fictional film As Good As It Gets, I draw from a number of scenes involving the main protagonist Melvin Udall. Although this character is extremely offensive to others, the film is classified as a romantic comedy. As such, it offers a good basis on which to test out my ideas regarding the proposed relationship between impoliteness and humour, and more importantly, how and why we may feel the need to laugh at what is essentially socially proscribed and disturbing behaviour. My work, then, contributes to two main academic fields of interest: with regards the field of impoliteness I demonstrate why offensiveness can be entertaining by making specific links with humour theory, and within the field of stylistics I show how a multi-disciplined approach to character analysis can offer us richer observations and interpretations of behaviour, than would otherwise be available through analysis of models in isolation

The interpretation of English noun phrases with particular regard to generic reference

Within a relevance-theoretic inferential framework, the present corpus-based study offers an explanatory account of how English noun phrases are interpreted in discourse with particular regard to generic reference. Relevance pragmatics pays special attention to the process of discovering the proposition expressed by an utterance as a direct speech act and therefore it provides us with tools to explain how the interpretation of noun phrases contributes to the recovery of the proposition, especially how inference is being carried out. Two sets of features developed in this thesis capture the mechanism of interpreting NPs in general and generic reference in particular. One set applies to nominal expressions which belong to a discoursal network, specifying their relations and thereby enabling us to establish the network. When the NP in question is an introductory expression, another set of features, which has therefore become more important, is used to indicate the clues used in establishing a mental representation of its interpretation. With the help of these two feature-based systems, cognitively significant clues to the interpretation of an NP and its discoursal relations can be caught, including those for deciding whether a certain NP is to be interpreted generically or not. This study also investigates the four types of generics discussed in the linguistic literature: member generics, class generics, sub-class generics, and the generic use of pronouns. With the help of the one-million-word ICE-GB and other authentic sources, a comprehensive classification of discoursal relations and types of generic referents is established, which will serve as a basis for future research

Patient-Physiotherapist Relationships in South Indian Outpatient Settings: An Ethnographic Discourse Study

Therapeutic relationship traditionally has been considered as one of the non-medical factors that influence on patient’s treatment outcome. Previous literature explored the different dimensions of the relationship between patients and various health professionals in healthcare settings. However, in the field of physiotherapy, only very limited number of studies explored the social dimension of the therapeutic relationship. So, the purpose of the study is to identify how the interactional features, contextual factors and the underlying power mechanism influence the formation of the therapeutic relationship in the outpatient physiotherapy settings in South India. Critical realist ethnography is adopted as a method of this study (Hammersely & Atkinson, 2007, Sinead, 2017). Data were collected from outpatient physiotherapy departments in Kerala. Total 21 physiotherapists and 36 patients have participated in this study. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The data collected in the local Malayalam language were translated to English and analysed using the elements from Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and pragmatics (Fairclough, 2001; Alba-Juez & Mackenzie, 2016). Patient compliance to the treatment, solidarity forming conversations and issues associated with expectation are identified as the main elements that influence in creating the better therapeutic relationship. Based on these findings, three therapeutic relationship models were identified include mutual, consumerist and paternalistic therapeutic relationship model. This study discussed the possibilities of how the different elements associated with these models influence the formation therapeutic relationship. The findings of this study enable the Indian physiotherapist to identify the underlying social phenomena and provide an opportunity to determine how to create the better therapeutic relationship based on that. Also, this study acknowledges and provides an insight to the global physiotherapist to think further about the important role of the power discourse and the social exchange happening between the therapist and patient in different aspects of the therapeutic process

Taking Note: Twentieth-Century Literary Annotation and the Crisis of Reading

The aim of this project is to provide a detailed reconsideration of the role that literary annotation plays in twentieth-century literature. The need for such a reconsideration stems from the fact that despite some of the last century's most enduring and significant works using either endnotes or footnotes, there has been very little scholarship written about it. Thus, T.S. Eliot's use of endnotes in The Waste Land or David Jones's footnotes to The Anathemata or David Foster Wallace's use of annotation in Infinite Jest have all been largely overlooked. This dissertation is an attempt to redress what I take to be a regrettable gap in twentieth-century literary studies. In order to do this, I examine how my chosen writers register through the figure of the note wider debates around notions of information overload, the necessity of the reader expending effort, and the cultivation of desired epistemic and interpretative strategies. Thus, I elevate the note to a point where it is far more culturally, critically, and artistically compelling than has previously been acknowledged. In other words, I aim to demonstrate that certain key works of literature within the twentieth century could not have realised their respective projects without the structural technique of annotation. Moving as it does from one end of the century to the other, the dissertation also traces the inheritance of an annotative template as a textual mechanism for indexing and responding to a crisis of reading borne out of the shifting literary landscape of the twentieth century. The figure of the note is as such central to the wider literary aims of my chosen texts and to disregard it, as has so often been the case, is therefore to misunderstand the text to which they have been attached

Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered within two song and dance complexes: al-razḥa, a collective war dance with drumming and antiphonal choral singing, and al-‘āzī, a choral ode with a solo singer, tight poetic structure, and a chorus of responders. Through a close analysis of the content and context of praise poems sung by Arab men’s performance troupes experienced over a year of participant observation fieldwork, I argue that praise poetry is an overlooked site for the construction and negotiation of state political legitimacy. Drawing on heterodox and Gramscian political economy, I show how musical performance operates within broader circuits of exchange by functioning as a site wherein non-market economic logics are fused with moral, performative, and political norms. Instead of simply tracing a circuit of utilitarian exchange (praise for gifts for praise), I focus on the how gifts and their responses reciprocally negotiate social relations between state elites and non-elites. By focusing on the words and actions of non elites as they integrate the various proffered benefits of a distributive state into their own communities, I attempt to complicate standard explanations of Arabian Gulf politics and statecraft. I posit two social mechanisms—one which relates generosity and political legitimacy and one that relates performance with the construction of a moral political community—and then follow them through their operation in social space. By singing praise poetry at celebrations of state distribution, praisers rhetorically render such state gifting as “generosity,” which is deeply tied to good leadership in the Omani context. In addition, praisers simultaneously mythopoetically generate a political community of generous givers and grateful receivers who are linked by relations of history, homeland, religion, and kinship. In this way, praise “opens palms” and induces continued elite distributions. However, unequal gifting is fraught with social hazard and threatens to trap communities in dependency relations with the state. By attending to the pragmatics of performance, however, I argue that razḥa and ‘āzī tacitly address this threat of dependency by performing strength and dignity while simultaneously seeking to redraw the relations of unequal gifting from ones of dependency to ones of mutual obligation—a “moral economy.” This ethnomusicological study is an attempt to show how musical and linguistic performers draw on a wide variety of tacit and explicit economic, moral, political, and communal factors in order to take social action in a context of authoritarian state hegemony