8,186 research outputs found
Owning your own home: reality or myth
The focus of the white paper will be to highlight the housing challenges that people in the New England region and in the United States face. Affordability, sustainability, people needs, societal needs, environmental needs, economic incentives and impact of government policies are just a few of the topics that will be explored
Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many
people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently
lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people.
The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments,
which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body.
We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the
robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also
show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model
with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use
haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are
readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical
human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk.
Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely
self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our
approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms
of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller
succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment
around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction
horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching
on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's
predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep
predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily
penalizes high forces.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Multidimensional Capacitive Sensing for Robot-Assisted Dressing and Bathing
Robotic assistance presents an opportunity to benefit the lives of many
people with physical disabilities, yet accurately sensing the human body and
tracking human motion remain difficult for robots. We present a
multidimensional capacitive sensing technique that estimates the local pose of
a human limb in real time. A key benefit of this sensing method is that it can
sense the limb through opaque materials, including fabrics and wet cloth. Our
method uses a multielectrode capacitive sensor mounted to a robot's end
effector. A neural network model estimates the position of the closest point on
a person's limb and the orientation of the limb's central axis relative to the
sensor's frame of reference. These pose estimates enable the robot to move its
end effector with respect to the limb using feedback control. We demonstrate
that a PR2 robot can use this approach with a custom six electrode capacitive
sensor to assist with two activities of daily living-dressing and bathing. The
robot pulled the sleeve of a hospital gown onto able-bodied participants' right
arms, while tracking human motion. When assisting with bathing, the robot moved
a soft wet washcloth to follow the contours of able-bodied participants' limbs,
cleaning their surfaces. Overall, we found that multidimensional capacitive
sensing presents a promising approach for robots to sense and track the human
body during assistive tasks that require physical human-robot interaction.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figures, International Conference on Rehabilitation
Robotics 201
Far-UV Emission from Elliptical Galaxies at z=0.55
The restframe UV-to-optical flux ratio, characterizing the ``UV upturn''
phenomenon, is potentially the most sensitive tracer of age in elliptical
galaxies; models predict that it may change by orders of magnitude over the
course of a few Gyr. In order to trace the evolution of the UV upturn as a
function of redshift, we have used the far-UV camera on the Space Telescope
Imaging Spectrograph to image the galaxy cluster CL0016+16 at z=0.55. Our
25''x25'' field includes four bright elliptical galaxies, spectroscopically
confirmed to be passively evolving cluster members. The weak UV emission from
the galaxies in our image demonstrates that the UV upturn is weaker at a
lookback time 5.6 Gyr earlier than our own, as compared to measurements of the
UV upturn in cluster E and S0 galaxies at z=0 and z=0.375. These images are the
first with sufficient depth to demonstrate the fading of the UV upturn expected
at moderate redshifts. We discuss these observations and the implications for
the formation history of galaxies.Comment: 4 pages, Latex. 2 figures. Uses corrected version of emulateapj.sty
and apjfonts.sty (included). Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Administrative Procedure
Since the last report on developments in Virginia\u27s law of administrative procedure, both her General Assembly and her courts have been busy making new law. This year\u27s General Assembly revamped the Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ), and made adjustments to laws regulating the periods in which agencies must decide certain types oflicensing cases and promulgate certain procedural regulations. Meanwhile, the courts of the Commonwealth were active in the field, addressing open questions concerning the following subjects: rulemaking, due process, evidence, timeliness, and judicial review
Software Metrics and the Object-Oriented Paradigm
Software metrics are in use to guide current software development practices. As commercial organizations make use of the benefits of the object-oriented paradigm, the desire to apply metrics to that paradigm has logically followed. However, standard procedural metrics are limited in their ability to describe true object-oriented designs and code, and in some aspects fail outright. This paper describes the difficulties in applying standard metrics to object-oriented code and defines a set of metrics which are specifically geared toward the features which make the object-oriented approach unique
Field experiments with corn
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