Design of test bench apparatus and preliminary weight reduction strategy for an active knee prosthesis

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 32).This thesis presents the design and structural analyses of an experimental test bench for the characterization of an active biomimetic knee prosthesis currently being developed by the Biomechatronics research group at MIT Media Laboratory. Finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to determine the maximum stress and material deflections of three principle components of the test bench and to verify their structural integrity. In addition, FEA is performed on the chassis of the active knee prosthesis when subjected to the expected loads associated with walking. The simulation results verify that the active prosthetic do not expect structural failure during level ground walking trials with above knee amputee participants. Finally, an empirical weight reduction strategy for the active knee is proposed and analyzed. This strategy aims to reduce distal leg mass which contributes to the overall energetic demands of amputee walking. FEA on the modified active knee prosthesis chassis validate the strategy modifications while maintaining the original design feature constraints.by Jacky H. Lau.S.B

Ligand and G-protein selectivity in the κ-opioid receptor

The κ-opioid receptor (KOR) represents a highly desirable therapeutic target for treating not only pain but also addiction and affective disorder

The inheritance of seed dormancy in Sinapis arvensis L

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A Scale Invariant Neural Feature Detector for Visual

A novel feature detector is presented for extracting local image features which are invariant to scale. This detector is composed of simple neuron-like elements whose activation is given by the sum of their weighted inputs. These features are employed for the visual homing task and found to yield superior performance to the warping method [1] on panoramic images of an unstructured environment

A relaxed cutting plane algorithm for solving the Vasicek-type forward interest rate model

This work considers the solution of the Vasicek-type forward interest rate model. A deterministic process is adopted to model the random behavior of interest rate variation as a deterministic perturbation. It shows that the solution of the Vasicek-type forward interest rate model can be obtained by solving a nonlinear semi-infinite programming problem. A relaxed cutting plane algorithm is then proposed for solving the resulting optimization problem. The features of the proposed method are tested using a set of real data and compared with some commonly used spline fitting methods.Semi-infinite programming Forward interest rate

Abstract LCLint: A Tool for Using Specifications to Check Code

This paper describes LCLlnt, an efficient and flexible tool that accepts as input programs (written in ANSI C) and various levels of formal specification. Using this information, LCLint reports inconsistencies between a program and its specification. We also describe our experience using LCLint to help understand, document, and re-engineer legacy code