Research on fabrication of mirror segments for E-ELT

The next generation ground-based giant telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), under development by the European Southern Observation (ESO) 1, will have nearly 1000 hexagonal segments of 1.45m across the flats. Fast processing of these segments with high form and edge specifications has proven to be a challenge. The Zeeko Precessions sub-aperture bonnet polishing plays an important role providing capability for polishing the surface and correcting the form to meet this target 2,3. BoXTM grinding has been adopted. This technology has the advantage of fast generating of aspheric surface with very low subsurface damage (SSD) 4. This will avoid the need of removing thick layer of stock at polishing stage to remove SSD. However the result grinding signatures has proven to be problematic for direct polishing with Zeeko's standard bonnet technology. A novel 'grolishing' process which stands between 'grinding' and 'polishing' has been developed to deal with mid-spatial features left by BoXTM grinding. This tool is designed base on Zeeko's R80 bonnet which will fits directly into the company's IRP series machines. The process parameters have been optimised to have signatures less than 10 nm PV. The edge profile is 1μm upstand within 40 mm edge zone. The 'grolished' surface can be directly pre-polished together with all the form corrections. To meet the fabrication time target, R160 bonnet is used with 50 mm polishing spot, this will provide removal rate of 9.8 mm3/minute, which can be employed at pre-polishing stage and some form correction. Process parameters have been developed to leave slow upstand at edge zone without any form of sharp edge downturn. The following form correction stage, which employs smaller polishing spot of about 20 mm diameter, will continue to remove form errors of spatial frequency between 0.02 - 0.05 1/mm. Furthermore, the upstand edge will be, to a large part, removed at this stage. It is demonstrated that the form specs can be achieved after this process. The following smoothing process will improve surface textures and remove edge errors. Local edge rectification is normally necessary to bring the edge at same level. A final smoothing process will bring the bulk area and edge zone to meet all the specifications. © 2012 SPIE

Ingestible, controllable, and degradable origami robot for patching stomach wounds

© 2016 IEEE.Developing miniature robots that can carry out versatile clinical procedures inside the body under the remote instructions of medical professionals has been a long time challenge. In this paper, we present origami-based robots that can be ingested into the stomach, locomote to a desired location, patch a wound, remove a foreign body, deliver drugs, and biodegrade. We designed and fabricated composite material sheets for a biocompatible and biodegradable robot that can be encapsulated in ice for delivery through the esophagus, embed a drug layer that is passively released to a wounded area, and be remotely controlled to carry out underwater maneuvers specific to the tasks using magnetic fields. The performances of the robots are demonstrated in a simulated physical environment consisting of an esophagus and stomach with properties similar to the biological organs

VoxRec : hybrid convolutional neural network for active 3D object recognition

Deep Neural Network methods have been used to a variety of challenges in automatic 3D recognition. Although discovered techniques provide many advantages in comparison with conventional methods, they still suffer from different drawbacks, e.g., a large number of pre-processing stages and time-consuming training. In this paper, an innovative approach has been suggested for recognizing 3D models. It contains encoding 3D point clouds, surface normal, and surface curvature, merge them to provide more effective input data, and train it via a deep convolutional neural network on Shapenetcore dataset. We also proposed a similar method for 3D segmentation using Octree coding method. Finally, comparing the accuracy with some of the state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method

Insight into aspheric misfit with hard tools: mapping the island of low mid-spatial frequencies

This paper addresses computer numerical control (CNC) polishing of aspheric or freeform optics. Prior CNC grinding of the asphere tends to produce mid-spatial frequencies (MSFs) at some level. Precessions polishing can rectify these, but the very ability of the bonnet tooling to adapt to the local asphere enables it to do so, at least in part, to similar spatial frequencies in the MSFs. To accelerate smoothing, hard tools can, in principle, be used, but aspheric misfit is often assumed to preclude this. In this paper, we explore new insight into the role of abrasive particle size in accommodating misfit. First, we report on a glass-bending rig to produce a continuous range of complex surfaces, while withstanding process forces. Then, we describe how this was used to evaluate the triangle of misfit, abrasive size, and MSFs produced for hard rotating tools. This has revealed a regime in which such tools can be used without introducing significant new MSFs, as evidenced by manufacture of prototype off-axis aspheric segments for the European Extremely Large Telescope project

Cloud-based automated clinical decision support system for detection and diagnosis of lung cancer in chest CT

Lung cancer is a major cause for cancer-related deaths. The detection of pulmonary cancer in the early stages can highly increase survival rate. Manual delineation of lung nodules by radiologists is a tedious task. We developed a novel computer-aided decision support system for lung nodule detection based on a 3D Deep Convolutional Neural Network (3DDCNN) for assisting the radiologists. Our decision support system provides a second opinion to the radiologists in lung cancer diagnostic decision making. In order to leverage 3-dimensional information from Computed Tomography (CT) scans, we applied median intensity projection and multi-Region Proposal Network (mRPN) for automatic selection of potential regionof-interests. Our Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system has been trained and validated using LUNA16, ANODE09, and LIDC-IDR datasets; the experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our system, attaining sensitivity, specificity, AUROC, accuracy, of 98.4%, 92%, 96% and 98.51% with 2.1 FPs per scan. We integrated cloud computing, trained and validated our Cloud-Based 3DDCNN on the datasets provided by Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, as well as LUNA16, ANODE09, and LIDC-IDR. Our system outperformed the state-of-the-art systems and obtained an impressive 98.7% sensitivity at 1.97 FPs per scan. This shows the potentials of deep learning, in combination with cloud computing, for accurate and efficient lung nodule detection via CT imaging, which could help doctors and radiologists in treating lung cancer patients

Isotropic A-branes and the stability condition

The existence of a new kind of branes for the open topological A-model is argued by using the generalized complex geometry of Hitchin and the SYZ picture of mirror symmetry. Mirror symmetry suggests to consider a bi-vector in the normal direction of the brane and a new definition of generalized complex submanifold. Using this definition, it is shown that there exists generalized complex submanifolds which are isotropic in a symplectic manifold. For certain target space manifolds this leads to isotropic A-branes, which should be considered in addition to Lagrangian and coisotropic A-branes. The Fukaya category should be enlarged with such branes, which might have interesting consequences for the homological mirror symmetry of Kontsevich. The stability condition for isotropic A-branes is studied using the worldsheet approach.Comment: 19 page

On asymptotically equivalent shallow water wave equations

The integrable 3rd-order Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation emerges uniquely at linear order in the asymptotic expansion for unidirectional shallow water waves. However, at quadratic order, this asymptotic expansion produces an entire {\it family} of shallow water wave equations that are asymptotically equivalent to each other, under a group of nonlinear, nonlocal, normal-form transformations introduced by Kodama in combination with the application of the Helmholtz-operator. These Kodama-Helmholtz transformations are used to present connections between shallow water waves, the integrable 5th-order Korteweg-de Vries equation, and a generalization of the Camassa-Holm (CH) equation that contains an additional integrable case. The dispersion relation of the full water wave problem and any equation in this family agree to 5th order. The travelling wave solutions of the CH equation are shown to agree to 5th order with the exact solution

Submonolayer Epitaxy Without A Critical Nucleus

The nucleation and growth of two--dimensional islands is studied with Monte Carlo simulations of a pair--bond solid--on--solid model of epitaxial growth. The conventional description of this problem in terms of a well--defined critical island size fails because no islands are absolutely stable against single atom detachment by thermal bond breaking. When two--bond scission is negligible, we find that the ratio of the dimer dissociation rate to the rate of adatom capture by dimers uniquely indexes both the island size distribution scaling function and the dependence of the island density on the flux and the substrate temperature. Effective pair-bond model parameters are found that yield excellent quantitative agreement with scaling functions measured for Fe/Fe(001).Comment: 8 pages, Postscript files (the paper and Figs. 1-3), uuencoded, compressed and tarred. Surface Science Letters, in press

The role of robotics in computer controlled polishing of large and small optics

Following formal acceptance by ESO of three 1.4m hexagonal off-axis prototype mirror segments, one circular segment, and certification of our optical test facility, we turn our attention to the challenge of segment mass-production. In this paper, we focus on the role of industrial robots, highlighting complementarity with Zeeko CNC polishing machines, and presenting results using robots to provide intermediate processing between CNC grinding and polishing. We also describe the marriage of robots and Zeeko machines to automate currently manual operations; steps towards our ultimate vision of fully autonomous manufacturing cells, with impact throughout the optical manufacturing community and beyond