Path planning for socially-aware humanoid robots

Designing efficient autonomous navigation systems for mobile robots involves consideration of the robotís environment while arriving at a systems architecture that trades off multiple constraints. We have architected a navigation framework for socially-aware autonomous robot navigation, using only the on-board computing resources. Our goal is to foster the development of several important service robotics applications using this platform. Our framework allows a robot to autonomously navigate in indoor environments while accounting for people (i.e., estimating the path of all individuals in the environment), respecting each individualís private space. In our design, we can leverage a wide number of sensors for navigation, including cameras, 2D and 3D scanners, and motion trackers. When designing our sensor system, we have considered that mobile robots have limited resources (i.e., power and computation) and that some sensors are costlier than others (e.g., cameras and 3D scanners stream data at high rates), requiring intensive computation to provide useful insight for real-time navigation. We tradeoff between accuracy, responsiveness, and power, and choose a Hokuyo UST-20LX 2D laser scanner for robot localization, obstacle detection and people tracking. We use an MPU-6050 for motion tracking. Our navigation framework features a low-power sensor system (< 5W) tailored for improved battery life in robotic applications while providing sufficient accuracy. We have completed a prototype for a Human Support Robot using the available onboard computing devices, requiring less than 60W to run. We estimate we can obtain similar performance, while reducing power by ~60%, utilizing low-power high-performance accelerator hardware and parallelized software.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Representation of less-developed countries in Pharmacology journals: an online survey of corresponding authors

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Scientists from less-developed countries (LDC) perceive that it is difficult to publish in international journals from their countries. This online survey was conducted with the primary aim of determining the opinion of corresponding authors of published papers in international Pharmacology journals regarding the difficulties in publications and their possible solutions.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The titles of all Pharmacology journals were retrieved from Pubmed. 131 journals were included in study. The latest issue of all journals was reviewed thoroughly. An online survey was conducted from the corresponding authors of the published papers who belonged to LDC.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>584 out 1919 papers (30.4%) originated from the LDC. 332 responses (response rate; 64.5%) were received from the authors. Approximately 50% the papers from LDC were published in journals with impact factor of less than 2. A weak negative correlation (r = -0.236) was observed between journal impact factor and the percentage of publications emanating from LDC. A significant majority of the corresponding authors (n = 254; 76.5%) perceived that it is difficult to publish in good quality journals from their countries. According to their opinion, biased attitude of editors and reviewers (64.8%) is the most important reason followed by the poor writing skills of the scientists from LDC (52.8%). The authors thought that well-written manuscript (76.1%), improvement in the quality of research (69.9%) and multidisciplinary research (42.9%) are important determinants that may improve the chances of publications.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The LDC are underrepresented in publications in Pharmacology journals. The corresponding authors of the published articles think that biased attitude of the editors as well as the reviewers of international journals and the poor writing skills of scientists are the major factors underlying the non-acceptance of their results. They also think that the improvement in the writing skills and quality of research will increase the chances of acceptance of their works in international journals.</p

A simple, efficient, and general treatment of the singularities in Hartree-Fock and exact-exchange Kohn-Sham methods for solids

We present a general scheme for treating the integrable singular terms within exact exchange (EXX) Kohn-Sham or Hartree-Fock (HF) methods for periodic solids. We show that the singularity corrections for treating these divergencies depend only on the total number and the positions of k-points and on the lattice vectors, in particular the unit cell volume, but not on the particular positions of atoms within the unit cell. The method proposed here to treat the singularities constitutes a stable, simple to implement, and general scheme that can be applied to systems with arbitrary lattice parameters within either the EXX Kohn-Sham or the HF formalism. We apply the singularity correction to a typical symmetric structure, diamond, and to a more general structure, trans-polyacetylene. We consider the effect of the singularity corrections on volume optimisations and k-point convergence. While the singularity corrections clearly depends on the total number of k-points, it exhibits a remarkably small dependence upon the choice of the specific arrangement of the k-points.Comment: 24 pages, 5 Figures, re-submitted to Phys. Rev. B after revision

Outcome of locking plate fixation for proximal humerus fractures

Background: The objective of the study was to evaluate functional outcome of open reduction and internal fixation with proximal humeral internal locking system (PHILOS) plate for proximal humerus fractures.Methods: We reviewed 30 patients who underwent open reduction and internal fixation with PHILOS plate between the years 2010 to 2015. There were 23 men and7 women with a mean age of 36 years (range 20-64).There were 22 patients in the age group of &lt;60 years and 8 patients in the age group of &gt;60 years. According to Neer classification system, 12, 11 and 4 patients had2-part, 3-part, and 4-part fractures, respectively and 2 patients had 4-part fracture dislocation. All surgeries were carried out at our tertiary care trauma center. Functional evaluation of the shoulder at final follow-up was done using Neer’s Evaluation Criteria.Results: The mean follow-up period was 20 months (range 14-40 months). All fractures united clinically and radio logically. The mean time for radiological union was 13.2 weeks (range 9-26 weeks).At the final follow-up the mean Neer’s Evaluation Criteria was 90 (range 76-100). The results were excellent in 17patients, Satisfactory in 8 patients, Unsatisfactory in 4 patients and Failure in 1 patient. During the follow-up, 3 cases of varus malunion, 1 case of failure of fixation were noted. No cases of AVN, hardware failure, locking screw loosening, infection or nonunion were noted.Conclusions: PHILOS provides stable fixation in proximal humerus fractures. In order to prevent the complications like avascular necrosis, knowledge of anatomy and vascular supply of head of humerus and good surgical dissection to preserve vascularity of humeral head is important

Losing Focus: Can It Be Useful in Robotic Laser Surgery?

This paper proposes a method to regulate the tissue temperature during laser surgery by robotically controlling the laser focus. Laser-tissue interactions are generally considered hard to control due to the inherent inhomogeneity of biological tissue, which can create significant variability in its thermal response to laser irradiation. In this study, we use methods from nonlinear control theory to synthesize a temperature controller capable of working on virtually any tissue type without any prior knowledge of its physical properties. The performance of the controller is evaluated in ex-vivo experiments.Comment: Provisionally Accepted at the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics 202

Community–Based Dental Education and Dentists’ Attitudes and Behavior Concerning Patients from Underserved Populations

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153650/1/jddj002203372014781tb05663x.pd

Smart mobile service that helps users to access the applications faster

Our target, today’s generation, we are targeting the root of today’s generation i.e. Mobile phones (Smart phone). Our intent is to engineer a service that will be running on operating system to access the application