Distance bound smoothing under orientation constraints

Trabajo presentado al ICRA celebrado en Seattle (US) del 26 al 30 de mayo de 2015.Distance Bound Smoothing (DBS) is a basic operation originally developed in Computational Chemistry to determine point configurations that are within certain pairwise ranges of distances. This operation consist in the iterative application of filtering processes that reduce the given ranges using triangular and tetrangular inequalities. Standard DBS has a limited range of applications because it does not take into account constraints on the orientations of simplices (triangles or tetrahedra, depending on the dimension of the problem). This paper discusses an extension of DBS that permits incorporating these constraints. This paves the way for the application of DBS techniques to a broad range of problems in Robotics.This work has been partially supported by by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under project DPI2014-57220-C2-2-PPeer Reviewe

The HumanoidLab: Involving students in a research centre through an educational initiative

Trabajo presentado a la 6th International Conference on Compute Supported Education, celebrada en Barcelona del 1 al 3 de abril de 2014.The HumanoidLab is a more than 5 year old activity aimed to use educational robots to approach students to our Research Centre. Different commercial educative humanoid platforms have been used to introduce students to different aspects of robotics using projects and offering guidance and assistance. About 40 students have performed small mechanics, electronics or programming projects that are used to improve the robots by adding features. Robotics competitions are used as a motivation tool. A two weeks course was started that has received 80 undergraduate students, and more than 100 secondary school students in a short version. The experience has been very positive for students and for the institution: some of these students have performed their scholar projects and research in robotics and continue enrolled in the robotics field, and some of them are currently in research groups at IRI.The HumanoidLab has been mainly funded by a program of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia devoted to strength department activities with 20KEur.Peer Reviewe

A diabetic milieu increases ACE2 expression and cellular susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infections in human kidney organoids and patient cells

Altres ajuts: European Research Council (ERC); EIT Health under grant ID 20366 (R2U-Tox-Assay); IBEC Faster Future program (A por la COVID-19); European Regional Development Fund (FEDER); Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Empresarial (AGATA 0011-1411-2020-000011, DIANA 0011-1411-2017-000029); Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO); IBEC International PhD Programme "La Caixa" Severo Ochoa fellowships (LCF/BQ/SO16/52270019); start-up funds from the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, Gainesville; T. von Zastrow Foundation; the FWF Wittgenstein award (Z 271-B19); the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program (F18-01336); the Canadian Institutes of Health Research COVID-19 (F20-02343, F20-02015); Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship (P400PM_194473/1); Swedish Research Council (2018-05766); the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU 101005026); Ayudas Fundación BBVA a Equipos de Investigación Científica SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19 through the project "Identifying SARS-CoV-2-host cell interactions exploiting CRISPR-Cas9-engineered human organoids: through the development of specific therapies against COVID19"; Fundació la Marató de TV3 (201910-31 and 202125-3).It is not well understood why diabetic individuals are more prone to develop severe COVID-19. To this, we here established a human kidney organoid model promoting early hallmarks of diabetic kidney disease development. Upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, diabetic-like kidney organoids exhibited higher viral loads compared with their control counterparts. Genetic deletion of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in kidney organoids under control or diabetic-like conditions prevented viral detection. Moreover, cells isolated from kidney biopsies from diabetic patients exhibited altered mitochondrial respiration and enhanced glycolysis, resulting in higher SARS-CoV-2 infections compared with non-diabetic cells. Conversely, the exposure of patient cells to dichloroacetate (DCA), an inhibitor of aerobic glycolysis, resulted in reduced SARS-CoV-2 infections. Our results provide insights into the identification of diabetic-induced metabolic programming in the kidney as a critical event increasing SARS-CoV-2 infection susceptibility, opening the door to the identification of new interventions in COVID-19 pathogenesis targeting energy metabolism

Sensor Localization from Distance and Orientation Constraints

The sensor localization problem can be formalized using distance and orientation constraints, typically in 3D. Local methods can be used to refine an initial location estimation, but in many cases such estimation is not available and a method able to determine all the feasible solutions from scratch is necessary. Unfortunately, existing methods able to find all the solutions in distance space can not take into account orientations, or they can only deal with one- or two-dimensional problems and their extension to 3D is troublesome. This paper presents a method that addresses these issues. The proposed approach iteratively projects the problem to decrease its dimension, then reduces the ranges of the variable distances, and back-projects the result to the original dimension, to obtain a tighter approximation of the feasible sensor locations. This paper extends previous works introducing accurate range reduction procedures which effectively integrate the orientation constraints. The mutual localization of a fleet of robots carrying sensors and the position analysis of a sensor moved by a parallel manipulator are used to validate the approach.This work has been partially supported by by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under project DPI2014-57220-C2-2-P.We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI

Disseny, implementació i control d’un robot paral·lel de 5 graus de llibertat

En projecte té com a objectiu el disseny, la implementació i el control d'un robot paral·lel de 5 graus de llibertat. El resultat de la implementació es pot observar en la fi gura 44. El robot en qüestió guarda semblances amb un pentapode. Un pentapode és un manipulador paral·lel complet amb un eix axial com a plataforma mòbil. El robot implementat es diferencia d'un pentapode en la disposició dels actuadors. Aquest tipus de manipuladors suposen una interessant alternativa als robots serie que manipulen eines amb simetria axial. La seva geometria particular permet assolir angles de gairebé 90o d'inclinació superant així les limitacions de la plataforma clàssica del tipus Stewart. El disseny del robot intenta complir els requeriments establerts, tenint en compte les limitacions mecàniques que sorgeixen per la complexitat del robot. La implementació consta de dues etapes, la fabricació i muntatge del robot i el control d'aquest per tal de generar trajectòries simples

Amulets The psychology of magical thought in a contemporary context

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN036519 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Distance bound smoothing under orientation constraints

Distance Bound Smoothing (DBS) is a basic operation originally developed in Computational Chemistry to determine point configurations that are within certain pairwise ranges of distances. This operation consist in the iterative application of filtering processes that reduce the given ranges using triangular and tetrangular inequalities. Standard DBS has a limited range of applications because it does not take into account constraints on the orientations of simplices (triangles or tetrahedra, depending on the dimension of the problem). This paper discusses an extension of DBS that permits incorporating these constraints. This paves the way for the application of DBS techniques to a broad range of problems in Robotics.Peer Reviewe