A Bioinspired 10 DOF Wearable Powered Arm Exoskeleton for Rehabilitation

The developed exoskeleton device (Exorn) has ten degrees of freedom to control joints starting from shoulder griddle to wrist to provide better redundancy, portability, and flexibility to the human arm motion. A 3D conceptual model is being designed to make the system wearable by human arm. All the joints are simple revolute joints with desired motion limit. A Simulink model of the human arm is being developed with proper mass and length to determine proper torque required for actuating those joints. Forward kinematics of the whole system has been formulated for getting desired dexterous workspace. A proper and simple Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the required embedded system have been designed for providing physiotherapy lessons to the patients. In the literature review it has been found that researchers have generally ignored the motion of shoulder griddle. Here we have implemented those motions in our design. It has also been found that people have taken elbow pronation and supination motion as a part of shoulder internal and external rotation though both motions are quite different. A predefined resolved motion rate control structure with independent joint control is used so that all movements can be controlled in a predefined way

MCDA techniques used in optimization of weights and ratings of DRASTIC model for groundwater vulnerability assessment

DRASTIC is a very simple and common model used for the assessment of groundwater to contamination. This model is widely used across the world in various hydrogeological environments for groundwater vulnerability assessment. The Ohio Water Well Association (OWWA) developed DRASTIC model in 1987. Over the years, several modifications have been made in this model as per the need of the regional assessment of groundwater to contamination. This model has fixed weights for its parameters and fixed ratings for the sub-parameters under the main parameters. The weights and ratings of DRASTIC parameters were fixed on the basis of Delphi network technique, which is the best technique for the consensus-building of experts, but it lacks scientific explanations. Over the years, several optimization techniques have been used to optimize these weights and ratings. This work intends to present a critical analysis of decision optimization techniques used to get the optimum values of weights and ratings. The inherent pros and cons and the optimization challenges associated with these techniques have also been discussed. The finding of this study is that the application of MCDA optimization techniques used to optimize the weights and ratings of DRASTIC model to assess the vulnerability of groundwater depend on the availability of hydrogeological data, the pilot study area and the level of required accuracy for earmarking the vulnerable regions. It is recommended that one must choose the appropriate MCDA technique for the particular region because unnecessary complex structure for optimization process takes more time, efforts, resources, and implementation costs

International Conference on MECHATRONICS, ROBOTICS AND MANUFACTURING

As on today, for mechatronic systems, the main issue is no more how to implement a control system, but how to implement actuators and what is the energy source. The most advanced mechatronics systems are the well known camera autofocus system or camera anti-shake systems. With regards to energy sources of mechatronics systems, most of the applications presently use batteries. But there is a paradigm shift in this approach and now the concept is the energy harvesting, allowing transforming into electricity mechanical energy from shock, vibration, or thermal energy from thermal variation, and so on. Secondly, robotics has became a popular tool in raising interests primerily among mechanical and computer science engineers. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming, and is thus able to do tasks on its own. Another common characteristic is that by its appearance or movements, a robot often conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own. This conference also addresses various issues of robotic systems. Manufacturing system refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished products may be used for manufacturing other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances or automobiles. Modern manufacturing includes all intermediate processes required for the production and integration of a product\u27s components. The conference shall address to the broad areas of Mechatronics, Robotics, and Manufacturing. This will cover industrial applications, such as mechanical product manufacturing; applications in the automotive, aircraft, aerospace, machine tools, mould and die industries; consumer electronics product manufacturing; computers, semiconductor and communication industries and regulated product manufacturing; and biomedical, food, pharmaceutical and packaging industries. The objective of ICMRM-2011 is to establish a channel of communication to disseminate knowledge between academics/researchers and industry practitioners about the advances in mechatronics, robotics, sensors and controls applications in modern manufacturing processes and systems. Area of Coverage Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Agent-based manufacturing systems Artificial intelligence methods for manufacturing Advanced machining systems Autonomous and adaptive control systems Automated manufacturing systems Computer aided and integrated manufacturing methods Computer aided inspection and quality control systems Computers in manufacturing Computational methods and optimisation Software design for intelligent manufacturing Robotics in manufacturing Micro and nanomechatronics systems for manufacturing Hybrid manufacturing processes and systems Intelligent and smart machining systems Layered manufacturing Micro and nanomanufacturing systems Modern engineering of manufacture Process modelling and monitoring Sensors and actuators for manufacturing systems Virtual and rapid prototypinghttps://www.interscience.in/conf_proc_volumes/1011/thumbnail.jp

Soft wearable ionic polymer sensors for palpatory pulse-rate extraction

IPMC (Ionic-Polymer-Metal-Composites) based sensing applications are gaining momentum owing to their flexible structure as well as bio-compatible attributes. The present article explores the domain of bio-potential measurements by using a soft-wearable IPMC-sensing unit to record natural auscultations of the wrist artery. The sensing capabilities are validated by characterizing the same through periodic impact loading over the polymer surface. The composite is installed on 10 healthy individuals, while the generated pulse-tracks are recorded simultaneously using a configured digital stethoscope used as reference. The experiments conducted on the selected experimental-set, in diverse physiological states reveal the potence of the proposed scheme in offering a novel material alternate to prevalent practices in pulse-bit sensing. The marked simplicity paves way for its induction as a potential smart sensor interface for pulse-rate monitoring

Utilisation of skewness of wavelet-based approximate coefficient in walking speed assessment

This study explores wavelet decomposition based skewness analysis for walking speed assessment. This has been achieved by using four force sensing resistors attached beneath the foot and one flex sensor attached on ankle. Experimentation is carried out on walking pattern of able individuals and data are collected using data acquiescing set-up and de-noised using Savitzky–Golay filter. De-noised data are then decomposed at different discrete wavelet transform (DWT) levels from where skewness values of approximate coefficient are assessed. Variation of skewness with respect to walking speed has been observed which shows that skewness values are having definite relations with walking speeds at certain DWT levels. Based on these, an algorithm is proposed for walking speed assessment. Experimentation is again carried out to validate the proposed algorithm. Satisfactory result is achieved indicating that assessment of wavelet decomposition based skewness of approximate coefficients may be very useful for walking speed measurement

Measurement of walking speed from gait data using kurtosis and skewness based approximate and detailed coefficients

This study deals with the application of kurtosis and skewness based approximate and detailed coefficients in walking speed measurement. Gait data (force information of foot and positional information of ankle) are gathered through sensors during level walking on motorised treadmill of normal individuals at various speeds and features are extracted from the data using discrete wavelet tools, namely kurtosis of approximate coefficients, kurtosis of detailed coefficients, skewness of approximate coefficients, and skewness of detailed coefficients. The features corresponding to the different discrete wavelet transformation levels are analysed and results are demonstrated. Specific relations have been found between walking speeds and those parameters, where from optimisation has been done with respect to a parameter, type of sensors, and number of sensors. Finally, an algorithm is proposed accordingly for walking speed measurement using the gait data and subsequently validated through experiments

Capturing Obstructed Nonverbal Cues in Augmented Reality Interactions: A Short Survey

We present a short survey on recovering nonverbal communication cues that are hidden by head-mounted devices while interacting in augmented reality. The focus is on recovering facial expressions and gaze behavior by using various kinds of sensors that are attached to or integrated with these devices. The nonverbal cues can be made visible for other co-located or remote interactants on devices or avatars

An iteratively optimized resolution to hyper redundancy for dissimilarly doped compliant IPMC actuators

Soft-robotics is gradually emerging as one of the promising fields of research and innovation. Owing to the blend of material-chemistry and conventional mechanics, complex motions have been successfully generated by flexible polymeric composites that act upon external activation stimuli. However, lack of robust deterministic models which can command reliable actuator performance, hinder their widespread deployments in diverse paradigms. The present article seeks to address the argument by modelling Ionic Polymer Metal Composites (IPMC) as multi-segmented chains of connected rigid bodies. A Cyclic-Coordinate-Descent (CCD) based Inverse Kinematic solver is employed to resolve the redundancy, by minimizing an objective function in joint space at gradual iterative steps. The algorithm is validated for its ability to model dissimilarly doped polymeric curvatures bearing distinct spatial postures. The 2-D shape estimation problem is addressed to generate patterns akin to original IPMCs for deployment on potential applications that anticipate a foresight of actuator geometry

Shape estimation of IPMC actuators in ionic solutions using hyper redundant kinematic modeling

Ionic Polymer Metal Composites (IPMCs) has established itself as an ionomer rendering wide-ranging applications spanning the paradigm of robotics to medical appliances, thereby drawing significant research interests. Prior studies to characterize IPMCs have been conducted over several years but efforts on its kinematic modeling have remained inchoate. The bending profile of IPMC changes when placed in different ionic solutions. The IPMC trace along with its tip location characterizes its complete behavior upon low level actuation. This article aims at identifying the bending patterns of an IPMC actuator, decomposing it as a 20-link hyper-redundant serial manipulator. The Tractrix based inverse kinematics engine is used to study the polymer profile in distilled water, 1.5 N LiCl and NaCl solutions respectively. The proposed algorithm yields a natural curve (Tractrix) which resembles the profile traced by an actuated IPMC strip — enabling its use in potential applications which would require a foresight of the actuator workspace