Flex-Gears

Flex-Gears are being developed as an alternative to brushes and slip rings to conduct electricity across a rotating joint. Flex-Gears roll in the annulus of sun and ring gears for electrical contact while maintaining their position by using a novel application of involute gears. A single Flex-Gear is predicted to transfer up to 2.8 amps, thereby allowing a six inch diameter device, holding 30 Flex-Gears, to transfer over 80 amps. Semi-rigid Flex-Gears are proposed to decrease Flex-Gear stress and insure proper gear meshing

Six-degree-of-freedom parallel minimanipulator with three inextensible limbs

A Six-Degree-of-Freedom Parallel-Manipulator having three inextensible limbs for manipulating a platform is described. The three inextensible limbs are attached via universal joints to the platform at non-collinear points. Each of the inextensible limbs is also attached via universal joints to a two-degree-of-freedom parallel driver such as a five-bar linkage, a pantograph, or a bidirectional linear stepper motor. The drivers move the lower ends of the limbs parallel to a fixed base and thereby provide manipulation of the platform. The actuators are mounted on the fixed base without using any power transmission devices such as gears or belts

UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF CONSUMERS’ VALUETECHNOLOGY FIT ON A MOBILE SHOPPING WEBSITE：THE CASE OF RAKUTEN ICHIBA

Mobile shopping is very popular nowadays. Many mobile shopping websites were founded in recent years, such as Yahoo! and Rakuten Ichiba. Most previous articles focused on theory of planned behavior, trust, flow, perceived usefulness, consumer usability preference, consumer shopping experience and decision-making, integrating technology acceptance model and perceived value. There are few studies to discuss benefits of matching discounts/bargains with a mobile shopping website, as well as how much affective reaction and flow affect continuance intention of using a mobile shopping website. The aim of this study investigates the factors (value-technology fit, affective reaction, flow) influencing continuance intention of the mobile shopping website, and mediation effects of affective reaction and flow. The results of this study show that users’ value-technology fit significantly affects their affective reaction, flow, and continuance intention to use the mobile shopping website. Affective reaction and flow significantly affect users’ continuance intention to use the mobile shopping website. Moreover, affective reaction and flow partially mediate relationship between value-technology fit and users’ continuance intention to use the mobile shopping website, Rakuten Ichiba. The research findings have suggestions for the mobile shopping managers and future research studies

The Key Success Factors of Wearable Computing Devices: An User-Centricity Perspective

In modern electronic business era, the currently popular topic of wearable computing devices (WCD) has prompted foreign and local industry players to look proactively into various WCD-related developments, including the external appearances of WCD hardware, software applications, human-device interface designs, and the appearances of WCDs expected by general users. Setting aside the necessary functional specifications and application requirements of WCDs, the wearing habits that general users have already developed is a more fundamental consideration. These habits should form the basis for the design of both WCD hardware and software at the technological level. In this paper, an analysis is made of the items that general users customarily wear and the purpose(s) and frequency of wearing them. The findings will serve as a reference for industry players who wish to enter the WCD market

Design of a Multi-Host Shared Memory Services System

Memory cache is one kind of memory, through which data and objects are stored, thereby reducing the time required to access the database and hard disk I/O, and achieving accelerated technology effects by a significant application in large-scale web systems. In this paper, we design Memcahed Helper (MH), based on a set of memcached with the scalability of a distributed memory cache system, in line with the progress of the cloud environment. The experimental results show that this system and the more efficient use of memory, provides better performance and speed

Systematic Enumeration of Parallel Manipulators

In this paper, a systematic methodology for enumeration of the kinematicstructures of parallel manipulators is presented. Parallel manipulators areclassified into planar, spherical, and spatial mechanisms. The classificationis followed by an enumeration of the kinematic structures according to thedegrees of freedom and connectivity listing. In particular, a class ofparallel manipulators with pure translational motion capability is enumerated

The 1991-1992 walking robot design

The University of Maryland Walking Machine team designed and constructed a robot. This robot was completed in two phases with supervision and suggestions from three professors and one graduate teaching assistant. Bob was designed during the Fall Semester 1991, then machined, assembled, and debugged in the Spring Semester 1992. The project required a total of 4,300 student hours and cost under $8,000. Mechanically, Bob was an exercise in optimization. The robot was designed to test several diverse aspects of robotic potential, including speed, agility, and stability, with simplicity and reliability holding equal importance. For speed and smooth walking motion, the footpath contained a long horizontal component; a vertical aspect was included to allow clearance of obstacles. These challenges were met with a leg design that utilized a unique multi-link mechanism which traveled a modified tear-drop footpath. The electrical requirements included motor, encoder, and voice control circuitry selection, manual controller manufacture, and creation of sensors for guidance. Further, there was also a need for selection of the computer, completion of a preliminary program, and testing of the robot

A Parallel Manipulator with Only Translational Degrees of Freedom

This report presents a novel three degree of freedom parallel manipulator that employs only revolute joints and constrains the manipulator output to translational motion. Closed-form solutions are developed for both the inverse and forward kinematics. It is shown that the inverse kinematics problem has up to four real solutions, and the forward kinematics problem has up to 16 real solutions

MIMO Evolution toward 6G: End-User-Centric Collaborative MIMO

In 6G, the trend of transitioning from massive antenna elements to even more massive ones is continued. However, installing additional antennas in the limited space of user equipment (UE) is challenging, resulting in limited capacity scaling gain for end users, despite network side support for increasing numbers of antennas. To address this issue, we propose an end-user-centric collaborative MIMO (UE-CoMIMO) framework that groups several fixed or portable devices to provide a virtual abundance of antennas. This article outlines how advanced L1 relays and conventional relays enable device collaboration to offer diversity, rank, and localization enhancements. We demonstrate through system-level simulations how the UE-CoMIMO approaches lead to significant performance gains. Lastly, we discuss necessary research efforts to make UE-CoMIMO available for 6G and future research directions.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. This work has been accepted in IEEE Communications Magazin

Modeling the pulse signal by wave-shape function and analyzing by synchrosqueezing transform

We apply the recently developed adaptive non-harmonic model based on the wave-shape function, as well as the time-frequency analysis tool called synchrosqueezing transform (SST) to model and analyze oscillatory physiological signals. To demonstrate how the model and algorithm work, we apply them to study the pulse wave signal. By extracting features called the spectral pulse signature, {and} based on functional regression, we characterize the hemodynamics from the radial pulse wave signals recorded by the sphygmomanometer. Analysis results suggest the potential of the proposed signal processing approach to extract health-related hemodynamics features