THREAD: A programming environment for interactive planning-level robotics applications

THREAD programming language, which was developed to meet the needs of researchers in developing robotics applications that perform such tasks as grasp, trajectory design, sensor data analysis, and interfacing with external subsystems in order to perform servo-level control of manipulators and real time sensing is discussed. The philosophy behind THREAD, the issues which entered into its design, and the features of the language are discussed from the viewpoint of researchers who want to develop algorithms in a simulation environment, and from those who want to implement physical robotics systems. The detailed functions of the many complex robotics algorithms and tools which are part of the language are not explained, but an overall impression of their capability is given

Experiences with the JPL telerobot testbed: Issues and insights

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Telerobot Testbed is an integrated robotic testbed used to develop, implement, and evaluate the performance of advanced concepts in autonomous, tele-autonomous, and tele-operated control of robotic manipulators. Using the Telerobot Testbed, researchers demonstrated several of the capabilities and technological advances in the control and integration of robotic systems which have been under development at JPL for several years. In particular, the Telerobot Testbed was recently employed to perform a near completely automated, end-to-end, satellite grapple and repair sequence. The task of integrating existing as well as new concepts in robot control into the Telerobot Testbed has been a very difficult and timely one. Now that researchers have completed the first major milestone (i.e., the end-to-end demonstration) it is important to reflect back upon experiences and to collect the knowledge that has been gained so that improvements can be made to the existing system. It is also believed that the experiences are of value to the others in the robotics community. Therefore, the primary objective here will be to use the Telerobot Testbed as a case study to identify real problems and technological gaps which exist in the areas of robotics and in particular systems integration. Such problems have surely hindered the development of what could be reasonably called an intelligent robot. In addition to identifying such problems, researchers briefly discuss what approaches have been taken to resolve them or, in several cases, to circumvent them until better approaches can be developed

Analyzing Contents of a Computer Cache

The Cache Contents Estimator (CCE) is a computer program that provides information on the contents of level-1 cache of a PowerPC computer. The CCE is configurable to enable simulation of any processor in the PowerPC family. The need for CCE arises because the contents of level-1 caches are not available to either hardware or software readout mechanisms, yet information on the contents is crucial in the development of fault-tolerant or highly available computing systems and for realistic modeling and prediction of computing- system performance. The CCE comprises two independent subprograms: (1) the Dynamic Application Address eXtractor (DAAX), which extracts the stream of address references from an application program undergoing execution and (2) the Cache Simulator (CacheSim), which models the level-1 cache of the processor to be analyzed, by mimicking what the cache controller would do, in response to the address stream from DAAX. CacheSim generates a running estimate of the contents of the data and the instruction subcaches of the level-1 cache, hit/miss ratios, the percentage of cache that contains valid or active data, and time-stamped histograms of the cache content

The nature of substance abuse treatment: Lived experiences of primary care providers.

There is an evolving need in healthcare to develop treatment options for substance abuse disorders in primary care settings. This is a study investigating the experience of providing primary health care treatment to those who have a history of substance abuse issues. Researchers conducted interviews with 14 primary care providers, and the transcripts from those interviews were analyzed using a phenomenological approach. It was determined that the overall experience of providing medical care to patients with a history of substance abuse is emotionally challenging and that it takes a great effort to maintain consistency in care with evidence of possible prescription drug misuse from the patient. Suggestions are made from this study to improve training and subsequent implementing of substance abuse treatment into primary care

MUSE: A musical data sonification toolkit

Presented at the 4th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Palo Alto, California, November 2-5, 1997.Data sonification is the representation of data using sound. Last year we presented a flexible, interactive and portable data sonification toolkit called LISTEN, that allows mapping of data to several sound parameters such as pitch, volume, timbre and duration [20]. One of the potential drawbacks of LISTEN is that since the sounds generated are non-musical, they can be fatiguing when exploring large data sets over extended periods of time. A primary goal in the design of MUSE – a MUsical Sonification Environment – is to map scientific data to musical sounds. The challenge is to ensure that the data meanings are preserved and brought out by these mappings. MUSE provides flexible data mappings to musical sounds using parameters such as pitch (melody), rhythm, tempo, volume, timbre and harmony. MUSE is written in C++ for the SGI platform and works with the freely available sound specification software CSound developed at MIT. We have applied MUSE to map uncertainty in some scientific data sets to musical sounds

A Prototype Ground-Remote Telerobot Control System

A local-remote telerobot control system is described which is being developed for time-delayed ground remote control of space telerobot systems