Transformation of a Woodworking and Furniture Industrial District in Kampala, Uganda: Dichotomous Development of SME Cluster and Large Firm Sector

Clustering small manufacturers are believed to attain various types of collective efficiency. A woodworking and furniture SME district in Uganda has created a learning environment for artisans to start up their own workshops. In the district workers can access various managerial information including business skills and input materials easily than outside. Hence it attracted new entrants to follow and district growth continued. On contrary large firms are locating separately and dispersedly from SME district and have a negative image to SME. This dichotomy has been created partly through spatial division of two sectors and partly through policy favouritism toward large firms

Robots that look like humans : a brief look into humanoid robotics

This article provides a brief overview of the technology of humanoid robots. First, historical development and hardware progress are presented mainly on human-size full-body biped humanoid robots, together with progress in pattern generation of biped locomotion. Then, «whole-body motion» ? coordinating leg and arm movements to fully leverage humanoids? high degrees of freedom ? is presented, followed by its applications in fields such as device evaluation and large-scale assembly. Upper-body humanoids with a mobile base, which are mainly utilized for research on human-robot interaction and cognitive robotics, are also introduced before addressing current issues and perspectives

Trends in CT Examinations and Diagnostic Reference Level (DRL)

Medical exposure is increasing year by year. The main reason is an increase in CT examinations. X-ray examination has been shifting from conventional radiography to CT imaging. Although CT examinations account for only 7.9% of the total number of diagnostic medical examinations, the contribution is about 47% of the total collective effective dose due to diagnostic medical radiology in health-care level I countries according to the 1997-2007 survey by UNSCEAR. Dental X-ray examinations have hardly contributed it, but CT examination is indispensable in dentistry. Dentists also should follow the requirements for CT imaging by the ICRP recommendation and review CT imaging protocol based on national diagnostic reference level (DRL)

Quotient-Space Motion Planning

International audienceA motion planning algorithm computes the motion of a robot by computing a path through its configuration space. To improve the runtime of motion planning algorithms, we propose to nest robots in each other, creating a nested quotient-space decomposition of the configuration space. Based on this decomposition we define a new roadmap-based motion planning algorithm called the Quotient-space roadMap Planner (QMP). The algorithm starts growing a graph on the lowest dimensional quotient space, switches to the next quotient space once a valid path has been found, and keeps updating the graphs on each quotient space simultaneously until a valid path in the configuration space has been found. We show that this algorithm is probabilistically complete and outperforms a set of state-of-the-art algorithms implemented in the open motion planning library (OMPL)

History of Digital Detectors in Intraoral Radiography

The first digital sensor used in intraoral radiography, RadioVisioGraphy was introduced in 1987. It was based on the activity of a charged-Coupled Device (CCD) sensor. Later on, other digital sensors became commercially available, including the Digora featuring an imaging plate coated with photostimulable phosphor (PSP) in 1994 and the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor-based sensor, CDR active pixel sensor, in 1998. These technologies have recently undergone considerable improvement, and several dental clinics have switched from film-based systems to digital imaging. In the early days, digital sensors were considered inferior to film in clinical diagnostics, but according to recent research results, there is no longer any significant difference because of the improvement in performance. However, our latest research using a new evaluation method and a precise phantom model indicated some differences between the performance of CCD and PSP systems and further differences between PSP systems of different function and performance

Infeasibility-free inverse kinematics method

International audienceThe problem of inverse kinematics is revisited in the present paper. The paper is focusing on the problem of solving the inverse kinematics problem while respecting velocity limits on both the robot's joints and the end-effector. Even-though the conventional inverse kinematics algorithms have been proven to be efficient in many applications, defining an admissible trajectory for the end-effector is still a burdensome task for the user, and the problem can easily become unsolvable. The main idea behind the proposed algorithms is to consider the sampling time as a free variable, hence adding more flexibility to the optimization problem associated with the inverse kinematics. We prove that the reformulated problem has always a solution if the end-effector path is in the reachable space of the robot, thus solving the problem of infeasibility of conventional inverse kinematics methods. To validate the proposed approach, we have conducted three simulations scenarios. The simulation results point that while the conventional inverse kinematics methods fail to track precisely a desired end-effector trajectory, the proposed algorithms always succeed

Real-time musculoskeletal visualization of muscle tension and joint reaction forces

International audienceThis paper presents a novel software that visualizes the physical burden of human body during movements. Its main objective is to support factory workers by monitoring the risk of physical health problems like low back pains. To achieve the goal, the software utilizes wearable sensors like IMUs to realize the measurement at a work-site. Several physical information like joint angles, joint torques, muscle tensions, joint reaction forces can be obtained by real-time musculoskeletal computation. The musculoskeletal information can be plotted and recorded by the visualization interface which is integrated to an ergonomic assessment software DhaibaWorks