89 research outputs found
A Survey on the Status of Smart Healthcare from the Universal Village Perspective
This survey paper discusses the condition of smart healthcare implementation. It discusses the current healthcare problems and how smart healthcare technologies ease the problems. Our group, Universal Village, realizes that the integration and interaction between parties in a system will maximize the effectiveness and benefit for the system. Based on this idea, this paper considers the smart city system as a whole, and talks about how smart healthcare interacts with infrastructures and functions inside and outside of the smart healthcare field. Then, it analyzes how a more powerful integrated system can be built from the smart healthcare system. In the end, several case studies are listed. Based on our analysis and the case studies, this paper then ended with the future prospects of the smart healthcare.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]
Collision-Aware Fast Simulation for Soft Robots by Optimization-Based Geometric Computing
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical
compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots
to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an
efficient and reliable simulator that can handle the collision response well,
is still a challenging task in the research of soft robotics. This paper
presents a collision-aware simulator based on geometric optimization, in which
we develop a highly efficient and realistic collision checking / response model
incorporating a hyperelastic material property. Both actuated deformation and
collision response for soft robots are formulated as geometry-based objectives.
The collision-free body of a soft robot can be obtained by minimizing the
geometry-based objective function. Unlike the FEA-based physical simulation,
the proposed pipeline performs a much lower computational cost. Moreover,
adaptive remeshing is applied to achieve the improvement of the convergence
when dealing with soft robots that have large volume variations. Experimental
tests are conducted on different soft robots to verify the performance of our
approach
Geometry-based Direct Simulation for Multi-Material Soft Robots
Robots fabricated by soft materials can provide higher flexibility and thus better safety while interacting with natural objects with low stiffness such as food and human beings. However, as many more degrees of freedom are introduced, the motion simulation of a soft robot becomes cumbersome, especially when large deformations are presented. Moreover, when the actuation is defined by geometry variation, it is not easy to obtain the exact loads and material properties to be used in the conventional methods of deformation simulation. In this paper, we present a direct approach to take the geometric actuation as input and compute the deformed shape of soft robots by numerical optimization using a geometry-based algorithm. By a simple calibration, the properties of multiple materials can be modeled geometrically in the framework. Numerical and experimental tests have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of our approach on both cable-driven and pneumatic actuators in soft robotics
Spring-IMU Fusion Based Proprioception for Feedback Control of Soft Manipulators
This paper presents a novel framework to realize proprioception and
closed-loop control for soft manipulators. Deformations with large elongation
and large bending can be precisely predicted using geometry-based sensor
signals obtained from the inductive springs and the inertial measurement units
(IMUs) with the help of machine learning techniques. Multiple geometric signals
are fused into robust pose estimations, and a data-efficient training process
is achieved after applying the strategy of sim-to-real transfer. As a result,
we can achieve proprioception that is robust to the variation of external
loading and has an average error of 0.7% across the workspace on a
pneumatic-driven soft manipulator. The realized proprioception on soft
manipulator is then contributed to building a sensor-space based algorithm for
closed-loop control. A gradient descent solver is developed to drive the
end-effector to achieve the required poses by iteratively computing a sequence
of reference sensor signals. A conventional controller is employed in the inner
loop of our algorithm to update actuators (i.e., the pressures in chambers) for
approaching a reference signal in the sensor-space. The systematic function of
closed-loop control has been demonstrated in tasks like path following and
pick-and-place under different external loads
Transcribing Latin Manuscripts in Respect to Linguistics
Current text detection software, although can transcribe modern languages with high accuracy, has flaws detecting texts and transcribing original Latin manuscripts sufficiently. This paper proposes a general approach for transcribing Latin manuscripts in respect to linguistics and develops a system to transcribe Latin manuscripts containing intricate abbreviations, which combines basic object detection algorithms with linguistics. We used methods from image processing and made changes based on the characteristics of Latin.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]
OpenPneu: Compact platform for pneumatic actuation with multi-channels
This paper presents a compact system, OpenPneu, to support the pneumatic
actuation for multi-chambers on soft robots. Micro-pumps are employed in the
system to generate airflow and therefore no extra input as compressed air is
needed. Our system conducts modular design to provide good scalability, which
has been demonstrated on a prototype with ten air channels. Each air channel of
OpenPneu is equipped with both the inflation and the deflation functions to
provide a full range pressure supply from positive to negative with a maximal
flow rate at 1.7 L/min. High precision closed-loop control of pressures has
been built into our system to achieve stable and efficient dynamic performance
in actuation. An open-source control interface and API in Python are provided.
We also demonstrate the functionality of OpenPneu on three soft robotic systems
with up to 10 chambers
Efficient Jacobian-Based Inverse Kinematics With Sim-to-Real Transfer of Soft Robots by Learning
This paper presents an efficient learning-based method to solve the inverse
kinematic (IK) problem on soft robots with highly non-linear deformation. The
major challenge of efficiently computing IK for such robots is due to the lack
of analytical formulation for either forward or inverse kinematics. To address
this challenge, we employ neural networks to learn both the mapping function of
forward kinematics and also the Jacobian of this function. As a result,
Jacobian-based iteration can be applied to solve the IK problem. A sim-to-real
training transfer strategy is conducted to make this approach more practical.
We first generate a large number of samples in a simulation environment for
learning both the kinematic and the Jacobian networks of a soft robot design.
Thereafter, a sim-to-real layer of differentiable neurons is employed to map
the results of simulation to the physical hardware, where this sim-to-real
layer can be learned from a very limited number of training samples generated
on the hardware. The effectiveness of our approach has been verified on
pneumatic-driven soft robots for path following and interactive positioning
Unifying Vision, Text, and Layout for Universal Document Processing
We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI
model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied
task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages
the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model
image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a
novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain
downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is
pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative
self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to
generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image
reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the
field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural
document editing and content customization. Our method sets the
state-of-the-art on 8 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA,
across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and
websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding
Benchmark.Comment: CVPR 202
New Perspectives on Roles of Alpha-Synuclein in Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the synucleinopathies spectrum of disorders typified by the presence of intraneuronal protein inclusions. It is primarily composed of misfolded and aggregated forms of alpha-synuclein (α-syn), the toxicity of which has been attributed to the transition from an α-helical conformation to a β-sheetrich structure that polymerizes to form toxic oligomers. This could spread and initiate the formation of “LB-like aggregates,” by transcellular mechanisms with seeding and subsequent permissive templating. This hypothesis postulates that α-syn is a prion-like pathological agent and responsible for the progression of Parkinson’s pathology. Moreover, the involvement of the inflammatory response in PD pathogenesis has been reported on the excessive microglial activation and production of pro-inflammatory cytokines. At last, we describe several treatment approaches that target the pathogenic α-syn protein, especially the oligomers, which are currently being tested in advanced animal experiments or are already in clinical trials. However, there are current challenges with therapies that target α-syn, for example, difficulties in identifying varying α-syn conformations within different individuals as well as both the cost and need of long-duration large trials
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