Wrist joint assembly

A wrist joint assembly is provided for use with a mechanical manipulator arm for finely positioning an end-effector carried by the wrist joint on the terminal end of the manipulator arm. The wrist joint assembly is pivotable about a first axis to produce a yaw motion, a second axis is to produce a pitch motion, and a third axis to produce a roll motion. The wrist joint assembly includes a disk segment affixed to the terminal end of the manipulator arm and a first housing member, a second housing member, and a third housing member. The third housing member and the mechanical end-effector are moved in the yaw, pitch, and roll motion. Drive means are provided for rotating each of the housings about their respective axis which includes a cluster of miniature motors having spur gears carried on the output drive shaft which mesh with a center drive gear affixed on the housing to be rotated

Triple-axis common-pivot arm wrist device for manipulative applications

A concept in manipulator development to overcome the 'weak wrist syndrome', a triple-axis common-pivot arm wrist (TACPAW), is presented. It contains torque motors for actuation, tachometers for measuring rate, and resolvers for position measurements. Furthermore, it provides three degrees of freedom, i.e., pitch, yaw, and roll, in a single manipulator joint. The advantages of this development are increased strength, compactness, and simplification of controls. Designed to be compatible with the protoflight manipulator arm, the joints of TACPAW are back-driveable with + or - 45 deg rotation in pitch, + or - 45 deg in yaw and continuous roll in either direction while delivering 20.5 N-m (15 ft-lb) torque in each of the three movements

Gene Expression in Experimental Aortic Coarctation and Repair: Candidate Genes for Therapeutic Intervention?

Coarctation of the aorta (CoA) is a constriction of the proximal descending thoracic aorta and is one of the most common congenital cardiovascular defects. Treatments for CoA improve life expectancy, but morbidity persists, particularly due to the development of chronic hypertension (HTN). Identifying the mechanisms of morbidity is difficult in humans due to confounding variables such as age at repair, follow-up duration, coarctation severity and concurrent anomalies. We previously developed an experimental model that replicates aortic pathology in humans with CoA without these confounding variables, and mimics correction at various times using dissolvable suture. Here we present the most comprehensive description of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) to date from the pathology of CoA, which were obtained using this model. Aortic samples (n=4/group) from the ascending aorta that experiences elevated blood pressure (BP) from induction of CoA, and restoration of normal BP after its correction, were analyzed by gene expression microarray, and enriched genes were converted to human orthologues. 51 DEGs with \u3e6 fold-change (FC) were used to determine enriched Gene Ontology terms, altered pathways, and association with National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headers (MeSH) IDs for HTN, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and CoA. The results generated 18 pathways, 4 of which (cell cycle, immune system, hemostasis and metabolism) were shared with MeSH ID’s for HTN and CVD, and individual genes were associated with the CoA MeSH ID. A thorough literature search further uncovered association with contractile, cytoskeletal and regulatory proteins related to excitation-contraction coupling and metabolism that may explain the structural and functional changes observed in our experimental model, and ultimately help to unravel the mechanisms responsible for persistent morbidity after treatment for CoA

Consequences of polar form coherence for fMRI responses in human visual cortex

AbstractRelevant features in the visual image are often spatially extensive and have complex orientation structure. Our perceptual sensitivity to such spatial form is demonstrated by polar Glass patterns, in which an array of randomly-positioned dot pairs that are each aligned with a particular polar displacement (rotation, for example) yield a salient impression of spatial structure. Such patterns are typically considered to be processed in two main stages: local spatial filtering in low-level visual cortex followed by spatial pooling and complex form selectivity in mid-level visual cortex. However, it remains unclear both whether reciprocal interactions within the cortical hierarchy are involved in polar Glass pattern processing and which mid-level areas identify and communicate polar Glass pattern structure. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 7T to infer the magnitude of neural response within human low-level and mid-level visual cortex to polar Glass patterns of varying coherence (proportion of signal elements). The activity within low-level visual areas V1 and V2 was not significantly modulated by polar Glass pattern coherence, while the low-level area V3, dorsal and ventral mid-level areas, and the human MT complex each showed a positive linear coherence response functions. The cortical processing of polar Glass patterns thus appears to involve primarily feedforward communication of local signals from V1 and V2, with initial polar form selectivity reached in V3 and distributed to multiple pathways in mid-level visual cortex

Jacobi multipliers, non-local symmetries and nonlinear oscillators

Constants of motion, Lagrangians and Hamiltonians admitted by a family of relevant nonlinear oscillators are derived using a geometric formalism. The theory of the Jacobi last multiplier allows us to find Lagrangian descriptions and constants of the motion. An application of the jet bundle formulation of symmetries of differential equations is presented in the second part of the paper. After a short review of the general formalism, the particular case of non-local symmetries is studied in detail by making use of an extended formalism. The theory is related to some results previously obtained by Krasil'shchi, Vinogradov and coworkers. Finally the existence of non-local symmetries for such two nonlinear oscillators is proved.Comment: 20 page