A Human-Embodied Drone for Dexterous Aerial Manipulation

Current drones passively surveil. Drones equipped with robotic arms shift this paradigm: the drone is actively interacting with the environment rather than simply sensing it. This would be needed to robotically enhance bridge-related work, called dexterous aerial manipulation: drones could hose decks; drilling on surfaces; and epoxy cracks. Such research is important to advancing bridge maintenance and repair. Recently, the worker’s experience was integrated in aerial manipulation using haptic technology. The net effect is such system could enable the worker to leverage drones to collaborative perform haptic assessments of the objects and complete tasks on the bridge remotely. However, the tasks were completed within the operator’s line-of-sight. Research gap: an immersive framework based on AR/VR is rarely integrated in aerial manipulation. Such framework allows drones to transport the operator’s senses, actions, and presence to a remote location in a real-time. Hence, the operator can physically interact with the environment and socially interacts with actual workers on the work site

Does Parental Income Determine the Effect of Loans on Students\u27 Degree Attainment?

Student borrowing has more than doubled in the past decade, increasing the importance of understanding how student borrowing affects degree attainment. This study examines the impact of borrowing on degree attainment rates of students who attended four-year colleges and universities during 1994-1999. The results show that an increase of$1, 000 has a significant positive impact on degree attainment. However, the influences of loans are not consistent across parental income levels. Loans are significant positive predictors for students of medium parental income but not for lower or higher parental income students

Undergraduate Borrowing and Its Effects on Plans to Attend Graduate School Prior to and After the 1992 Higher Education Act Amendments

As student loan indebtedness has more than doubled in the past decade, it has become important to examine the effects of undergraduate debt on graduate school attendance. The significant increase in student borrowing can be attributed primarily to the passage of the Higher Education Amendments of 1992, which increased federal student loan limits and expanded eligibility in student loan programs. To measure the effects of the increased undergraduate borrowing on graduate school attendance, this study compared graduate school plans of students who attended colleges and universities between 1985-1989 (before the Amendments) and 1994-1998 (after the Amendments). The results indicated a slight negative effect of borrowing on students\u27 plans to attend graduate schools prior to the 1992 Amendments. By contrast, the students who attended school after the 1992 Amendments showed significant positive effects of borrowing, particularly for middle-income students. If middle-income students borrowed money, they were more likely to plan to attend graduate school than students from high-income families with loans

Building a Multicontextual Model of Latino College Enrollment: Student, School, and State-Level Effects

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/review_of_higher_education/v035/35.2.nunez.html.Latinos’ college enrollment rates, particularly in four-year institutions, have not kept pace with their population growth in the United States. Using three-level hierarchical generalized linear modeling, this study analyzes data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine the influence of high school and state contexts, in addition to student characteristics, on Latino students’ enrollment in four-year institutions. Results suggest that academic preparation, navigation of financial aid, levels of school resources, and teacher quality are among the important areas to target to promote Latino four-year college enrollment

Mobile-manipulating UAVs for Sensor Installation, Bridge Inspection and Maintenance

A parallel mechanism and smart gripper was designed and mounted on a rotorcraft drone to act as a robotic arm and hand. This empowers the drone to perform aerial manipulation and execute bridge maintenance. Hosing, drilling, and epoxying serve as case studies to test-and-evaluation and verify-and-validate the design. The approach, tasks, and findings are presented and show that the case studies are realizable. Conclusions and recommendations point to employing haptics-based human-in-the-loop approaches that can increase the scope of repair work involved in bridge maintenance

College Departure: Exploring Student Aid Effects on Multiple Mobility Patterns from Four-Year Institutions

College departure involves multiple mobility patterns that include lateral transfer (from a four-year to another four-year institution), reverse transfer (from a four-year to a two-year institution), and stop out (taking time out of higher education altogether). This study addresses how financial aid influences the likelihood of such mobility patterns for minority and low-income students. Utilizing data from the Education Longitudinal Survey of 2002, this study found that the effects of financial aid on multiple mobility patterns are similar across students of different income groups. By contrast, non-white students benefit significantly from financial aid, particularly from low-burden aid options (e.g., tuition waivers and grants) in lowering the probability of lateral transfer. No financial aid has a significant effect on changing the likelihood that students reverse transfer or stop out

A Human-Embodied Drone for Dexterous Aerial Manipulation

Current drones perform a wide variety of tasks in surveillance, photography, agriculture, package delivery, etc. However, these tasks are performed passively without the use of human interaction. Aerial manipulation shifts this paradigm and implements drones with robotic arms that allow interaction with the environment rather than simply sensing it. For example, in construction, aerial manipulation in conjunction with human interaction could allow operators to perform several tasks, such as hosing decks, drill into surfaces, and sealing cracks via a drone. This integration with drones will henceforth be known as dexterous aerial manipulation. Our recent work integrated the worker’s experience into aerial manipulation using haptic technology. The net effect was such a system could enable the worker to leverage drones and complete tasks while utilizing haptics on the task site remotely. However, the tasks were completed within the operator’s line-of-sight. Until now, immersive AR/VR frameworks has rarely been integrated in aerial manipulation. Yet, such a framework allows the drones to embody and transport the operator’s senses, actions, and presence to a remote location in real-time. As a result, the operator can both physically interact with the environment and socially interact with actual workers on the worksite. This dissertation presents a human-embodied drone interface for dexterous aerial manipulation. Using VR/AR technology, the interface allows the operator to leverage their intelligence to collaboratively perform desired tasks anytime, anywhere with a drone that possesses great dexterity

Bag of Tricks for In-Distribution Calibration of Pretrained Transformers

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have become a de-facto standard promoting the accuracy of text classification tasks, recent studies find that PLMs often predict over-confidently. Although various calibration methods have been proposed, such as ensemble learning and data augmentation, most of the methods have been verified in computer vision benchmarks rather than in PLM-based text classification tasks. In this paper, we present an empirical study on confidence calibration for PLMs, addressing three categories, including confidence penalty losses, data augmentations, and ensemble methods. We find that the ensemble model overfitted to the training set shows sub-par calibration performance and also observe that PLMs trained with confidence penalty loss have a trade-off between calibration and accuracy. Building on these observations, we propose the Calibrated PLM (CALL), a combination of calibration techniques. The CALL complements the drawbacks that may occur when utilizing a calibration method individually and boosts both classification and calibration accuracy. Design choices in CALL's training procedures are extensively studied, and we provide a detailed analysis of how calibration techniques affect the calibration performance of PLMs

Parallel Manipulator-Gripper for Mobile Manipulating UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are originally developed for military, but have been developed over time to time for valuable roles in surveillance, work-assistant, and intelligence for both civilian and military operations. The ability of UAVs that manipulate or carry objects can expand the type of tasks achieved by unmanned aerial systems. High degree of freedom robots with dexterous arm can lead to various applications. Most of manipulators are serial, each motor on each joint affects on stabilizing UAVs. Our lab , DASL , has presented parallel mechanism manipulator for UAVs. It results in less impact on center of gravity(CoG) of UAVs and high precise manipulation. Thus, this work focuses on 6 degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator and gripper(PMG) concept for unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used for multiple purposes. Depending on the purpose, the grasper module on the manipulator’s end-effector changes. The design and mechanism is proposed, and the final results are also given

Optoelectronic manifestation of the orbital angular momentum driven by chiral hopping in helical Se chains

Chiral materials have garnered significant attention in the field of condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, the magnetic moment induced by the chiral spatial motion of electrons in helical materials, such as elemental Te and Se, remains inadequately understood. In this work, we investigate the development of quantum angular momentum enforced by chirality using static and time-dependent density functional theory calculations for an elemental Se chain. Our findings reveal the emergence of an unconventional orbital texture driven by the chiral geometry, giving rise to a non-vanishing current-induced orbital moment. By incorporating spin-orbit coupling, we demonstrate that a current-induced spin accumulation arises in the chiral chain, which fundamentally differs from the conventional Edelstein effect. Furthermore, we demonstrate the optoelectronic detection of the orbital angular momentum in the chiral Se chain, providing a conceptually novel alternative to the interband Berry curvature, which is ill-defined in low dimensions.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure