Multiagent learning towards RoboCup

This article describes the issues in multiagent learning towards RoboCup,^1≈3) especially for the real robot leagues. First, the review of the issue in the context of the related area is given, then related works from several viewpoints are reviewed. Next, our approach towards RoboCup Initiative is introduced and finally future issues are given. Minoru Asada, Ph.D.: He received B.E., M.Sc., and Ph.D., degrees in control engineering from Osaka University, in 1977, 1979, and 1982, respectively. From 1982 to 1988, he was a research associate of Control Engineering, Osaka University. In 1989, he became an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering for Computer-Controlled Machinery, Osaka University. In 1995 he became a professor of the department of Adaptive Machine Systems at the same university. From 1986 to 1987, he was a visiting researcher of Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He received the 1992 best paper award of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS92), and the 1996 best paper award of RSJ (Robotics Society of Japan). Also, his paper was one of the finalists of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society 1995 Best Conference Paper Award. He was a general chair of IEEE/RSJ 1996 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS96). Since early 1990, he has been involved in RoboCup activities and his team was the first champion team with USC team in the middle size league of the first RoboCup held in conjunction with IJCAI-97, Nagoya, Japan. Eiji Uchibe, Ph.D.: He received a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Osaka University in 1999. He is currently a research associate of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, in Research for the Future Program titled Cooperative Distributed Vision for Dynamic Three Dimensional Scene Understanding. His research interests are in reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, and their applications. He is a member of IEEE, AAAI, RSJ, and JSAI.     

RAS introduces RAS Society Digital Library [Society News, RAS Society Awards]

Individuals who join the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) or renew their memberships for the year 2010 now have the option to subscribe to the RAS Society Digital Library (SDL) for US$40/year. This article also includes: ICRA 2009--Kobe, Japan. - IEEE, ICRA, and RAS Award Recipients. - IEEE Robotics and Automation Award. - RAS Society Awards. - RAS IEEE Transactions Best Paper Awards. - ICRA Awards. - Bylaws Change Regarding Election of Vice Presidents. - IEEE/IFR IERA Award. - RAS New Technical Committee and New Chapters. - and four Challenges.     

Development of a biomimetic miniature robotic crawler

The paper presents the development of segmented artificial crawlers endowed with passive hook-shaped frictional microstructures. The goal is to find design rules for fabricating biomimetic, adaptable and mobile machines mimicking segmented animals with hydrostatic skeleton, and intended to move effectively along unstructured substrates. The paper describes the mechanical model, the design and the fabrication of a SMA-actuated segmented microrobot, whose locomotion is inspired by the peristaltic motion of Annelids, and in particular of earthworms (Lumbricus Terrestris). Experimental locomotion performance are compared with theoretical performance predicted by a purposely developed friction model -taking into account design parameters such as number of segments, body mass, special friction enhancement appendixes—and with locomotion performance of real earthworms as presented in literature. Experiments indicate that the maximum speed of the crawler prototype is 2.5 mm/s, and that 3-segment crawlers have almost the same velocity as earthworms having the same weight (and about 330% their length), whereas 4-segment crawlers have the same velocity, expressed as body lengths/s, as earthworms with the same mass (and about 270% their length). Arianna Menciassi (MS, 1995; PhD, 1999) joined the CRIM Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy) as a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering with a research program on the micromanipulation of mechanical and biological micro-objects. The main results of the activity on micromanipulation were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (May 2001, Seoul) in a paper titled “Force Feedback-based Microinstrument for Measuring Tissue Properties and Pulse in Microsurgery”, which won the “ICRA2001 Best Manipulation Paper Award”. In the year 2000, she was offered a position of Assistant Professor in Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and in June 2006 she obtained a promotion to Associate Professor. Her main research interests are in the field of biomedical microrobotics, biomimetics, microfabrication technologies, micromechatronics and microsystem technologies. She is working on several European projects and international projects for the development of minimally invasive instrumentation for medical applications and for the exploitation of micro- and nano-technologies in the medical field. Samuele Gorini received his Laurea Degree in Mechanical Engineering (with honors) from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2001. In 2005 he obtained the Ph.D. in Microsystem Engineering with a thesis on locomotion methods and systems for miniaturised endoscopic devices. Since 2000, he has been working at the CRIM Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy. His research interests are in the field of biomedical robotics with a special focus on actuation technologies. Starting from the year 2004 he has been president of Era Endoscopy S.r.l., a start-up company of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna developing novel devices for endoscopy. Dino Accoto (MS 1998, PhD 2002) is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Scuola Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy). He received the Laurea degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pisa (cum laude) in 1998, the diploma in Engineering from the Scuola Sant’Anna (cum laude) in 1999 and the PhD degree from the Scuola Sant’Anna in 2002. From October 2001 to September 2002 he has been visiting scholar at the RPL-Lab, Stanford University (Ca, USA). Since 2004 he cooperates with the Biomedical Robotics & EMC Lab at Campus Bio-Medico University in Rome. His main research field is the modelling and development of small electromechanical systems, with a special attention to multi-physics and multi-domain approaches. The research, often inspired by the analysis of natural mechanisms, has been mainly applied to hybridizing microtechnologies, including microfluidics, and robotics. He has co-authored more than 30 papers, appeared in international journals and conference proceedings. Paolo Dario received his Dr. Eng. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1977. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.. He also teaches courses at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa and at the Campus Biomedico University in Rome. He has been Visiting Professor at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, at the College de France, Paris, and at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France. He was the founder of the ARTS (Advanced Robotics Technologies and Systems) Laboratory and is currently the Co-ordinator of the CRIM (Center for the Research in Microengineering) Laboratory of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, where he supervises a team of about 70 researchers and Ph.D. students. His main research interests are in the fields of medical robotics, bio-robotics, mechatronics and micro/nanoengineering, and specifically in sensors and actuators for the above applications, and in robotics for rehabilitation. He is the coordinator of many national and European projects, the editor of two books on the subject of robotics, and the author of more than 200 scientific papers (75 on ISI journals). He is Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor and member of the Editorial Board of many international journals. Prof. Dario has served as President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in the years 2002–2003. He has been the General Chair of the IEEE RAS-EMBS BioRob’06 Conference and he is the General Co-Chair of ICRA 2007 Conference. Prof. Dario is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the European Society on Medical and Biological Engineering, and a recipient of many honors and awards, such as the Joseph Engelberger Award. He is also a member of the Board of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR).     

Development of Arm Equipped Single Wheel Rover: Effective Arm-Posture-Based Steering Method

We have been proposing a new planetary rover system named SMC Rover. This system consists of one main body and detachable units, which can work as child rovers, and also become driving units of the main body. Each detachable unit named Uni-Rover consists of a single manipulator mounted on a wheel. Prototype models of the Uni-Rover and the SMC Rover have been already developed. This paper describes a new method of trajectory modeling for the Uni-Rover using the relation between arm posture and turning radius. At first, an intuitively recognizable model which uses zero slip angle is introduced. However, because this intuitive model has some problems, a new solution which considers the loss of friction on the wheel and on the caster is also discussed. The validity of the presented method is verified by experiments with an actual mechanical model. Moreover, an effective steering method which considers the margin of the energy stability is introduced.Kazuhiro Motomura is a Ph.D candidate at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). In 2001 he was admitted to skip the fourth grade of the bachelor course in the Department of Mechano-Aerospace engineering at Tokyo Tech to enterthe master course in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the same Institute. He received the B.E. degree in National Institution for Academic Degrees an University Evaluation in 2002, and received the M.E. degree in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Tokyo Tech in 2003. He has been a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2004. He awarded the Incentive Award for the presentation in the 17th RSJ Annual Conference in 2001, and the Finalists for the Best Video Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2003. His research interests include design of robotic mechanisms and control of mobile robots. He studies about the development of planetary rovers.Atsushi Kawakami awarded the chance to skip fourth gradein the bachelor course of Department of Mechano-Aerospace engineering in Tokyo Institute of Technology, and entered the master course in 1997. He received the M.E. and Dr. E. degrees in Department of Mechanical Engineering Science in Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1999 and 2003, respectively. From 2003, he is a post-doctoral researcher. His research interest is in design of robotic mechanisms. He studies about the development of planetary rover. He awarded the Incentive Award for the presentation in the 17th RSJ Annual Conference in 2001, and the Finalists for the Best Video Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2003. He also acts as an organizer and lecturerin several hands on robots competitions that aim at the promotion and education for the beginners.Shigeo Hirose was born in Tokyo in 1947. He received the B. E. degree with first class honors in Mechanical Engineering from Yokohama National University in 1971, and the M. E. and Dr. E. degrees in Control Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1973 and 1976, respectively. From 1976 to 1979 he was a Research Associate, from 1979 to 1992 an Associate Professor and since 1992 he has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is the Fellow of both IEEE and Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers. His research interest is in design of novel robotic mechanisms and its control. He awarded more than 30 prizes from academic societies; these include the first Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award in 1999 and Best Conference Paper Award in 1995 both from IEEE Robotics & Automation Society. Prof. Hirose has published more than 200 academic papers as well as several books, including Snake Inspired Robots (Kogyo-chosakai Publishing Co. Ltd, 1987, in Japanese), Robotics (Shokabo Publishing Co. Ltd., 1987, in Japanese), and Biologically Inspired Robots (Oxford University Press,1993).     

A Sampling-Based Motion Planning Approach to Maintain Visibility of Unpredictable Targets

This paper deals with the surveillance problem of computing the motions of one or more robot observers in order to maintain visibility of one or several moving targets. The targets are assumed to move unpredictably, and the distribution of obstacles in the workspace is assumed to be known in advance. Our algorithm computes a motion strategy by maximizing the shortest distance to escape—the shortest distance the target must move to escape an observer's visibility region. Since this optimization problem is intractable, we use randomized methods to generate candidate surveillance paths for the observers. We have implemented our algorithms, and we provide experimental results using real mobile robots for the single target case, and simulation results for the case of two targets-two observers. Rafael Murrieta-Cid received the B.S degree in Physics Engineering (1990), and the M.Sc. degree in Automatic Manufacturing Systems (1993), both from “Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey” (ITESM) Campus Monterrey. He received his Ph.D. from the “Institut National Polytechnique” (INP) of Toulouse, France (1998). His Ph.D research was done in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence group of the LAAS/CNRS. In 1998–1999, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. From January 2000 to July 2002 he was an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at ITESM Campus México City, México. In 2002–2004, he was working as a postdoctoral research associate in the Beckman Institute and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since August 2004, he is director of the Mechatronics Research Center in the ITESM Campus Estado de México, México. He is mainly interested in sensor-based robotics motion planning and computer vision. Benjamin Tovar received the B.S degree in electrical engineering from ITESM at Mexico City, Mexico, in 2000, and the M.S. in electrical engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2004. Currently (2005) he is pursuing the Ph.D degree in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to M.S. studies he worked as a research assistant at Mobile Robotics Laboratory at ITESM Mexico City. He is mainly interested in motion planning, visibility-based tasks, and minimal sensing for robotics. Seth Hutchinson received his Ph. D. from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1988. He spent 1989 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University. In 1990 Dr. Hutchinson joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Dr. Hutchinson is currently a senior editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. In 1996 he was a guest editor for a special section of the Transactions devoted to the topic of visual servo control, and in 1994 he was co-chair of an IEEE Workshop on Visual Servoing. In 1996 and 1998 he co-authored papers that were finalists for the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions Paper Award. He was co-chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision from 1992 to 1996, and has served on the program committees for more than thirty conferences related to robotics and computer vision. He has published more than 100 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision.     

Intelligent systems in the automotive industry: applications and trends

There is a common misconception that the automobile industry is slow to adapt new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and soft computing. The reality is that many new technologies are deployed and brought to the public through the vehicles that they drive. This paper provides an overview and a sampling of many of the ways that the automotive industry has utilized AI, soft computing and other intelligent system technologies in such diverse domains like manufacturing, diagnostics, on-board systems, warranty analysis and design. Oleg Gusikhin received the Ph.D. degree from St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the M.B.A. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Since 1993, he has been with the Ford Motor Company, where he is a Technical Leader at the Ford Manufacturing and Vehicle Design Research Laboratory, and is engaged in different functional areas including information technology, advanced electronics manufacturing, and research and advanced engineering. He has also been involved in the design and implementation of intelligent control applications for manufacturing and vehicle systems. He is the recipient of the 2004 Henry Ford Technology Award. He holds two U.S. patents and has published over 30 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. He is also a Certified Fellow of the American Production and Inventory Control Society and a member of IEEE and SME. Nestor Rychtyckyj received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. He is a technical expert in Artificial Intelligence at Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, MI, in Advanced and Manufacturing Engineering Systems. His current research interests include the application of knowledge-based systems for vehicle assembly process planning and scheduling. Currently, his responsibilities include the development of automotive ontologies, intelligent manufacturing systems, controlled languages, machine translation and corporate terminology management. He has published more than 30 papers in referred journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of AAAI, ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. Dimitar P. Filev received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Czech Technical University, Prague, in 1979. He is a Senior Technical Leader, Intelligent Control and Information Systems with Ford Research and Advanced Engineering specializing in industrial intelligent systems and technologies for control, diagnostics and decision making. He is conducting research in systems theory and applications, modeling of complex systems, intelligent modeling and control, and has published 3 books and over 160 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He holds 14 granted U.S. patents and numerous foreign patents in the area of industrial intelligent systems He is the recipient of the 1995 Award for Excellence of MCB University Press. He was awarded the Henry Ford Technology Award four times for development and implementation of advanced intelligent control technologies. He is an Associate Editor of International Journal of General Systems and International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society and President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS).     

Erratum

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. The American Control Conference. IFAC World Congress. IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. IEEE International Conference on Communications.     

Optimal Node Visitation in Acyclic Stochastic Digraphs with Multi-threaded Traversals and Internal Visitation Requirements

The original definition of the problem of optimal node visitation (ONV) in acyclic stochastic digraphs concerns the identification of a routing policy that will enable the visitation of each leaf node a requested number of times, while minimizing the expected number of the graph traversals. The original work of Bountourelis and Reveliotis (2006) formulated this problem as a Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem, and since the state space of this SSP formulation is exponentially sized with respect to the number of the target nodes, it also proposed a suboptimal policy that is computationally tractable and asymptotically optimal. This paper extends the results of Bountourelis and Reveliotis (2006) to the cases where (i) the tokens traversing the graph can “split” during certain transitions to a number of (sub-)tokens, allowing, thus, the satisfaction of many visitation requirements during a single graph traversal, and (ii) there are additional visitation requirements attached to the internal graph nodes, which, however, can be served only when the visitation requirements of their successors have been fully met. In addition, the presented set of results establishes stronger convergence properties for the proposed suboptimal policies, and it provides a formal complexity analysis of the considered ONV formulations. From a practical standpoint, the extension of the original results performed in this paper enables their effective usage in the application domains that motivated the ONV problem, in the first place.

Multisensor Demining Robot

The paper describes an advanced multisensor demining robot. The robot transport system is based on a simple structure using pneumatic drive elements. The robot has robust design and can carry demining equipment up to 100 kg over rough terrains. Due to the adaptive possibilities of pedipulators to obstacles, the robot can adjust the working position of the demining sensors while searching for mines. The detection block consists of a metal detector, an infrared detector, and a chemical explosive sensor. The robot is controlled by means of an on-board processor and by an operator remote station in an interactive mode. Experimental results of the transport, control, and detection systems of the robot are presented.Michael Yu. Rachkov is Professor of Automation at the Moscow State Industrial University. He graduated in Automatic Control Systems from Moscow Higher Technical School, 1979. He held academic posts at the Institute for Problems in Mechanics, Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1986 he completed his PhD in industrial robotics and received his DSc in mobile robotics in 1997. Professor Rachkov has been leading in several international projects like EUREKA and REMAPHOS. He has published over 170 papers and several books in the field of automation, robotics and optimal control. He is a member of Russian Cosmonautics Academy and International Informatization Academy.Lino Marques is a research engineer at the Institute of Systems and Robotics of the University of Coimbra. He received the Engineering and MsC. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Faculty of Science and Technology of this University in 1992 and 1997 respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree and teaching in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His current research interests include sensors, mechatronics, mobile robotics and industrial automation.Anábal T. De Almeida graduated in Electrical Engineering, University of Porto, 1972, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, from Imperial College, University of London, 1977. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Coimbra, and he is the Director of the Institute of Systems and Robotics since 1993. Professor De Almeida is a consultant of the European Commission Framework Programmes. He is the co-author of five books and more than one hundred papers in international journals, meetings and conferences. He has coordinated several European and national research projects.     

LMI-based H ∞ synchronization of second-order neutral master-slave systems using delayed output feedback control

The H _∞ synchronization problem of the master and slave structure of a second-order neutral master-slave systems with time-varying delays is presented in this paper. Delay-dependent sufficient conditions for the design of a delayed output-feedback control are given by Lyapunov-Krasovskii method in terms of a linear matrix inequality (LMI). A controller, which guarantees H _∞ synchronization of the master and slave structure using some free weighting matrices, is then developed. A numerical example has been given to show the effectiveness of the method. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Recommended by Editorial Board member Bin Jiang under the direction of Editor Jae Weon Choi. This research has been partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Collaborative Research Center 637 ‘Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes: A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations’ (SFB 637). This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60504008), by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20070213084), by the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (111064). Hamid Reza Karimi born in 1976, received the B.Sc. degree in Power Systems Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1998 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees both in Control Systems Engineering from University of Tehran in 2001 and 2005, respectively. From 2006 to 2007, he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung with both Technical University of Munich and University of Bremen in Germany. He held positions as Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Tehran in Iran, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Industrial Mathematics of the University of Bremen in Germany and Research Fellow of Juan de la Cierva program at the Department of Electronics, Informatics and Automation of the University of Girona in Spain before he was appointed as an Associate Professor in Control Systems at the Faculty of Technology and Science of the University of Agder in Norway in April 2009. His research interests are in the areas of nonlinear systems, networked control systems, robust filter design and vibration control of flexible structures with an emphasis on applications in engineering. Dr. Karimi was the recipient of the German Academic Awards (DAAD Award) from 2003 to 2005 and was a recipient of the Distinguished Researcher Award from University of Tehran in 2001 and 2005. He received the Distinguished PhD Award of the Iranian President in 2005 and the Iranian Students Book Agency’s Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in 2007. He also received first rank of Juan de la Cierva research program in the field of Electrical, Electronic and Automation Engineering in Spain in 2007. Huijun Gao was born in Heilongjiang Province, China, in 1976. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Shenyang University of Technology, Shengyang, China, in 2001 and the Ph.D. degree in Control Science and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2005. He was a Research Associate with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, from November 2003 to August 2004. From October 2005 to September 2007, he carried out his postdoctoral research with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada, supported by an Alberta Ingenuity Fellowship and an Honorary Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship. Since November 2004, he has been with Harbin Institute of Technology, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include network-based control, robust control/filter theory, model reduction, time-delay systems, multidimensional systems, and their engineering applications. Dr. Gao is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part B: Cybernetics, the Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems, the Circuits, System and Signal Processing etc. He serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Systems Science, the Journal of the Franklin Institute etc. He was the recipient of the University of Alberta Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow Prize in 2005 and was a corecipient of the National Natural Science Award of China in 2008. He was a recipient of the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund in 2008 and the National Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in 2007. He was an outstanding reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Automatica in 2008 and 2007 respectively, and an appreciated reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in 2006.     

A Simple Robotic System for Neurorehabilitation

In the recent past, several researchers have shown that important variables in relearning motor skills and in changing the underlying neural architecture after stroke are the quantity, duration, content, and intensity of training sessions. Unfortunately, when traditional therapy is provided in a hospital or rehabilitation center, the patient is usually seen for few hours a week. Robot-mediated therapies could improve this situation but even if interesting results have been achieved by several groups, the use of robot-mediated therapy has not become very common in clinical practice. This is due to many different reasons (e.g., the “technophobia” of some clinicians, the need for more extensive clinical trials) but one of the more important is the cost and the complexity of these devices which make them difficult to be purchased and used in all the clinical centers. The aim of this work was to verify the possibility of improving motor recovery of hemiparetic subjects by using a simple mechatronic system. To achieve this goal, our system (named “MEchatronic system for MOtor recovery after Stroke” (MEMOS)) has been designed with the aim of using mainly “off-the-shelf products” with only few parts simply manufactured with standard technology, when commercial parts were not available. Moreover, the prototype has been developed taking into account the requirements related to the clinical applicability such as robustness and safety. The MEMOSsystem has been used during clinical trials with subjects affected by chronic hemiparesis (<6 months from the cerebrovascular accident). The results obtained during these experiments seem to showthat notwithstanding the simple mechatronic structure characterizing theMEMOSsystem, it is able to help chronic hemiparetics to reduce their level of impairment. Further clinical experiments with acute and chronic subjects will be carried out in order to confirm these preliminary findings. Moreover, experiments for tele-rehabilitation of patients will be also carried out. Silvestro Micera was born in Taranto, Italy, on August 31, 1972. He received the University degree (Laurea) in electrical engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy, in 2000. From 1998 to 2001, he was the Project Manager of the EU GRIP Project (ESPRIT LTR Project 26322, “An integrated system for the neuroelectrIic control of grasp in disabled persons”). During 1999, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University. Since May 2000, he has been an Assistant Professor of Biomechanical Engineering at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. He is currently involved in several projects on neuro-robotics and rehabilitation engineering. His research interests include the development of neuro-robotic systems (interfacing the central and peripheral nervous system with robotic artefacts) and the development of mechatronic and robotic systems for function restoration in disabled persons. Dr. Micera is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING and member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology and Robotics and Automation Societies. M. Chiara Carrozza received the Laurea degree in physics from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1990. Since 2001, she has been an Associate Professor of biomedical robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. She is the co-cordinator of the Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems Laboratory where she is responsible for some national and international projects in the fields of biorobotics. Her research interests are in the fields of biorobotics (artificial hands, upper limb exoskeletons), rehabilitation engineering (neurorehabilitation, domotic, and robotic aids), and biomedical microengineering (microsensors, tactile sensors). She is an author of several scientific papers and international patents. Eugenio Guglielmelli received the Laurea degree and the PhD in electronics engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1991 and in 1995, respectively. He is currently Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Campus Bio-Medico University in Rome, Italy, where he teaches the courses of Bio-Mechatronics and of Rehabilitation Bioengineering, and where he also recently co-founded the new Research Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics & Electro-Magnetic Compatibility. He has been working in the field of biomedical robotics over the last fifteen years at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna where he also served from 2002 to 2004 as the Head of the Advanced Robotics Technology & Systems Laboratory (ARTS Lab), founded by prof. Paolo Dario in 1991. His main current research interests are in the fields of novel theoretical and experimental approaches to human-centered robotics and to biomporphic control of mechatronic systems, and in their application to robot-mediated motor therapy, assistive robotics, neuro-robotics and neuro-developmental engineering. He serves in the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Applied Bionics and Biomechanics. He has been Guest Co-Editor of the Special Issue on Rehabilitation Robotics of the International Journal ‘Autonomous Robots’. He is member of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society, of the Society for Neuroscience, and of the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE). He served (2002–03) as the Secretary of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS) and he is currently Co-chair of the RAS Technical Committee on Rehabilitation Robotics. He serves in the Programme Committees of several International Conferences, such as ICRA, IROS, ICAR, AIM, BIOROB and others. He was/is a member of the Organizing Committees of ICAR2003, IROS2004, IFAC/SYROCO2006 and ICRA2007. Giovanni Cappiello received the M.E. degree from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in robotics at the ARTS Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Pisa. He worked on the RTR IV Prosthetic Hand Project. Among his research interests are rehabilitation technologies, biomedical and surgical devices, osseointegration, and biomimetic artificial sensors. He is involved in the design of antropomorphic hands and arm and in the exploitation of compliant joints. Franco Zaccone was born in Policoro, Italy. He received the University degree (Laurea) in electrical engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 2000. Since June 2000, he has been a Research Assistant at the Advanced Robotics Technologies and Systems Laboratory, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa. His research interests include the design of hardware systems for rehabilitation engineering and motion analysis. Cinzia Freschi was born in Caserta, Italy, on December 25, 1969. She received the University degree (Laurea) in computer engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1998. Since 1998, she has been research assistant at the Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems Laboratory (ARTSLAB), Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. Her research interests are in the filed of rehabilitation engineering and neuro-robotics. Roberto Colombo received the Dr. Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the Politecnico of Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1980. Since 1981, he has been a Research Engineer in the Bioengineering Department of the “Salvatore Maugeri” Foundation, IRCCS, Rehabilitation Institute, Veruno, Italy. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Partner of the European Community project “Prevention of muscular disorders in operation of computer input devices (PROCID).” From 2001 to 2004, he was the Coordinator of the project “Tecniche robotizzate per la valutazione ed il trattamento riabilitativo delle disabilitá motorie dell'arto superiore,” 2001-175, funded by the Italian Ministry of Health. His research interests include robot-aided neurorehabilitation, muscle tone and spasticity evaluation, muscle force and fatigue assessment, speech production mechanisms study, cardiovascular control assessment by spectral analysis of heart rate variability signals, and respiratory mechanics assessment. He has taught several national courses in the field of neurorehabilitation. He is the author of over 20 papers and the co-editor of one book on the subject of speech production mechanisms. Alessandra Mazzone received the degree (Diploma) in computer science, from the ITIS “Leonardo da Vinci,” Borgomanero, Italy, in 1988. Since 1989, she has been a Programmer at the Bioengineering Department, the Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri, Rehabilitation Institute of Veruno (NO), Italy. Her research interests include robot-aided neurorehabilitation, cardiovascular control assessment by spectral analysis of heart rate variability signals, and respiratory mechanics assessment. Carmen Delconte received the Diploma in neurophysiology techniques from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 1989. She is currently with the Clinical Neurophysiology Unit, Scientific Institute of Veruno “Salvatore Maugeri” Foundation, Rehabilitation Institute, Veruno, Italy. Her research concerns the quantification of muscle tone, emg-biomechanical studies, and the robotic rehabilitation of upper limb in cerebrovascular diseases. She has been published in the clinical and electrophisiological field of neuromuscular diseases and on the topic of stroke patients rehabilitation. Her current research is focused on the evaluation and treatment of upper limbs disorders like spasticity and paresis. Dr. Delconte is a member of the Italian Neurophysiology Technician Society. Fabrizio Pisano received the M.D. degree from the University of Milan, Milan, Italy, in 1981. In 1986, he completed his training as resident in neurology and became Neurologist at the same University He was a teacher in “Electromyography” from 1991 to 1997 at the School of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the University of Turin, Torino, Italy. He has taught several national and international electromyographic courses on hand neuromotor rehabilitation, occupational pathology, rehabilitation therapy, muscle fatigue, posture and movement, clinical neurophysiology, and EMG Culture. He was a Scientific Project co-leader of a telethon program (1994–1996); speech motor control in ALS; a search for an early marker of disease. He was the Project Leader of “Quantitative Analysis of Spastic Hypertonia” by the Istituto Superiore della Sanitá during 1998–1999. He was the Clinical Scientific Leader of the INAIL project “International clinical survey over functional electrical stimulation.” He was the Scientific Project Leader of the Clinical Neurophysiology Unit of the project “Tecniche robotizzate per la valutazione ed il trattamento riabilitativo delle disabilitá motorie dell'arto superiore,” 2001-175, funded by the Italian Ministry of Health. He is currently a Neurologist and the Head of the Clinical Neurophysiology Unit, ”Salvatore Maugeri” Foundation, IRCCS, Rehabilitation Institute, Veruno, Italy. He has been published in the clinical and electrophysiological field of neuromuscular diseases and on the topic of stroke patients rehabilitation. His current research interests are in evaluation and treatment of upper limb disorders like spasticity and paresis. Dr. Pisano is a Member of the Italian Neurological Society and the Italian Clinical Neurophysiology Society. Giuseppe Minuco received the Dr. Eng. degree in mechanical engineering from the Politecnico Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1972, and a postgraduate degree in biomedical engineering from the Faculty of Medicine, Bologna, Italy, in 1975. He is currently Head of the Bioengineering Department, “Salvatore Maugeri” Foundation, IRCCS, Pavia, Italy. He is Chair of the Technical Scientific Committee of “CBIM” (Medical Informatics and Bioengineering Consortium) Pavia, Italy. He is Member of the Editorial Board of The Monaldi Archives for Chest Disease and of Giornale Italiano di Medicina del Lavoro ed Ergonomia. Has taught several courses in healthcare management. His main interests are in the fields of rehabilitation engineering, clinical engineering, medical informatics, and telemedicine. Paolo Dario received the Dr. Eng. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1977. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. He also teaches courses at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa, and at the Campus Biomedico University, Rome, Italy. He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown University, Providence, RI, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, and at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. He was the founder of the Advanced Robotics Technologies and Systems (ARTS) Laboratory and is currently the co-cordinator of the Center for Research in Microengineering (CRIM) Laboratory of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where he supervises a team of about 70 researchers and Ph.D. students. He is also the Director of the Polo Sant'Anna Valdera and a Vice-Director of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. His main research interests are in the fields of medical robotics, mechatronics, and micro/nanoengineering, and specifically in sensors and actuators for the above applications. He is the coordinator of many national and European projects, the editor of two books on the subject of robotics, and the author of more than 200 scientific papers (75 in ISI journals). He is Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and Member of the Editorial Board of many international journals. Prof. Dario served as President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society during 2002–2003, and he is currently Co-Chair of the Technical Committees on Bio-robotics and of Robo-ethics of the same society. He is a Fellow of the European Society on Medical and Biological Engineering, and a recipient of many honors and awards, such as the Joseph Engelberger Award. He is also a Member of the Board of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR).     

Fuzzy risk analysis based on the ranking of generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers

In this paper, we present a new method for fuzzy risk analysis based on the ranking of generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The proposed method considers the centroid points and the standard deviations of generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers for ranking generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. We also use an example to compare the ranking results of the proposed method with the existing centroid-index ranking methods. The proposed ranking method can overcome the drawbacks of the existing centroid-index ranking methods. Based on the proposed ranking method, we also present an algorithm to deal with fuzzy risk analysis problems. The proposed fuzzy risk analysis algorithm can overcome the drawbacks of the one we presented in [7]. Shi-Jay Chen was born in 1972, in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. He received the B.S. degree in information management from the Kaohsiung Polytechnic Institute, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and the M.S. degree in information management from the Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, in October 2004. His research interests include fuzzy systems, multicriteria fuzzy decisionmaking, and artificial intelligence. Shyi-Ming Chen was born on January 16, 1960, in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in June 1991. From August 1987 to July 1989 and from August 1990 to July 1991, he was with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Fu-Jen University, Taipei, Taiwan. From August 1991 to July 1996, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. From August 1996 to July 1998, he was a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. From August 1998 to July 2001, he was a Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan. Since August 2001, he has been a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan. He was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. He was a Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Republic of China, in 2003. He has published more than 250 papers in referred journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. His research interests include fuzzy systems, information retrieval, knowledge-based systems, artificial intelligence, neural networks, data mining, and genetic algorithms. Dr. Chen has received several honors and awards, including the 1994 Outstanding Paper Award o f the Journal of Information and Education, the 1995 Outstanding Paper Award of the Computer Society of the Republic of China, the 1995 and 1996 Acer Dragon Thesis Awards for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 1995 Xerox Foundation Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 1996 Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 1997 National Science Council Award, Republic of China, for Outstanding Undergraduate Student's Project Supervision, the 1997 Outstanding Youth Electrical Engineer Award of the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering, Republic of China, the Best Paper Award of the 1999 National Computer Symposium, Republic of China, the 1999 Outstanding Paper Award of the Computer Society of the Republic of China, the 2001 Institute of Information and Computing Machinery Thesis Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 2001 Outstanding Talented Person Award, Republic of China, for the contributions in Information Technology, the 2002 Institute of information and Computing Machinery Thesis Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the Outstanding Electrical Engineering Professor Award granted by the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering (CIEE), Republic of China, the 2002 Chinese Fuzzy Systems Association Best Thesis Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 2003 Outstanding Paper Award of the Technological and Vocational Education Society, Republic of China, the 2003 Acer Dragon Thesis Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Supervision, the 2005 “Operations Research Society of Taiwan” Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision, the 2005 Acer Dragon Thesis Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Supervision, the 2005 Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Supervision, and the 2006 “Operations Research Society of Taiwan” Award for Outstanding M.S. Thesis Supervision. Dr. Chen is currently the President of the Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence (TAAI). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA), and the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society. He was an administrative committee member of the Chinese Fuzzy Systems Association (CFSA) from 1998 to 2004. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part C, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Applied Intelligence, an Editor of the New Mathematics and Natural Computation Journal, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, an Editorial Board Member of the WSEAS Transactions on Systems, an Editor of the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, an Associate Editor of the WSEAS Transactions on Computers, an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications, an Editorial Board Member of the Advances in Fuzzy Sets and Systems Journal, an Editor of the International Journal of Soft Computing, an Editor of the Asian Journal of Information Technology, an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Intelligence Systems Technologies and Applications, an Editor of the Asian Journal of Information Management, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, and an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology. He was an Editor of the Journal of the Chinese Grey System Association from 1998 to 2003. He is listed in International Who's Who of Professionals, Marquis Who's Who in the World, and Marquis Who's Who in Science and Engineering.     

Pitch-Dependent Identification of Musical Instrument Sounds

This paper describes a musical instrument identification method that takes into consideration the pitch dependency of timbres of musical instruments. The difficulty in musical instrument identification resides in the pitch dependency of musical instrument sounds, that is, acoustic features of most musical instruments vary according to the pitch (fundamental frequency, F0). To cope with this difficulty, we propose an F0-dependent multivariate normal distribution, where each element of the mean vector is represented by a function of F0. Our method first extracts 129 features (e.g., the spectral centroid, the gradient of the straight line approximating the power envelope) from a musical instrument sound and then reduces the dimensionality of the feature space into 18 dimension. In the 18-dimensional feature space, it calculates an F0-dependent mean function and an F0-normalized covariance, and finally applies the Bayes decision rule. Experimental results of identifying 6,247 solo tones of 19 musical instruments shows that the proposed method improved the recognition rate from 75.73% to 79.73%. This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), No.15200015, and Informatics Research Center for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure (COE program of MEXT, Japan). Tetsuro Kitahara received the B.S. from Tokyo University of Science in 2002 and the M.S. from Kyoto University in 2004. He is currently a Ph.D. course student at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. Since 2005, he has been a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His research interests include music informatics. He recieved IPSJ 65th National Convention Student Award in 2003, IPSJ 66th National Convention Student Award and TELECOM System Technology Award for Student in 2004, and IPSJ 67th National Convention Best Paper Award for Young Researcher in 2005. He is a student member of IPSJ, IEICE, JSAI, ASJ, and JSMPC. Masataka Goto received his Doctor of Engineering degree in Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering from Waseda University, Japan, in 1998. He then joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL; reorganized as the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in 2001), where he has been engaged as a researcher ever since. He served concurrently as a researcher in Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO), Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) from 2000 to 2003, and an associate professor of the Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies, Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba since 2005. His research interests include music information processing and spoken language processing. Dr. Goto received seventeen awards including the IPSJ Best Paper Award and IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Awards (MUS and SLP) from the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), Awaya Prize for Outstanding Presentation and Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation from the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), Award for Best Presentation from the Japanese Society for Music Perception and Cognition (JSMPC), WISS 2000 Best Paper Award and Best Presentation Award, and Interaction 2003 Best Paper Award. He is a member of the IPSJ, ASJ, JSMPC, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). Hiroshi G. Okuno received the B.A. and Ph.D from the University of Tokyo in 1972 and 1996, respectively. He worked for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, and Tokyo University of Science. He is currently a professor at the Department of Intelligence Technology and Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and a visiting associate professor at the University of Tokyo. He has done research in programming languages, parallel processing, and reasoning mechanism in AI, and he is currently engaged in computational auditory scene analysis, music scene analysis and robot audition. He received the best paper awards from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and the International Society for Applied Intelligence, in 1991 and 2001, respectively. He edited with David Rosenthal “Computational Auditory Scene Analysis” from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1998 and with Taiichi Yuasa “Advanced Lisp Technology” from Taylor and Francis Inc. in 2002. He is a member of IPSJ, JSAI, JSSST, JSCS, ACM, AAAI, ASA, and IEEE.     

Scheduling real-time requests in on-demand data broadcast environments

On-demand broadcast is an attractive data dissemination method for mobile and wireless computing. In this paper, we propose a new online preemptive scheduling algorithm, called PRDS that incorporates urgency, data size and number of pending requests for real-time on-demand broadcast system. Furthermore, we use pyramid preemption to optimize performance and reduce overhead. A series of simulation experiments have been performed to evaluate the real-time performance of our algorithm as compared with other previously proposed methods. The experimental results show that our algorithm substantially outperforms other algorithms over a wide range of workloads and parameter settings. The work described in this paper was partially supported by grants from CityU (Project No. 7001841) and RGC CERG Grant No. HKBU 2174/03E. This paper is an extended version of the paper “A preemptive scheduling algorithm for wireless real-time on-demand data broadcast” that appeared in the 11th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications. Victor C. S. Lee received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the City University of Hong Kong in 1997. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the City University of Hong Kong. Dr. Lee is a member of the ACM, the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. He is currently the Chairman of the IEEE, Hong Kong Section, Computer Chapter. His research interests include real-time data management, mobile computing, and transaction processing. Xiao Wu received the B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Yunnan University, Kunming, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong. He was with the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, between January 2001 and July 2002. From 2003 to 2004, he was with the Department of Computer Science of the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, as a Research Assistant. His research interests include multimedia information retrieval, video computing and mobile computing. Joseph Kee-Yin NG received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science, a M.Sc. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the years 1986, 1988, and 1993, respectively. Prof. Ng is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. His current research interests include Real-Time Networks, Multimedia Communications, Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing, Mobile and Location- aware Computing, Performance Evaluation, Parallel and Distributed Computing. Prof. Ng is the Technical Program Chair for TENCON 2006, General Co-Chair for The 11th International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2005), Program Vice Chair for The 11th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS 2005), Program Area-Chair for The 18th & 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2004 & AINA 2005), General Co-Chair for The International Computer Congress 1999 & 2001 (ICC’99 & ICC’01), Program Co-Chair for The Sixth International Conference on Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA’99) and General Co-Chair for The 1999 and 2001 International Computer Science Conference (ICSC’99 & ICSC’01). Prof. Ng is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, Journal of Embedded Computing, and Journal of Microprocessors and Microsystems. He is the Associate Editor of Real-Time Systems Journal and Journal of Mobile Multimedia. He is also a guest editor of International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing for a special issue on Applications, Services, and Infrastructures for Wireless and Mobile Computing. Prof. Ng is currently the Region 10 Coordinator for the Chapter Activities Board of the IEEE Computer Society, and is the Coordinator of the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program (Asia/Pacific). He is a senior member of the IEEE and has been a member of the IEEE Computer Society since 1991. Prof. Ng has been an Exco-member (1993–95), General Secretary (1995–1997), Vice-Chair (1997–1999), Chair (1999–2001) and the Past Chair of the IEEE, Hong Kong Section, Computer Chapter. Prof. Ng received the Certificate of Appreciation for Services and Contribution (2004) from IEEE Hong Kong Section, the Certificate of Appreciation for Leadership and Service (2000–2001) from IEEE Region 10 and the IEEE Meritorious Service Award from IEEE Computer Society at 2004. He is also a member of the IEEE Communication Society, ACM and the Founding Member for the Internet Society (ISOC)-Hong Kong Chapter.     

Central pattern generator parameter search for a biped walking robot using nonparametric estimation based Particle Swarm Optimization

A parameter search for a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) for biped walking is difficult because there is no methodology to set the parameters and the search space is broad. These characteristics of the parameter search result in numerous fitness evaluations. In this paper, nonparametric estimation based Particle Swarm Optimization (NEPSO) is suggested to effectively search the parameters of CPG. The NEPSO uses a concept experience repository to store a previous position and the fitness of particles in a PSO and estimated best position to accelerate a convergence speed. The proposed method is compared with PSO variants in numerical experiments and is tested in a three dimensional dynamic simulator for bipedal walking. The NEPSO effectively finds CPG parameters that produce a gait of a biped robot. Moreover, NEPSO has a fast convergence property which reduces the evaluation of fitness in a real environment. Recommended by Editorial Board member Euntai Kim under the direction of Editor Jae-Bok Song. Jeong-Jung Kim received the B.S. degree in Electronics and Information Engineering from Chonbuk National University in 2006 and the M.S. degree in Robotics from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2008. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics and machine learning. Jun-Woo Lee received the B.S. degree in Electronics, Electrical and Communication Engineering from Pusan National University in 2007. He is currently working toward an M.S. in the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His research interests include swarm intelligence and machine learning. Ju-Jang Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1948. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1973 and 1977, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, in 1984. From 1977 to 1978, he was a Research Engineer at the Korean Electric Research and Testing Institute, Seoul. From 1978 to 1979, he was a Design and Processing Engineer at G. T. E. Automatic Electric Company, Waukesha, WI. For a brief period in 1983, he was the Project Engineer for the Research and Development Department of the Wisconsin Electric Power Company, Milwaukee. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, in 1984, where he is currently a Professor. In 1987, he was a Visiting Professor at the Robotics Laboratory of the Imperial College Science and Technology, London, U.K. From 1991 to 1992, he was a Visiting Scientist at the Robotics Department of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. His research interests are in the areas of intelligent control of mobile robots, service robotics for the disabled, space robotics, evolutionary computation, variable structure control, chaotic control systems, electronic control units for automobiles, and power system stabilizers. Dr. Lee is a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Society, the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, IEEK, KITE, and KISS. He is also a former President of ICROS in Korea and a Counselor of SICE in Japan. He is a Fellow of SICE and ICROS. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.     

Partially Observable Markov Decision Process Approximations for Adaptive Sensing

Adaptive sensing involves actively managing sensor resources to achieve a sensing task, such as object detection, classification, and tracking, and represents a promising direction for new applications of discrete event system methods. We describe an approach to adaptive sensing based on approximately solving a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) formulation of the problem. Such approximations are necessary because of the very large state space involved in practical adaptive sensing problems, precluding exact computation of optimal solutions. We review the theory of POMDPs and show how the theory applies to adaptive sensing problems. We then describe a variety of approximation methods, with examples to illustrate their application in adaptive sensing. The examples also demonstrate the gains that are possible from nonmyopic methods relative to myopic methods, and highlight some insights into the dependence of such gains on the sensing resources and environment.

Particle swarm-based olfactory guided search

This article presents a new algorithm for searching odour sources across large search spaces with groups of mobile robots. The proposed algorithm is inspired in the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. In this method, the search space is sampled by dynamic particles that use their knowledge about the previous sampled space and share this knowledge with other neighbour searching particles allowing the emergence of efficient local searching behaviours. In this case, chemical searching cues about the potential existence of upwind odour sources are exchanged. By default, the agents tend to avoid each other, leading to the emergence of exploration behaviours when no chemical cue exists in the neighbourhood. This behaviour improves the global searching performance. The article explains the relevance of searching odour sources with autonomous agents and identifies the main difficulties for solving this problem. A major difficulty is related with the chaotic nature of the odour transport in the atmosphere due to turbulent phenomena. The characteristics of this problem are described in detail and a simulation framework for testing and analysing different odour searching algorithms was constructed. The proposed PSO-based searching algorithm and modified versions of gradient-based searching and biased random walk-based searching strategies were tested in different environmental conditions and the results, showing the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, were analysed and discussed. Lino Marques is an auxiliary professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Coimbra, and he is a researcher in the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-UC). He received his Licenciatura, MSc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. His main research interests include embedded systems, mechatronics, robotics for risky environments, optical range sensors, artificial olfaction systems and mobile robot olfaction. Urbano Nunes is an associate professor of the University of Coimbra and a researcher of the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-UC), where he has been involved in research and teaching since 1983. He received his Licenciatura and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 1983 and 1995, respectively. He is the coordinator of the Mechatronics Laboratory of ISR-UC, and had been responsible for several funded projects in the areas of mobile robotics and intelligent vehicles. His research interests include mobile robotics, intelligent vehicles, and mechatronics. Professor Urbano Nunes serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal on Machine Intelligence and Robotic Control, and currently he is co-chair of the IEEE RAS TC on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Currently he is the Program Chair of the IEEE ITSC2006. He has served as General Co-Chair of ICAR 2003 and as member of several program committees of international conferences. Aníbal T. De Almeida graduated in Electrical Engineering, University of Porto, 1972, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, from Imperial College, University of London, 1977. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Coimbra, and he is the Director of the Institute of Systems and Robotics since 1993. Professor De Almeida is a consultant of the European Commission Framework Programmes. He is the co-author of five books and more than one hundred papers in international journals, meetings and conferences. He has coordinated several European and national research projects.     

Implementation of algebraic controllers for non-conventional sampled-data systems

Nowadays, in industrial control applications, is rather usual to sample and update different variables at different rates, although it is common to consider all these activities equally and regularly spaced on time. These applications are implemented on real-time operating systems by decomposing them into several tasks in such a way that pre-emption and blocking may appear due to task priorities and resource sharing. This could imply the presence of delays, leading to a non-regular periodic behaviour and, as a result, the control performance can be degraded. In order to undertake this problem, a solution based on a modelling methodology for non-conventional sampled-data systems is proposed. This technique permits the consideration of any cyclic sampling pattern. Thus, these delays can be considered in the modelling step, and later on, a non-conventional controller based on this model can be designed. In this way, if the considered non-conventional control system is implemented assuming a real-time operating system (Tornado-VxWorks, in this case), a clear performance improvement can be observed. ángel Cuenca was born in Valencia (Spain) in 1974. He received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Control Engineering in 2004, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He is with the department of Systems Engineering and Control at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He has been teaching courses on systems theory, programmable logic controllers and multi-rate sampled-data systems. His research interests include non-conventionally sampled-data systems and networked based control systems. He has taken part in several national and European research projects. Julian Salt was born in Valencia, Spain in 1960. He received his M.Sc. degree in industrial engineering in 1986 and his Ph.D. in Control Engineering in 1992, from Valencia Polytechnic University. His current position is as Professor of Automatic Control (2000-), Valencia Polytechnic University (UPV), teaching a wide range of subjects in the area from continuous and discrete simulation to automation and programmable logic controllers applications. His research interests include non-conventionally sampled control systems and networked based control systems. He has taken part in research projects funded by local industries, government and the European Science Foundation. He has also been involved in educational projects and currently is Head of the Systems Engineering and Control Department at UPV. He has been director of 8 PhD thesis and coauthor of about 60 technical papers in journals and technical meetings. Pedro Albertos, full Professor since 1975, currently at the Dept of Systems Engineering and Control at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. He has been Director from 1979 to 1995 and in 1998. He has been teaching courses on Advanced Control Systems, Intelligent Control Systems and Systems Theory. He is Honorary Profesor at the Northwestern University, Senhyang, China and Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universities of Oulu (Finland) and Polytechnic of Bucarest (Rumania). Invited Professor in more than 20 Universities, all around the world, he has delivered seminars in more than 30 universities and research centres. Authored more than 300 papers, book chapters and congress communications, he is co-editor of 7 books and co-author of Multivariable Control Systems (Springer 2004). He has directed 16 PhD thesis, and he is the coordinator of the PhD Program on Automatica and Industrial Informatics, which has been implemented in Spain, Mexico, Columbia and Venezuela. He has participated in many national and international research projects. Currently is involved in the ARTIST2 Node of Excellence on Embedded Control Systems. He is associated editor of Control Engineering Practice and Automatica and editor in chief of the journal Revista RIAI (Revista Iberoamericana de Automática e Informática Industrial). In the period 1999–2002 he was the IFAC President.     

A multi-threshold online smoothing technique for variable rate multimedia streams

Variable bit rate (VBR) compression for media streams allocates more bits to complex scenes and fewer bits to simple scenes. This results in a higher and more uniform visual and aural quality. The disadvantage of the VBR technique is that it results in bursty network traffic and uneven resource utilization when streaming media. In this study we propose an online media transmission smoothing technique that requires no a priori knowledge of the actual bit rate. It utilizes multi-level buffer thresholds at the client side that trigger feedback information sent to the server. This technique can be applied to both live captured streams and stored streams without requiring any server side pre-processing. We have implemented this scheme in our continuous media server and verified its operation across real world LAN and WAN connections. The results show smoother transmission schedules than any other previously proposed online technique. This research has been funded in part by NSF grants EEC-9529152 (IMSC ERC), and IIS-0082826, DARPA and USAF under agreement nr. F30602-99-1-0524, and unrestricted cash/equipment gifts from NCR, IBM, Intel and SUN. Roger Zimmermann is currently a Research Assistant Professor with the Computer Science Department and a Research Area Director with the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. His research activities focus on streaming media architectures, peer-to-peer systems, immersive environments, and multimodal databases. He has made significant contributions in the areas of interactive and high quality video streaming, collaborative large-scale group communications, and mobile location-based services. Dr. Zimmermann has co-authored a book, a patent and more than seventy conference publications, journal articles and book chapters in the areas of multimedia and databases. He was the co-chair of the ACM NRBC 2004 workshop, the Open Source Software Competition of the ACM Multimedia 2004 conference, the short paper program systems track of ACM Multimedia 2005 and will be the proceedings chair of ACM Multimedia 2006. He is on the editorial board of SIGMOD DiSC, the ACM Computers in Entertainment magazine and the International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications. He has served on many conference program committees such as ACM Multimedia, SPIE MMCN and IEEE ICME. Cyrus Shahabi is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also a Research Area Director at the NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. His B.S. degree is in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. He has two books and more than hundred articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the areas of databases and multimedia. Dr. Shahabi's current research interests include Peer-to-Peer Systems, Streaming Architectures, Geospatial Data Integration and Multidimensional Data Analysis. He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) and on the editorial board of ACM Computers in Entertainment magazine. He is also the program committee chair of ICDE NetDB 2005 and ACM GIS 2005. He serves on many conference program committees such as IEEE ICDE 2006, ACM CIKM 2005, SSTD 2005 and ACM SIGMOD 2004. Dr. Shahabi is the recipient of the 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and 2003 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). In 2001, he also received an award from the Okawa Foundations. Kun Fu is currently a Ph.D candidate in computer science from the University of Southern California. He did research at the Data Communication Technology Research Institute and National Data Communication Engineering Center in China prior to coming to the United States and is currently working on large scale data stream recording architectures at the NSF's Integrated Media System Center (IMSC) and Data Management Research Laboratory (DMRL) at the Computer Science Department at USC. He received an MS in engineering science from the University of Toledo. He is a member of the IEEE. His research interests are in the area of scalable streaming architectures, distributed real-time systems, and multimedia computing and networking. Mehrdad Jahangiri was born in Tehran, Iran. He received the B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from University of Tehran at Tehran, in 1999. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He is currently a research assistant working on multidimensional data analysis at Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC)—Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California.     

Genetic operators for combinatorial optimization in TSP and microarray gene ordering

This paper deals with some new operators of genetic algorithms and demonstrates their effectiveness to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and microarray gene ordering. The new operators developed are nearest fragment operator based on the concept of nearest neighbor heuristic, and a modified version of order crossover operator. While these result in faster convergence of Genetic Algorithm (GAs) in finding the optimal order of genes in microarray and cities in TSP, the nearest fragment operator can augment the search space quickly and thus obtain much better results compared to other heuristics. Appropriate number of fragments for the nearest fragment operator and appropriate substring length in terms of the number of cities/genes for the modified order crossover operator are determined systematically. Gene order provided by the proposed method is seen to be superior to other related methods based on GAs, neural networks and clustering in terms of biological scores computed using categorization of the genes. Shubhra Sankar Ray is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He received the M.Sc. in Electronic Science and M.Tech in Radiophysics & Electronics from University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India, in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Till March 2006, he had been a Senior Research Fellow of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India, working at Machine Intelligence Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, India. His research interests include bioinformatics, evolutionary computation, neural networks, and data mining. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, India. She did her Bachelors in Physics and Computer Science in 1988 and 1992 respectively. Subsequently, she did her Masters in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur in 1994 and Ph.D in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta in 1998. She has worked in Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA, in 1997, as a graduate research assistant, in the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, in 1999, as a post doctoral fellow, in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, USA, in 2001 as a faculty and researcher, and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA, in 2004 as a visiting research faculty. Dr. Bandyopadhyay is the first recipient of Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma Gold Medal and Institute Silver Medal for being adjudged the best all round post graduate performer in IIT, Kharagpur in 1994. She has received the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) and the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) Young Scientist Awards in 2000, as well as the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) Young Engineers' Award in 2002. She has published over ninety articles in international journals, conference and workshop proceedings, edited books and journal special issues and served as the Program Co-Chair of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, 2005, Kolkata, India, and as the Tutorial Co-Chair, World Congress on Lateral Computing, 2004, Bangalore, India. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal on Computational Intelligence. Her research interests include Evolutionary and Soft Computation, Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Parallel & Distributed Systems and VLSI. Sankar K. Pal (www.isical.ac.in/∼sankar) is the Director and Distinguished Scientist of the Indian Statistical Institute. He has founded the Machine Intelligence Unit, and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility in the Institute in Calcutta. He received a Ph.D. in Radio Physics and Electronics from the University of Calcutta in 1979, and another Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering along with DIC from Imperial College, University of London in 1982. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986-87; the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas in 1990-92 & 1994; and in US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC in 2004. Since 1997 he has been serving as a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (USA) for the Asia-Pacific Region, and held seve ral visiting positions in Hong Kong and Australian universities. Prof. Pal is a Fellow of the IEEE, USA, Third World Academy of Sciences, Italy, International Association for Pattern recognition, USA, and all the four National Academies for Science/Engineering in India. He is a co-author of thirteen books and about three hundred research publications in the areas of Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Image Processing, Data Mining and Web Intelligence, Soft Computing, Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, Fuzzy Sets, Rough Sets, and Bioinformatics. He has received the 1990 S.S. Bhatnagar Prize (which is the most coveted award for a scientist in India), and many prestigious awards in India and abroad including the 1999 G.D. Birla Award, 1998 Om Bhasin Award, 1993 Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, 2000 Khwarizmi International Award from the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2000–2001 FICCI Award, 1993 Vikram Sarabhai Research Award, 1993 NASA Tech Brief Award (USA), 1994 IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award (USA), 1995 NASA Patent Application Award (USA), 1997 IETE-R.L. Wadhwa Gold Medal, the 2001 INSA-S.H. Zaheer Medal, and 2005-06 P.C. Mahalanobis Birth Centenary Award (Gold Medal) for Lifetime Achievement . Prof. Pal is an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks [1994–98, 2003–06], Pattern Recognition Letters, Neurocomputing (1995–2005), Applied Intelligence, Information Sciences, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Fundamenta Informaticae, Int. J. Computational Intelligence and Applications, and Proc. INSA-A; a Member, Executive Advisory Editorial Board, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Systems, Int. Journal on Image and Graphics, and Int. Journal of Approximate Reasoning; and a Guest Editor of IEEE Computer.