Velocity degeneracy determination for the kinematically redundant CSA/ISE STEAR testbed manipulator

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA)/International Submarine Engineering (ISE) STEAR Testbed Manipulator (STM) is a ground‐based manipulator similar to the arms of the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator (SPDM) being built for the International Space Station (ISS). This work presents the determination of the velocity‐degenerate (singular) configurations for the STM, a system comprised of two seven‐jointed redundant manipulators. The two “arms” of the STM are mirror images of one another. The analysis presented is for the STM‐1 or “right” arm, but it applies to the STM‐2 or “left” arm since they are mirror images and have similar dimensions and joint ranges. A methodology based on reciprocity of screws is used to identify all configurations causing one degree‐of‐freedom (DOF) instantaneous motion loss in the STM. It is shown that there are five families of two‐condition configurations resulting in a single DOF loss for manipulators kinematically similar to the STM‐1. Reciprocal screws characterizing the lost motion DOF for each of the degenerate configurations are derived. Analysis of the velocity degeneracies shows that for the STM‐1 dimensions and joint limits, only four of the five velocity‐degenerate configurations are feasible. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Using cross‐talk simulation to predict the performance of anaglyph 3‐D glasses

Abstract— The anaglyph 3‐D method is a widely used technique for presenting stereoscopic 3‐D images. Its primary advantage is that it will work on any full‐color display (LCDs, plasmas, and even prints) and only requires that the user view the anaglyph image using a pair of anaglyph 3‐D glasses with usually one lens tinted red and the other lens tinted cyan (blue plus green). A common image‐quality problem of anaglyph 3‐D images is high levels of cross‐talk — the incomplete isolation of the left and right image channels such that each eye sees a “ghost” of the opposite perspective view. An anaglyph cross‐talk simulation model has been developed which allows the amount of anaglyph cross‐talk to be estimated based on the spectral characteristics of the anaglyph glasses and the display. The model is validated using a visual cross‐talk ranking test which indicates good agreement. The model is then used to consider two scenarios for the reduction of cross‐talk in anaglyph systems and finds that a considerable reduction is likely to be achieved by using spectrally pure displays. The study also finds that the 3‐D performance of commercial anaglyph glasses can be significantly better than handmade anaglyph glasses.     

Understanding the French 2003 Heat Wave Experience: Beyond the heat,a Multi‐Layered Challenge

The 2003 heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in France. It was a stealth killer. “We did not notice anything”, as the Minister of Health declared to the Parliamentary Commission. It is of crucial importance to understand the keys to this collective failure, which has much in common with the Chicago experience in 1995 –the lessons of which had not been grasped nor learned. A four‐layered challenge explains the fiasco. The emergency challenge, which is not the realm of bureaucracies outside the “9/11” bodies. The crisis management challenge, largely documented since the 80s and the 90s, but still poorly known by most organisations, in France and elsewhere. The unconventional crisis challenge, emerging more and more today with “outside‐of‐the‐box” scenarios – and for which very few are ready to prepare, in any country in the world. The “texture” challenge, when the whole fabric of our complex systems (rather than just some specific segment) is suddenly deeply affected — an entirely new front‐line in the crisis world, which urges to switch from a mechanical or an architectural to a more “biological” approach to read, seize, and handle emerging csrises. The 2003 heat fiasco compels us to prepare for far more than climate‐related crises. It calls for a fresh and bold look at our crisis paradigms. As General Foch said: “Gunfire kills, but so do outdated visions”.     

A Linear Algebraic Procedure in Obtaining Reciprocal Screw Systems

This paper presents a linear algebraic procedure in obtaining (6?n) reciprocal screws from an n‐screw system of a robotic manipulator. The procedure starts by formulating the reciprocal relationship between a screw system and its reciprocal screw system in matrix form, and augmenting the screw matrix which is assembled with n screws in the screw system. Vectors of cofactors of the augmented row are then produced and the partitioning of the screw matrix is implemented to generate each of the (6?n) reciprocal screws. The theory developed in this paper provides a novel and simple procedure to obtain reciprocal screws from any screw system. The paper illustrates applications to cases with different screw systems. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Color‐tuning projection system for adaptive combination of high brightness and wide color gamut

Abstract— The demand for projectors with high brightness and wide color gamut has been increasing; however, UHP lamp projectors cannot deliver those two qualities efficiently and simultaneously because of its color‐separation system. The newly developed projection system — “Color‐Tuning Projection System” — realizes the adaptive combination of high brightness and wide color gamut with one projector. This projector features a fourth liquid‐crystal panel — “Color Tuner” — with a 3LCD optical engine, which controls yellow light separately from the RGB light of a UHP lamp. This color‐tuner‐based optical engine — “Color‐Tuning Optical Engine” — and a new color‐conversion signal‐processing algorithm — “Adaptive Color Conversion Algorithm” — controls the yellow‐light volume and corrects color‐shifted pixels according to the brightness and chromaticity analysis of the input image, key technologies of the Color‐Tuning Projection System. This additional panel system enables the projector to ach ieve up to 115% higher brightness and 120% wider color gamut according to the input image. This paper presents an innovative design concept, a novel technology regarding brightness and a color‐gamut conversion projection system, and the characteristics of the prototype.     

Performance evaluation of rule‐based expert systems: An example from medical billing domain

Most of the research in the area of performance evaluation of rule‐based expert systems (RBESs) is focused on verification and validation issues. Many researchers discuss usability, usefulness, portability, and response time for the evolution of RBES. The final goal of all such studies is to construct a system with optimal, accurate knowledge base. Arguably, a system with best knowledge base is actually worthless if it is never utilized in the real world. We have proposed “benefit” as a measure of evaluation and suggested some guidelines for performance evaluation of RBESs. The proposed measure has been demonstrated for performance evaluation of an RBES applied in the medical billing domain. Results showed that the system has saved hundreds of working hours during the evaluation period of 3 months. Moreover, other associated measures have also been considered. Associated measures in the medical billing domain are “claim rejection rate”—reduced by 54%—and “claim aging,” which has decreased from 34 to 28 days due to the RBES. Guidelines proposed by this research can be applied for the evaluation of expert systems implemented in other application domains, including in the first place business decision support systems.     

MONSTERS,ALIENS, AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Consistent flaws are revealed in post-incident reviews of security failures and ongoing reviews of security processes. These flaws include the math and methods used, insufficient situational awareness, overlooked systems mechanics, and missed root causes. Yet, many security teams are composed of bright, diligent, and dedicated professionals. How could they make such big mistakes? Simple—by being vulnerable to their own brains. It’s about brain science. Cognitive bias and structural blindness is the human condition. Brains must be trained to overcome our own vulnerabilities—like a martial artist building speed. This training is entirely different from checklists, intrusion prevention systems or mandatory security awareness videos. Yes, errors in typical security methods have wasted untold hours of human labor and mountains of money. Good news is that we security pros are not alone. Professionals in other areas have been exploring ways to help our brains see bigger and better for decades. Our opportunity is to bring this into security. Decades of research and proven practice are adapted to tech-related risk in a “dual cycle” approach. The first cycle—the “5 + 2 Step Cycle for Managing Risk to Performance”—is about substantive improvements in the management of risk. The second cycle is about “making change stick” by integrating the substantive change with an organizational change/transformation method.     

Avoid Critical Audit Errors: Secrets Revealed in Radar and Kids’ Toys—and a Bagel Helps

Failures, errors, mistakes, and exploits are problems if an audit found no significant problem and yet the cause was present. Improved audits do not mean more testing of more “controls.” Instead, it means audits that fully recognize what is new in the external environment, or internal activities or capabilities. Errors are largely preventable by better understanding what is new and what has changed. It’s about better auditing the “new thing.” Avoiding errors starts by: (a) realizing the “new thing” is often old—structural blindness just prevents auditors from seeing it and (b) understanding “how it works”—the machinery of business and information technology (IT). Avoiding structural blindness comes from improving audit and learning processes to proactively overcome the blindness—improving our personal awareness of change. Learning “how it works” comes from improving the process by which we learned about the mechanics of business and IT. It helps to practice this skill by fixing anything from toys to household appliances. Automation not only reshapes what is being audited but also audit activities. Improvement in process, awareness, skill, “how it works” and automation can be faster and easier through outcomes acceleration workshops—these workshops are so efficient because of how they integrate substantive learning and organizational improvement.     

A system approach to high‐quality picture‐rate conversion

Abstract— Various techniques have been implemented to improve the motion portrayal of flat‐panel displays, of which the widespread introduction of motion‐compensated picture‐rate conversion systems is an essential part. However, a careful design of such systems is critical as they have the potential to introduce perceptually annoying artifacts. In this paper, an overview of the required “ingredients” of high‐quality motion‐compensated picture‐rate conversion is presented, as implemented in state‐of‐the‐art systems‐on‐chip. The visual impact of individual components on picture quality is illustrated.     

Double‐faced TFT‐LCD having one LC panel and one lighting system

Abstract— We have developed a novel liquid‐crystal‐display (LCD) system referred to as a “Double‐Faced LCD.” It has only one LC panel and one lighting system, but it works not only as a transmissive‐type LCD from one side but also as a reflective‐type LCD from the other side. Therefore, the thickness and the weight of the Double‐Faced LCD can be reduced compared to those of conventional LC modules that have two LC panels and two lighting systems.     

When is the Naive Bayes approximation not so naive?

The Naive Bayes approximation (NBA) and associated classifier are widely used and offer robust performance across a large spectrum of problem domains. As it depends on a very strong assumption—independence among features—this has been somewhat puzzling. Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain its success and many generalizations have been proposed. In this paper we propose a set of “local” error measures—associated with the likelihood functions for subsets of attributes and for each class—and show explicitly how these local errors combine to give a “global” error associated to the full attribute set. By so doing we formulate a framework within which the phenomenon of error cancelation, or augmentation, can be quantified and its impact on classifier performance estimated and predicted a priori. These diagnostics allow us to develop a deeper and more quantitative understanding of why the NBA is so robust and under what circumstances one expects it to break down. We show how these diagnostics can be used to select which features to combine and use them in a simple generalization of the NBA, applying the resulting classifier to a set of real world data sets.     

A contrarian view of postmodern society and information technologies

In this short paper—little more than a note, even a short “contrarian” sermon for this anniversary volume—what I do is argue that even the allegedly most “revolutionary” inventions of our computer-driven age are not revolutionary in the sense that their impacts are “driving” society. Some of them are genuinely revolutionary, I admit, but in the reverse direction. The inventions don’t “impact societies”; rather, particular communities within society use the technical languages that are at their core, invent them, embed them in machines, and so on. It is not inventions but particular groups within modern—and so-called postmodern—societies that have invented and use technical languages which are embedded in gadgets that are said to “drive” modern or postmodern societies. And they do so only in one sense: they were invented and are used by various communities in our kinds of societies for a variety of ends. And if this is so, and if we feel those ends are undemocratic or positively anti-democratic, I conclude that we should resist them any way we can, even politically.     

Some Information Age Techno‐Fallacies

In research on computer data bases, work and electronic location monitoring, telephone identification systems and drug testing ¹ 1. These and related articles can be found at www.garymarx.net I encountered comments such as: “turn the technology loose and let the benefits flow”; “do away with the human interface”; “only the computer sees it”; “that has never happened”; “there is no law against this”; “the technology is neutral”. These are all examples of what can be termed information age techno‐fallacies. They are part of the cultural undergirding of routine data collection practices and an optimistic, techno‐surveillance worldview that is strongest in, but is hardly restricted to, the United States. They reflect a broader celebratory ethos of technology and commerce. To understand technologies for collecting personal information, we must understand the ideational environment in which they are nourished and in which they flourish. Before a surveillance technology is adopted, it is important to examine the broader cultural climate, the rationales for action and the accompanying empirical and value assumptions.     

The Nut in Screw Theory

This study in projective geometry reveals that the principle of duality applies to the screw. Here, the screw is demonstrated to be an element of a projective three‐dimensional space (P³), right alongside the line. Dual elements for the screw and line are also revealed (the nut and spline). Reciprocity is demonstrated for a pair of screws, and incidence is demonstrated for screw and its dual element. Reciprocity and incidence are invariant for projective transformations of P³, but only incidence is invariant for the more general linear transformations of screws. This latter transformation is analogous to a projective transformation of a projective five‐dimensional space (P⁵), which is shown to induce a contact transformation of the original P³, where some points lying on a Kummer surface are directly mapped. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Plasma beam alignment for the large‐area substrates: Equipment and process

Abstract— We have developed an effective method for liquid‐crystal alignment of the large‐area substrates. This method is based on the oblique treatment of the alignment substrates with a “sheet” of accelerated plasma generated by the anode layer source of the “race track” geometry. During this treatment, the substrate or source is cyclically translated in the direction perpendicular to the plasma “sheet.” This method provides planar, tilted, and vertical liquid‐crystal alignment with excellent uniformity and reproducibility and easy axis control in the azimuthal and polar planes.     

Networked Press Freedom and Social Media: Tracing Historical and Contemporary Forces in Press‐Public Relations

This paper analyzes how mainstream, online news organizations understand press autonomy in their relationships to audiences. I situate the press in terms of neo‐institutional sociology, seeing its autonomy as a distributed, field‐level phenomenon involving “boundary work” among distributed actors. I then trace press‐audience relations through two historical examples (letters to the editor and ombudsmen), showing how the press has historically both separated itself from and relied upon audiences. Examining eight news organizations' social media policies, I analyze the “inside‐out” and “outside‐in” forces through which the press distinguishes itself from audiences, concluding with a discussion of how such guidelines structure the types of control that news organizations have, or might have, as they use social network sites in their news work.     

Use of complex variables for the solution of certain nonlinear systems

The paper discusses several practical aspects of a method for tackling nonlinear differential equations. The method has probably been known to workers in quantum mechanics, but it does not seem to have been employed in applied mechanics and engineering. It relies on the possibility of lumping together pairs of differential equations, e.g. in cases where the original system equations exhibit certain symmetry which permits the transformation of pairs of real variables to complex variables. Under certain conditions this transformation procedure provides a relatively simple analytical tool for the integration of complicated sets of nonlinear differential equations; under less favorable conditions a numerical procedure is also involved in the final integration. The implementation of this “complex procedure” in computer integration is worthwhile since the associated coding of the systems and the computer programs are more compact and consequently simpler. It is also shown that the widely used method for the approximate solution of nonlinear differential equations — the “averaging method” — yields equations which can be tackled by the procedure. A short review of the averaging method is presented in order to demonstrate that the complex procedure can be involved in the averaging method both at the stage of the derivation of the approximate system equations and at the stage of integration of these equations. The employment of the complex procedure leads to improvements at both stages.The improvements gained by applying the complex procedure in association with the averaging method are more significant the larger the system is and the more pairs of variables susceptible for the suggested procedure it contains. The paper therefore concludes with a review of large electromechanical, biological and physiological systems where the employment of the complex procedure may lead to a considerable simplification of calculations.     

Team NimbRo at MBZIRC 2017: Fast landing on a moving target and treasure hunting with a team of micro aerial vehicles

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2017 has defined ambitious new benchmarks to advance the state‐of‐the‐art in autonomous operation of ground‐based and flying robots. This study covers our approaches to solve the two challenges that involved micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Challenge 1 required reliable target perception, fast trajectory planning, and stable control of an MAV to land on a moving vehicle. Challenge 3 demanded a team of MAVs to perform a search and transportation task, coined “Treasure Hunt,” which required mission planning and multirobot coordination as well as adaptive control to account for the additional object weight. We describe our base MAV setup and the challenge‐specific extensions, cover the camera‐based perception, explain control and trajectory‐planning in detail, and elaborate on mission planning and team coordination. We evaluated our systems in simulation as well as with real‐robot experiments during the competition in Abu Dhabi. With our system, we—as part of the larger team NimbRo—won the MBZIRC Grand Challenge and achieved a third place in both subchallenges involving flying robots.     

EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVE—ACT—PARADIGM

The paper is conceived as an introductory part of a larger unit. An ontology is proposed, based on three fundamental concepts: epistemic perspective, act, and paradigm (in T. Kuhn's sense of this term). Therefore, the point of departure is Kuhn's philosophy of science and some kind of ontology involved. The common denominator of considerations presented in this paper may be called a systems approach or systems spirit. In the author's view, the “doctrinal choice,” which appears in general systems theory, arguing either that general systems, as they are, really exist (Bertalanffy, Boulding, Rapoport, Mesarovic), or that only isomorphic systemic objects exist really (Laszlo, Bunge, Sadovsky), may be avoided. This doctrinal choice is a counterpart of the ancient problem of universals in philosophy (i.e. nominalism vs. essentialism). The problem of existence, one of the fundamental questions in philosophy, was reduced (or rather replaced) by the problem of point of view (epistemic perspective), or—strictly speaking—question, if epistemic perspective may be considered as an entity having autonomic ontological status, i.e. independent of the knowing subject. The concept of “act” was borrowed from phenomenology, as it appears in writings of E. Husserl (“Ideas I”) and some of his philosophical descendants (e.g. M. Merleau-Ponty, and R. Ingarden).     

新型微型六足机器人的运动原理及控制程序

介绍了一种微型六足机器人的新结构，该结构将直线行进运动与转向运动合理地结合了起来，论述了这种新型结构的运动结合原理以及基于IO板的机器人控制系统VB软件编程，分析了机器人的运动稳定性和灵活性，给出了实验结果和分析。成功制作了机器人样机——“银甲虫1号”，其大小为：半径3cm，高4.2cm，重49g。实验证明“银甲虫1号”运动灵活可靠，有很好的机动性。