Standing on Shifting Terrain

Terrain Perception in a Shape Shifting Rolling-Crawling Robot

Terrain perception greatly enhances the performance of robots, providing them with essential information on the nature of terrain being traversed. Several living beings in nature offer interesting inspirations which adopt different gait patterns according to nature of terrain. In this paper, we present a novel terrain perception system for our bioinspired robot, Scorpio, to classify the terrain...

The Shifting Terrain of Risk and Uncertainty on the Liability Insurance Field

Shifting terrain in the regulation of off-label promotion of pharmaceuticals.

In regulating the promotion of unapproved, or off-label, uses of approved drugs, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sought to strike a balance between supporting the ability of physicians to prescribe according to their best clinical judgment and preventing drug manufacturers from inappropriately driving prescribing practices. The agency has long maintained the general position that alt...

Walking on Uneven Terrain

Control of legged locomotion across uneven terrain is poorly understood from a theoretical perspective, despite strong relevance to clinical and robotic applications. Gait research has typically examined locomotion on smooth and level surfaces with uniform steps. Identifying key gait parameters that permit agile locomotion across uneven surfaces could lead to a clearer understanding of control ...

Siting Observers on Terrain

This paper presents an experimental study of a new algorithm that synthesizes separate programs, for fast viewshed, and for fast approximate visibility index determination, into a working testbed for siting multiple observers jointly to cover terrain from a full level-1 DEM, and to do it so quickly that multiple experiments are easily possible. Both the observer and target may be at a given fix...