Mobile robotics is a growing trend in recent years as mobile robots are being used in service as well as industrial sectors. This paper introduces a novel design of a mobile robot platform for use in constrained workplaces. The constrained environments are nothing but congested places, for example hospitals, ware houses, offices, shop floors where various equipments and machineries are to be ar...

In recent years, interactive ray tracing has become a reality, although mainly by using clustered workstations and sophisticated acceleration structures. On non-clustered computer architectures this is still not an easy task, especially when rendering animated scenes, even though the computation power of modern workstations is increasing rapidly. In this paper we propose known image-space rende...

A symposium on the topic was held at the ACS national meeting in New Orleans last month. It was cosponsored by the Divisions of Polymer Chemistry and Polymeric Materials: Science & Engineering. The symposium was organized by Brittain; University of Houston associate chemistry professor Rigoberto C. Advincula; Duke University senior research scientist Kenneth C. Caster; and Jürgen Rühe, professo...

The hypothesis was tested that wheelchairs could be prevented from accidentally falling down stairs. A rigid post was attached to the wheelchair frame immediately behind the caster (clearance of 13 mm) such that it would strike the floor just after the casters dropped off an edge. The device was tested by means of a 3-degree ramp at the lower end of which was a level surface that ended with a 1...

In the near future, personal service robots are expected to come into human daily life as supporters in education, leisure, house care, health care, and so on. Most of them are built on an omnidirectional mobile robot so as to navigate in an environment restricted in space and cluttered with obstacles. Caster wheels have been chosen for the development of an omnidirectional mobile robot, as rep...