This paper presents a self-positioning system for a mobile robot. The proposed positioning system consists of an ODV (OmniDirectional Vision system) featuring two mirrors with a contrived curvature for obtaining a panoramic image with low aberration. An obtained panoramic image which occupies most of the visual field can be processed to recognize the topological position of three landmarks whic...

Magnetic orientation in mammals has been demonstrated convincingly in only two genera of subterranean mole-rats (Spalax and Cryptomys sp.) by examining the directional placement of nests in radially symmetrical indoor arenas. Mole-rats show a spontaneous directional preference to place their nests to the south or southeast of magnetic north. Using a similar nest-building assay, we show that lab...

Trade-offs among traits are important for maintaining biodiversity, but the role of natural selection in their construction is not often known. It is possible that trade-offs reflect fundamental constraints, negative correlational selection, or directional selection operating on costly, redundant traits. In a Sonoran Desert community of winter annual plants, we have identified a trade-off betwe...

The design and implementation of an indoor absolute localization system for a novel threedegree-of-freedom (DOF) omni-directional mobile platform is presented. This localization system is a modification of the Cricket indoor localization system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is similar to the Global Positioning System (GPS) used in outdoor applications. The des...

Abstract— Four-bar motion generation is used to synthesize a mechanism which passes through or approximate prescribed rigid-body positions. This work will discuss the motion generation of four-bar mechanism with position tolerance variations due to joint running clearance. The tolerance variations study will be based on the standards of American National Standard Institute (ANSI). The new desig...

Geared Five-bar motion generation is used to synthesize a mechanism which passes through or approximate prescribed rigid-body positions. This work will discuss the motion generation of geared five-bar mechanism with position tolerance variations due to gear fabrication. The tolerance variations study will be based on the standards of American Gear Manufacturing Association (AGMA) and American N...

We tested between two coding mechanisms that the brain may use to retain distance information about a target for a reaching movement across vergence eye movements. If the brain were to encode a retinal disparity representation (retinal model), i.e., target depth relative to the plane of fixation, each vergence eye movement would require an active update of this representation to preserve depth ...