Passive dynamic walking, a phenomenon originally described for bipeds having straight legs, also works with knees. Thus given only a downhill elope aa a source of energy, a humanlike pair of legs will settle into a natural gait generated by passive interaction of gravity and inertia. No muscular input is required. The physice is much the same as in straightlegged walking, but the knee-jointed f...

Glyphosate (N-phosphonomethylglycine) was readily transported in sugar beet plants (Beta vulgaris L., Klein E type, monogerm). Concentrations in sink leaves reached 2.5 to 13.7 micromolar in 10 hours from a 15 millimolar solution supplied to one mature leaf. Distribution of glyphosate followed that of [(3)H]sucrose used as a marker for materials transported by phloem, indicating that this is th...

Employee knowledge is a key asset of every corporate organization. Therefore organizations strive to preserve this knowledge in its different forms in a variety of ways. One kind of such knowledge is the network of social contacts employees develop over time, incorporating meta knowledge on who knows what. These networks depend on the active participation of employees and their usefulness is re...

Robotic hands built for manipulation are often anthropomorphic but not anatomically accurate. We are constructing an anatomically-correct testbed (ACT) of the human hand to understand its mechanisms, function, and control. We have previously demonstrated that an accurate model of the extensor mechanism in the ACT Hand is crucial in realizing the human-like finger movements. Here, we present des...

Parallel mechanisms frequently contain an unstable type of singularity that has no counterpart in serial mechanisms. When the mechanism is at or near this type of singularity, it loses the ability to counteract external forces in certain directions which can lead to arbitrary motion. The determination of unstable singular configurations in parallel mechanisms is not trivial, and is usually atte...

To enhance scalability of replicated services a large number of mobile agents attempt to access in mobile agent systems, we present a new strategy to apply an appropriate passive replication mechanism to each replicated service according to its execution behavior because deterministic services require weaker constraints to ensure their consistency than non-deterministic ones. For this goal, two...

Abstract: We have studied synchronization mechanism in locally coupled nonlinear oscillators. Here, synchronization takes place by passive coupling based on a reactiondiffusion process. We will compare this mechanism to basic synchronization techniques, showing their similarities and specific properties. In addition to synchronization, passive and local coupling can also “awaken” non-oscillatin...

Object manipulation is a basic task in robotics and automation. Active manipulation by grasp is conventional approach in object manipulation. However, in many cases, grasp-less manipulation can be beneficial in terms of cost, minimalism and extension of workspace. On the other hand passive mechanisms are advantageous from the energy saving viewpoint. In this paper we combine these ideas to deve...