Arsenals of nuclear weapons have continued to shrink: in December 2001, the United States and Russia completed reductions under START I; the United States has completed reductions under the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs),1 and Russia is reportedly close to completing them.2 The May 2002 Treaty of Moscow will also shrink the operationally deployed strategic nuclear forces of both R...

Chronic pains and herniated disks are common diseases that about 80% of adults have experienced. Among the diseases, the rate of traffic accidents and accidental falls comprise only about 10%, whereas the vast number of such diseases are caused by patients habitual wrong posture in their daily lives. In general, people who suffer such back-related diseases often do not recognize that their habi...

This paper presents some examples of stabilization of periodic motions. First, the juggling motion controlled by a duplicated simple controller and neural oscillators is discussed. Next, the bipedal stepping motion of the human like lower body and trunk model is discussed. In this model, the stepping motion was accomplished with neural oscillator and simple posture controllers. At the last part...

It has been recognized that advances in preventive maintenance can improve the sustainment of systems, facilities, and infrastructure. Robot technologies have also received attention for maintenance applications. In order to operate delicate tasks, multi-fingered robot hands have been proposed in cases where human capability is deficient. This paper deals with motion capturing systems for contr...

Activity recognition plays a key role in providing information for context-aware applications. When attempting to model activities, some researchers have looked towards Activity Theory, which theorizes that activities have objectives and are accomplished through tools and objects. The goal of this paper is to determine if hand posture can be used as a cue to determine the types of interactions ...

Recently several large-scale databases of motion-capture data streams have been constructed. We present a novel method to index motion-capture data streams in such databases. We pay attention to posture variation; the impression of the visual aspect of the whole body is regarded as important. The spatial distribution of body segments is statistically summarized as a feature vector having only 1...

In this paper, kinematic models for multiple manipulator space robotic systems are developed, as functions of body-fixed barycentric vectors. These models are used to define workspaces for single and multi-manipulator freefloating systems. It is shown that following the capture of a large payload, the location of these workspaces in space changes, and their size is reduced. These effects, commo...

In this paper we present our research work on the classification of sleeping postures using pressure sensing. A densely pressure-sensor grid placed under the matrass is first used for the posture classification task that will serve next as a reference. Pressure data obtained from 21 subjects for 4 sleeping postures (supine, prone, left and right side) has been analysed to determine the optimal ...

Even if it has been neglected for a long time, the sound and posture domain seemed to arouse an increasing interest in recent years. In the present position paper, we propose to present an overview of our recent findings on this field and to put them in perspective with the literature. We will bring evidence to support the view that spatial cues provided by auditory information can be integrate...

Even without the possibility that reassessment of the nation’s military posture might lead to declines in support for generation of new knowledge in the physical sciences and engineering, the growth of the service economy should suffice to occasion a fresh look at US technology policy. This paper reviews the reasons, with particular attention to services such as health care. It then sketches ne...