The development of Portland cement and concrete in the 19th 20th centuries revolutionised construction industry, provided a means achieving architectural structural feats that were previously impossible. While reinforced bridges simultaneously spanning vast distances carrying significant loads, material was little understood designs reflected this. As result, many early structures suffer from d...

Even when simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solutions have been broadly developed, the vast majority of them relate to a single robot performing measurements in static environments. Researches show that the performance of SLAM algorithms deteriorates under dynamic environments. In this paper, a multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (MR-SLAM) system is implemented within a...

Angular measures to point landmarks such as mountain peaks can be used to navigate through large, unstructured environments if the landmarks have been matched to a map and their left to right order in the view is known. This paper addresses the problem of ordering those landmarks. Experiments run in simulation show that simple geometric properties can often be used to order landmarks, avoiding ...

Closed-form solutions were developed to optimize kinematics design of a 2-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) planar parallel manipulator. The optimum design based on the workspace was presented. Meanwhile, a global, comprehensive conditioning index was introduced to evaluate the kinematic designs. The optimal parallel manipulator is incorporated into a 5-DOF hybrid machine tool which includes a 2-DOF rot...

BACKGROUND Assessing the clinical effectiveness of measuring grip strength as a prognostic tool in recovering ambulation in bed-confined frail elderly patients. METHODS A prospective study was carried out with 50 elderly inpatients (mean age: 81.6 years old). Manual muscle test was used for checking strength of hip flexor muscles, hip abductor muscles and knee extensor muscles. Grip strength ...

This paper presents a novel approach for landmarkbased shape deformation, in which fitting error and shape difference are formulated into a support vector machine (SVM) regression problem. To well describe nonrigid shape deformation, this paper measures the shape difference using a thin-plate spline model. The proposed approach is capable of preserving the topology of the template shape in the ...

The surgical management of chronic rhinosinusitis has evolved considerably in the last decade. We currently have a more refined understanding of the various disease entities that make up the generic diagnosis of chronic rhinosinusitis. This has led to the development of more sophisticated medical and surgical therapy for the different entities. Failure of maximal medical therapy leads to the co...