We develop non-smooth motion controllers that enable a manipulator to perform surface tasks that do not involve force/torque interactions, while maintaining bounded joint rates. The robot’s end-effector is first stabilized to a point close to the surface, and then it tracks a trajectory on the surface, while avoiding certain prescribed regions. We show that the resulting closed loop system is u...

This paper presents a new 3-D design of a discretely-actuated robot manipulator powered by binary actuators. Binary actuators have two stable states, which are, for example, closed (0) and open (1). Major benefits of this kind of discretely-actuated manipulator are repeatability, relatively low cost, and no need for feedback control. In addition, hyper-redundancy allows tasks to be performed ev...

We consider the problem of scheduling an application composed of independent tasks on a fully heterogeneous master-worker platform with communication costs. We introduce a bi-criteria approach aiming at maximizing the throughput of the application while minimizing the energy consumed by participating resources. Assuming arbitrary superlinear power consumption laws, we investigate different mode...

The existing methods for evaluation evolved from the techniques used for the speech recognition systems. In tasks such as resource management, there is a closed vocabulary and the data is read speech. The main evaluation criteria is recognition accuracy, i.e., how many words in the test set are recognized correctly. To perform this evaluation, the researchers need a large database of read speec...

This work compares the degradation in driving performance associated with secondary tasks performed with voice-based and visual/manual interfaces, including radio tuning, phone dialing, and more complex tasks involving a sequence of interactions with an in-vehicle computer system. Twenty-one participants drove an instrumented vehicle while performing a combination of car-following, peripheral t...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in the Power Spectrum Density (PSD) of the electroencephalography (EEG) in common sensorimotor balance training tasks of varying difficulty. Sensorimotor balance exercises including alteration of vision, base of support or surface compliance are used to improve postural control. These exercises are presumed to induce supraspina...

The buzz around Transformer-based language models (TLM) such as BERT, RoBERTa, etc. is well-founded owing to their impressive results on an array of tasks. However, when applied areas needing specialized knowledge (closed-domain), medical, finance, performance takes drastic hits, sometimes more than older recurrent/convolutional counterparts. In this paper, we explore zero-shot capabilities lar...

background: dairy farming work involves frequent use of poor postures. these postures may increase the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders among dairy workers. objective: to assess postural load during performance of various tasks related to dairy farming. methods: this cross-sectional study was conducted on a dairy farm in iran. in order to assess postural load, tasks related to dairy...