In recent years we have seen tremendous advances in the mechatronic, sensing and computational infrastructure of robots, enabling them to act faster, stronger and more accurately than humans do. Yet, when it comes to accomplishing manipulation tasks in everyday settings, robots often do not even reach the sophistication and performance of young children. This is partly due to humans having deve...

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a widely adopted model organism for studying various neurobiological processes at the molecular and cellular level in vivo. With a small, flexible, and continuously moving body, the manipulation of C. elegans becomes a challenging task. In this review, we highlight recent advances in microfluidic technologies for the manipulation of C. elegans. These new f...

This paper describes CRAM (Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine) as a software toolbox for the design, the implementation, and the deployment of cognition-enabled autonomous robots performing everyday manipulation activities. CRAM equips autonomous robots with lightweight reasoning mechanisms that can infer control decisions rather than requiring the decisions to be preprogrammed. This way CRAMprog...

Interactive tools for shape modeling with hierarchical implicit surfaces have been limited both by the high computational cost of visualization, and the lack of techniques for direct surface manipulation. To address the visualization issue, Hierarchical Spatial Caching is developed. This novel technique combines caching and spatial approximation to accelerate queries of the functional model tre...

Tabular data are pervasive. Although tables often describe multivariate data without explicit definitions of a network, it may be advantageous to explore the data by modeling it as a graph or network for analysis. Even when a given table design specifies a network structure, analysts may want to look at multiple networks from different perspectives, at different levels of abstraction, and with ...

A synthesis-by-rule system based on the selective use of non-uniform synthesis units has been developed. This system uses a natural speech database and an algorithm which searches the database for the optimal speech segment to be used as the synthesis unit. Because of flexible use of synthesis units, this scheme has great advantages, especially in expressing many coarticulat~ry variations. Howe...

Consider a thin, flexible wire of fixed length that is held at each end by a robotic gripper. The curve traced by this wire can be described as a local solution to a geometric optimal control problem, with boundary conditions that vary with the position and orientation of each gripper. The set of all local solutions to this problem is the configuration space of the wire under quasi-static manip...

This paper proposed a novel spatial-motion-constraints virtual fixtures (VFs) method for the human-machine interface collaborative technique. In our method, two 3D flexible VFs have been presented: warning pipe and safe pipe. And a potential-collision-detection method based on two flexible VFs has been proposed. The safe pipe constructs the safe workspace dynamically for the robot, which makes ...

this paper aims to discuss the requirements of safe and smooth trajectory planning of transporter mobile robots to perform non-prehensile object manipulation task. in non-prehensile approach, the robot and the object must keep their grasp-less contact during manipulation task. to this end, dynamic grasp concept is employed for a box manipulation task and corresponding conditions are obtained an...