People with physical disabilities have ranked object retrieval as a high-priority task for assistive robots. We have developed Dusty, a teleoperated mobile manipulator that fetches objects from the floor and delivers them to users at a comfortable height. In this paper, we first demonstrate the robot's high success rate (98.4%) when autonomously grasping 25 objects considered being important by...

A dusty plasma system containing Boltzmann-distributed electrons, non-thermal ions, and mobile charge fluctuating negative dust has been considered. The nonlinear propagation of the dust-acoustic (DA) waves in such a dusty plasma has been investigated by employing the reductive perturbation method. It has been found that the dust charge fluctuation is a source of dissipation, and is responsible...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is responsible for significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. We evaluated the characteristics of stable COPD patients in the pulmonology clinics of seven Asian cities and also evaluated whether the exposure to biomass fuels and dusty jobs were related to respiratory symptoms, airflow limitation, and quality of life in t...

The effect of an external magnetic field on a critical point for phase transitions in a dusty plasma is investigated. It is shown that the ambient magnetic field increases the effective hard core radius of dust particles, which, in turn, would affect a critical point in terms of the Coulomb coupling parameter and the ratio between the inter-dust grain spacing and the dusty plasma Debye radius. ...

A review is presented of recent experiments performed on the University of Iowa DC discharge dusty plasma device on various aspects of dust acoustic waves. A brief introduction to the physics of dusty plasmas and the dust acoustic wave is first presented. Three experiments are then described: (i) observation and interpretation of large amplitude (nonlinear) dust acoustic waves; (ii) evolution o...