This is not about knights and dames, nor is it about jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington or Court Basie. Rather, it is about a most important issue in science, which is the difficult task of choosing titles for seminars, lectures, scientific papers, books and even the titles of the journals themselves. Today, we all have to compete for readers and listeners, and in the current ruthlessly com...

The problem of bounding the order of a permutation group G in terms of its degree n was one of the central problems of 19th century group theory (see [4]). It is closely related to the 1860 Grand Prix problem of the Paris Academy, but its history goes in fact much further back (see e.g. [3], [1] and [10]). The heart of the problem is of course the case where G is a primitive group. The best res...

To facilitate the research of mobile robot based odor source localization (OSL) and evaluate different strategies for the OSL, numerical simulation of odor plume in indoor ventilated environments is addressed. On the basis of the FLUENT software package, the 3-D wind field of an indoor ventilated environment is calculated using the Reynolds average approach, where the real wind velocity measure...

We present a relative localization method based on sound source localization for mobile robots in outdoor environments. One robot estimates the relative position of nearby robots by receiving the sound signals they generate. In our work, a device including a buzzer and an array of four microphones is designed and installed on each mobile robot. We describe a technique for calculating the relati...

Compliant Actuators are desirable for human friendly robotics, especially for assistive and rehabilitation robots that have direct physical interaction with human users. Various designs of Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) have been developed for these applications. This paper presents a novel SEA design with variable impedance for human-friendly robotics applications that overcomes the major limi...