In recent years, the popularity of rock-climbing has grown tremendously, setting an increasing pressure on cliff habitats. Climbing may be particularly harmful in Mediterranean biome due to its appropriate environmental conditions for climbing. A few studies have identified effect climbing plant diversity at a small-scale (namely locally or even just specific areas). However, no exist assessing...

This research presents the design and preliminary evaluation of an electromyographically (EMG) controlled 2-degree-of-freedom (DOF) ankle-foot prosthesis designed to enhance rock climbing ability in persons with transtibial amputation. The comprises motorized ankle subtalar joints, is capable emulating some key biomechanical behaviors exhibited by complex during maneuvers. free space motion dev...

Motor-related regions of parietal and prefrontal cortices have been shown to selectively activate when observers passively view objects that afford manual grasping. Yet, it remains unknown whether these cortical responses depend on prior motor-related experience with the object being observed. To address this question, we asked participants to undergo fMRI scanning while viewing exemplars of tw...

Walking and climbing robots need to plan longterm routes on both horizontal and vertical terrain, but onboard sensors take images from vantage points that provide strongly foreshortened images that cause the appearance of terrain features to vary greatly by distance and viewing angle. This paper presents a convolutional neural network (CNN) method for predicting valid handhold and foothold loca...