In this paper, we investigate the kinematic mechanism and path planning of a two-caster nonholonomic vehicle (the Essboard) which is a recent variant of skateboards. Different from the most studied Snakeboard, the Essboard consists of a torsion bar and two platforms, each of which contains a pedal and a caster. We study the relationship between the tilt angle of the pedal and the wheel directio...

When the ion mean free path much exceeds the Larmor radius in a plasma, the viscous stress tensor is altered dramatically, and depends only upon quantities measured along the field lines. This regime corresponds to typical interstellar medium conditions in galaxies and protogalaxies, even if the magnetic field is extremely weak with negligible pressure and tension forces. Despite the fact that ...

Particle sorting methods in microfluidic platforms are gaining momentum for various biomedical applications. Bioparticles are found in different shapes and sizes. However, conventional separation techniques are mainly designed for separation of spherical particles. Thus, there is a need to develop new methods for effective separation of spherical and non-spherical bioparticles for various appli...

Ormia ochracea (Diptera, Tachinidae) are acoustic parasitoids of crickets that have one of the most directionally sensitive auditory systems known. We studied dynamic characteristics of walking phonotaxis in these flies in response to variations in sound source azimuth, and compared phonotaxis of flies in freely walking conditions to tethered flies walking on a treadmill. Motor patterns at the ...

Motion planning is a term used in robotics for the process of detailing a task into discrete motions. It is a process to compute a collision-free path between the initial and final configuration for a rigid or articulated object (the "robot") among obstacles. It is aimed at enabling robots with capabilities of automatically deciding and executing a sequence motion in order to achieve a task wit...

The significance of the seismic rotational components have been overlooked in the seismic evaluation of structural behavior. As researchers have measured seismic components more accurately using sensitive rotational velocity sensor, it was observed that the magnitude of rotational components is considerable and could not be neglected. Hence, some parts of seismic damage or failure of structures...

An approach to the path planning problem is presented in which a distributed representation of the workspace is used, and related to it, parallel processing techniques are presented to search the world model. The representation, which is based on configuration space and can be computed in parallel, naturally captures the real world geometry. The search is based on a celhdar automaton and diffus...

We report a theoretical investigation of the CH4 + Cl hydrogen abstraction reaction in the framework of empirical valence bond (EVB) theory. The main purpose of this study is to benchmark the EVB method against previous experimental and theoretical work. Analytical potential energy surfaces for the reaction have been developed on which quasi-classical trajectory calculations were carried out. T...