In recent years compliance has emerged as one of the big IT challenges enterprises are faced with. The management of a multitude of regulations and the complexity of current business processes are problems that need to be addressed. In this paper we present an approach based on so-called compliance templates to develop and manage compliant business processes involving different stakeholders. We...

In this paper, a new topology that is a symmetric five bar profile for displacement amplification is proposed, and a compliant mechanical amplifier (CMA) based on the new topology is designed to amplify the stroke of a piezoelectric actuator. The new CMA can convert the motion generated by a PZT actuator with a large amplification ratio (24.4) in a very compact size, and it has a high natural f...

This paper presents an ongoing task that will construct a DAML+OIL-compliant Chinese Lexical Ontology. The ontology mainly comprises three components: a hierarchical taxonomy consisting of a set of concepts and a set of relations describing the relationships among the concepts, a set of lexical entries associated with the concepts and relations, and a set of axioms describing the constraints on...

Whilst the energy efficiency of wheeled vehicles is fast improving, negotiating rough terrain still presents a significant problem. The alternative of using legged walking and running may provide a more versatile and possibly more efficient solution. Despite muscles only converting approximately 20% of chemical energy into mechanical work, animals achieve very efficient running gaits through st...

To federate collections with varying degrees of metadata richness across continents poses a number of challenging issues such as: how to build a rich unified search interface when there is a lack of controlled vocabulary, and how to federate collections in different languages. The focus of this paper is on the approaches we have taken to address these issues in Arc, an OAI compliant federated d...

Soft limbs with anisotropic stiffness are common in nature and enable animals to solve a variety of tasks, including locomotion and manipulation. This mixture of hardness and softness enables animals to efficiently control the unpredictable contact forces that occur while performing such tasks. A challenge for soft robotics is to create artificial limbs that mimic natural mixtures of hardness a...

Metal deposition by electroplating has been extensively used and analyzed for industrial applications, but it remains insufficiently characterized for fabricating compliant micromechanisms. This research presents a new fabrication process for heterogeneous optimized compliant mechanisms that consists of placing two materials side by side as opposed to the convention of stacking materials layer ...

We address the problem of grasping everyday objects that are small relative to an anthropomorphic hand, such as pens, screwdrivers, cellphones, and hammers from their natural poses on a support surface, e.g., a table top. In such conditions, state of the art grasp generation techniques fail to provide robust, achievable solutions due to either ignoring or trying to avoid contact with the suppor...

Snake robots can be at the same time efficient tools to answer questions coming from biology on animal locomotion, but also agile machines that are able to efficiently locomote over unstructured terrains and narrow spaces, useful for engineering problems such as search and rescue. Compliance in the snake robot structure could bring many advantages such as faster locomotion speed, higher energy ...

In recent years compliance has emerged as one of the big IT challenges enterprises are faced with. The management of a multitude of regulations and the complexity of current business processes are problems that need to be addressed. In this paper we present an approach based on so-called compliance templates to develop and manage compliant business processes involving different stakeholders. We...