Playing it safe [human-friendly robots]

We have presented a new actuation concept for human-friendly robot design, referred to as DM/sup 2/. The new concept of DM/sup 2/ was demonstrated on a two-degree-of-freedom prototype robot arm that we designed and built to validate our approach. The new actuation approach substantially reduces the impact loads associated with uncontrolled manipulator collision by relocating the major source of actuation effort from the joint to the base of the manipulator. The emerging field of human-centered robotics focuses on application such as medical robotics and service robotics, which require close interaction between robotic manipulation systems and human beings, including direct human-manipulator contact. As a result, this system must consider the requirements of safety. To achieve safety we must employ multiple strategies involving all aspects of manipulator design.     

Scalable multi-process inter-server collaborative design synthesis in the Internet distributed resource environment

With the advanced Internet, numerous and diverse design resources distributed in different locations and disciplines are becoming more and more accessible for designers. To help designers make the most of this Internet distributed resource environment in the design synthesis, a scalable multi-process inter-server collaborative method is proposed in this study. A distributed design resource management mechanism is proposed based on the input–output flow model, and a scalable multi-process inter-server collaborative algorithm is proposed for the design synthesis. Based on this method, a software prototype is established, and the design synthesis of a 3-DOF wave power system is completed with it.     

Medically safe and sound [human-friendly robot dependability]

This article focuses on the issue of safety in medical robotics. It analyzes the constraints that medical robots have to satisfy. General design and manufacturing guidelines for medical robotics safety are described at three different levels according to the electromechanical, electrical and software components. The implementation of the selected guidelines is illustrated on two case studies that have resulted in the design of two intrinsically safe robots.     

Some aspects of human-friendly control for movement-helping devices

Future welfare models should meet the needs of a large group of aged and disabled people. Present research and technology efforts in this direction are oriented toward the development of highly effective home-installed devices which will provide the user with continuous assistance in different everyday activities. The problems and needs of the elderly and the disabled vary from person to person over a large range, and with many serious requirements. Modern designs for such devices are oriented toward solutions where the user is less engaged in the control process, and the interaction between the device and the user ishuman-friendly, i.e., the devices should possess a high level of intelligence in their controls, actions, and interactions with the user, offering him/her a high level of comfort and functionality. This paper considers a mixed control mode as a better alternative for human-machine interactions for users with great movement disability. Some examples of easy direct control are discussed.     

Warning: to err is human [human-friendly robot dependability]

In this article we describe current and future technologies for ensuring the safety of the operators maneuvering a Skill-Assist working in an automobile final assembly process. It proposes a method that allows a Skill-Assist to detect operation slip from a sequence of an operator's hand motion trajectory data represented using hidden Markov models (HMM). The method can also determine either safety- or productivity-oriented control policy throughout two-way interpretation of the belief structure. A workability improvement process that comprises a fault-warning (FW) safety-preservation (SP) space policy and teaching data renewal subprocesses allows for optimal reconstruction of the policy determinant observation space and HMMs. Some experimental results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of both the control policy determination and the workability improvement process.     

可扩展路由器

对可扩展路由器的研究现状进行了综述,并在可扩展路由器体系结构和模型研究的基础上提出其分层模型,将可扩展路由器"自底向顶"地划分为互连结构和数据交换层,路由查找层、标准接口层、分布式操作系统层、分布式路由行为层和单映像管理层6层,并综述了每层的研究进展.最后进行了总结并分析了当前可扩展路由器发展的难点.     

可伸缩TAGS

In a distributed Web server system where tasks are unpreemptible,the most important issue for improving quality of service(QoS)is how to realize fairness and reduce average slow down.In this paper we present an algorithm named Scalable TAGS by integrating Central Queue algorithm and Task Assignment by Guessing Size(TAGS),together with its performance analysis,system parameter setting algorithm subject to fairness require-ment,and optimal grouping method.     

Implementation of a human-friendly systems methodology for intelligent control system modelling and simulation

We have been developing an interactive computer software for the systematic support to modeling and simulation of intelligent control systems, based on a human-friendy systems methodology. The support system has a universal application in data analysis, system structuring, statistical and fuzzy modeling, and simulation, with the aid of human-computer interfaces to acquire knowledge or judgment of the domain experts. This paper presents our soft systems methodology and its implementation into the computer to develop intelligent process control systems. New technical proposals include a modeling method of fuzzy implication inference models and a design method of model predictive controllers.     

Scalable Room Synchronizations

This paper presents a scalable solution to the group mutual exclusion problem, with applications to linearizable stacks and queues, and related problems. Our solution allows entry and exit from the mutually exclusive regions in $O(t_r + \tau)$ time, where $t_r$ is the maximum time spent in a critical region by a user, and $\tau$ is the maximum time taken by any instruction, including a fetch-and-add instruction. This bound holds regardless of the number of users. We describe how stacks and queues can be implemented using two regions, one for pushing (enqueueing) and one for popping (dequeueing). These implementations are particularly simple, are linearizable, and support access in time proportional to a fetch-and-add operation. In addition, we present experimental results comparing room synchronizations with the Keane–Moir algorithm for group mutual exclusion.     

Scalable image decomposition

Neural Computing and Applications - Image decomposition, which separates a given input image into structure and texture images, has been used for various applications in the fields of computer...     

Scalable Bloom Filters

Bloom filters provide space-efficient storage of sets at the cost of a probability of false positives on membership queries. The size of the filter must be defined a priori based on the number of elements to store and the desired false positive probability, being impossible to store extra elements without increasing the false positive probability. This leads typically to a conservative assumption regarding maximum set size, possibly by orders of magnitude, and a consequent space waste. This paper proposes Scalable Bloom Filters, a variant of Bloom filters that can adapt dynamically to the number of elements stored, while assuring a maximum false positive probability.     

Real estate of names

A common convention for writing names (identifiers) in mathematical formulas makes poor use of the real estate on the page occupied by those names. Here is a design principle for using space more efficiently.     

Scalable search-based image annotation

With the popularity of digital cameras, more and more people have accumulated considerable digital images on their personal devices. As a result, there are increasing needs to effectively search these personal images. Automatic image annotation may serve the goal, for the annotated keywords could facilitate the search processes. Although many image annotation methods have been proposed in recent years, their effectiveness on arbitrary personal images is constrained by their limited scalability, i.e. limited lexicon of small-scale training set. To be scalable, we propose a search-based image annotation algorithm that is analogous to information retrieval. First, content-based image retrieval technology is used to retrieve a set of visually similar images from a large-scale Web image set. Second, a text-based keyword search technique is used to obtain a ranked list of candidate annotations for each retrieved image. Third, a fusion algorithm is used to combine the ranked lists into a final candidate annotation list. Finally, the candidate annotations are re-ranked using Random Walk with Restarts and only the top ones are reserved as the final annotations. The application of both efficient search techniques and Web-scale image set guarantees the scalability of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we provide an annotation rejection scheme to point out the images that our annotation system cannot handle well. Experimental results on U. Washington dataset show not only the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm but also the advantage of image retrieval using annotation results over that using visual features.     

Scalable and Structured Scheduling

Scheduling a program (i.e. constructing a timetable for the execution of its operations) is one of the most powerful methods for automatic parallelization. A schedule gives a blueprint for constructing a synchronous program, suitable for an ASIC or VLIW processor. However, constructing a schedule entails solving a large linear program. Even if one accepts the (experimental) fact that the Simplex is almost always polynomial, the scheduling time is of the order of a large power of the program size. Hence, the method does not scale well. The present paper proposes two methods for improving the situation. First, a large program can be divided into smaller units (processes), which can be scheduled separately. This is structured scheduling. Second, one can use projection methods for solving linear programs incrementally. This is specially efficient if the dependence graph is sparse.     

可扩展的Linux性能监视器

性能监视是系统管理和性能优化的基本手段,然而Linux平台上的性能监视并不能满足系统管理和性能监视的需要。该文用WindowsNT的性能监视器为前端,实现了一个可扩展的Linux性能监视器,它不仅能监视Linux操作系统本身,而且能监视第三方厂商开发的应用程序。