Driving Robotic Exoskeletons Using Cable-Based Transmissions: A Qualitative Analysis and Overview

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Grosu ◽  
Laura De Rijcke ◽  
Victor Grosu ◽  
Joost Geeroms ◽  
Bram Vanderboght ◽  
...  

Wearable robotics is a field receiving increasing attention from the scientific community. It has great potential to improve rehabilitation process or increase the human capabilities but faces a number of challenges. On the one side, powerful actuation is required, leading to considerable system weight. On the other side, due to the close physical interaction with a human and taking into consideration safety requirements, the displacement of the actuators is crucial to the operational efficiency and functionality of exoskeleton devices. One possible solution for the design of an operational and efficient wearable device is to relocate its actuators out of joints and transmit the force by means of cable-based transmission systems. This paper presents an overview of various cable-based configurations correlated to conventional mechanical designs and their implementation in exoskeleton's structures and an overview of exoskeleton robots including comparison and trend analyses.

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-61
Author(s):  
Michael Poznic ◽  
Rafaela Hillerbrand

Climatologists have recently introduced a distinction between projections as scenario-based model results on the one hand and predictions on the other hand. The interpretation and usage of both terms is, however, not univocal. It is stated that the ambiguities of the interpretations may cause problems in the communication of climate science within the scientific community and to the public realm. This paper suggests an account of scenarios as props in games of make-belive. With this account, we explain the difference between projections that should be make-believed and other model results that should be believed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9&10) ◽  
pp. 747-765
Author(s):  
F. Orts ◽  
G. Ortega ◽  
E.M. E.M. Garzon

Despite the great interest that the scientific community has in quantum computing, the scarcity and high cost of resources prevent to advance in this field. Specifically, qubits are very expensive to build, causing the few available quantum computers are tremendously limited in their number of qubits and delaying their progress. This work presents new reversible circuits that optimize the necessary resources for the conversion of a sign binary number into two's complement of N digits. The benefits of our work are two: on the one hand, the proposed two's complement converters are fault tolerant circuits and also are more efficient in terms of resources (essentially, quantum cost, number of qubits, and T-count) than the described in the literature. On the other hand, valuable information about available converters and, what is more, quantum adders, is summarized in tables for interested researchers. The converters have been measured using robust metrics and have been compared with the state-of-the-art circuits. The code to build them in a real quantum computer is given.


2016 ◽  
pp. 225-239
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. The receptive of the hermeneutic consists in coming to know and acknowledge what has happened, observing what there is as historically effected, foretelling what will happen as a matter of projection of future possibilities, and disclosing / discovering transcendental conditions, fore-structures or horizons of human understanding and interpretation; the creative of the hermeneutic, on the other hand, consists in realizing and demonstrating human sensibilities and human capabilities and needs, conceptualizing what is factual and real based on human cognitive and volitional faculties and experiences, developing values and pursuing regulative ideals of actions, and searching for best possible ways or methods to reach for individual and communal end-goals which will enhance human beings as autonomous entities and moral agents in the world. The receptive is represented by the phenomenological approach to Being and reality whereas the creative is conveyed by an ontology of reflection of human being for self-definition and self-cultivation of human faculties. This amounts to bringing out an existing distinction between ming (what is imparted) and li (the presupposed ground) on the one hand and xing ( human potentiality for being in oneself) and xin (human understanding and interpretation toward action) on the other in the tradition of Confucian metaphysics.Next, I shall focus on Heidegger and Gadamer as taking ontological receptivity (as a matter of fore-structures of Being or Language of human understanding) as the source of meaning of existence and meaningfulness of texts. Th ere are of course creative elements to be identifi ed with forming investigative projects of the Dasein for disclosing truth of the Being, but the main tone is to realize the Being or Language as base structures of our hermeneutic consciousness or hermeneutic space of understanding. Because of spacelimitation, however, I shall leave to another occasion the discussion of the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy in the Yijing tradition as represented in my onto-hermeneutics which takes experiences of ≫comprehensive observation≪ (guan) and ≫feeling- refl ection≪ (gan) as two avenues toward human understanding and hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation.


Author(s):  
Elzbieta Malinowski

Data warehouses (DWs) integrate data from different source systems in order to provide historical information that supports the decision-making process. The design of a DW is a complex and costly task since the inclusion of different data items in a DW depends on both users’ needs and data availability in source systems. Currently, there is still a lack of a methodological framework that guides developers through the different stages of the DW design process. On the one hand, there are several proposals that informally describe the phases used for developing DWs based on the authors’ experience in building such systems (Inmon, 2002; Kimball, Reeves, Ross, & Thornthwaite, 1998). On the other hand, the scientific community proposes a variety of approaches for developing DWs, discussed in the next section. Nevertheless, they either include features that are meant for the specific conceptual model used by the authors, or they are very complex. This situation has occurred since the need to build DW systems that fulfill user expectations was ahead of methodological and formal approaches for DW development, just like the one we had for operational databases.


2012 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Giardina ◽  
Antonio G. Spagnolo

L’articolo delinea i momenti salienti nella storia della chirurgia, quali la scoperta dell’anestesia, dell’asepsi e antisepsi che ne hanno consentito l’ascesa dopo secoli di oscurità. Il desiderio di conoscenza appagato da tali scoperte si è spesso accompagnato a dilemmi etici da un lato e a resistenze ideologiche, da parte della comunità scientifica (spesso ostile alla genesi del nuovo nella medicina) dall’altro. È questo uno dei più forti ostacoli che i grandi del passato, coloro che hanno avuto il coraggio di andare controcorrente (rompendo i paradigmi esistenti), hanno dovuto superare. Questi uomini rappresentano uno stimolo per ricondurre il sapere scientifico ad un confronto attivo con l’etica al fine di sanare una dicotomia che ha radici antiche. L’antico, dunque, non è semplicemente passato ma rivive attraverso la narrazione storica di vite esemplari di medici. ---------- This article traces salient points in the history of surgery, such as the discovery of anesthesia, asepsis and antisepsis, which permitted surgery’s ascendancy after centuries of unimportance. Encouraged by such breakthroughs, the yearning to learn was often accompanied by ethical dilemmas on the one hand and on the other by ideological resistance on the part of the scientific community, which was often hostile to new medical findings. This was one of the greatest obstacles of the past for the distinguished individuals who had the courage to go against the tide, to break with existing paradigms, to overcome opposition to innovation. These men functioned as a stimulus to bring scientific knowledge head to head with ethics with the goal of healing ancient irreconcilable differences. The past is not simply the past; it lives on through the historical narrative of exemplary lives of certain physicians.


Author(s):  
Javier Marzal Felici ◽  
Juan Antonio García Galindo

Below is the Scientific Policy Presentation, a document created by Javier Marzal Felici, Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Jaume I University of Castellón, and by Juan Antonio García Galindo, Professor of Journalism at the University of Málaga. It was commissioned by the Presidency and Governing Board of the Spanish Association of Communication Research (AE-IC) and written between July and October 2020. This report acts as a summary while making proposals; that is to say, it is “executive”. On the one hand, it gives an overview of the situation for research in the field of communication in Spain, gathering numerous reflections given by several dozens of researchers and members of AE-IC. On the other, the Scientific Policy Presentation proposes to stimulate or even “provoke” internal debate within the heart of AE-IC at a time when it is clearly perceived that the sphere of communication sciences has reached a notable level of maturity. Finally, those presenting it are attempting to gather the main concerns of a large part of the scientific community in the field of communication sciences in order to build future consensuses that are as broad as possible by presenting sixteen recommendations on scientific policy.


Author(s):  
Eric Scerri

Although periodic systems were produced independently by six codiscoverers in the space of a decade, Dmitri Mendeleev’s system is the one that has had the greatest impact by far. Not only was Mendeleev’s system more complete than the others, but he also worked much harder and longer for its acceptance. He also went much further than the other codiscoverers in publicly demonstrating the validity of his system by using it to predict the existence of a number of hitherto unknown elements. According to the popular story, it was Mendeleev’s many successful predictions that were directly responsible for the widespread acceptance of the periodic system, while his competitors either failed to make predictions or did so in a rather feeble manner. Several of his predictions were indeed widely celebrated, especially those of the elements germanium, gallium, and scandium, and many historians have argued that it was such spectacular feats that assured the acceptance of Mendeleev’s periodic system by the scientific community. The notion that scientific theories are accepted primarily if they make successful predictions seems to be rather well ingrained into scientific culture, and the history of the periodic table has been one of the episodes through which this notion has been propagated. However, philosophers and some scientists have long debated the extent to which predictions influence the acceptance of scientific theories, and it is by no means a foregone conclusion that successful predictions are more telling than other factors. In looking closely at the bulk of Mendeleev’s predictions in this chapter, it becomes clear that, at best, only half of them proved to be correct. This raises a number of questions. First of all, why is it that history has been so kind to Mendeleev as a maker of predictions? As historian of chemistry William Brock has pointed out, “Not all of Mendeleev’s predictions had such a happy outcome; like astrologers’ failures, they are commonly forgotten.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirin Hirsch ◽  
Andrew Smith

In this article the authors ask what it would mean to think sociologically about the window as a specific material and symbolic object. Drawing on qualitative analysis of a series of comparative interviews with residents in three different streets in a diverse local area of Glasgow, they explore what the use and experience of windows tells us about their respondents’ very different relationships to the places where they live. On the one hand, the window, as a material feature of the home, helps us grasp the lived reality of class inequality and how such inequality shapes people’s day-to-day experience. On the other hand, windows are symbolically charged objects, existing at the border of the domestic and public world. For this reason, they feature in important ways in local debates over the appearance, ownership and conservation of the built environment. The article explores these struggles, and shows what they reveal about the construction of belonging in the neighbourhood, a process which is both classed and racialised at one and the same time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-327
Author(s):  
Matthew Unangst

Before the commercialization of colonialism, Germans primarily engaged with the possibility of a German colonial empire through German explorers of Africa. This article examines the discourse about such men with an eye to the ways in which Germans formulated identities around them as celebrities in the earlyKaiserreich. A shift in the discourse is observable around the time of the beginning of formal German colonialism in the mid-1880s. To that point, observers had placed German explorers within an international scientific community defined by its cosmopolitanism. From the mid-1880s, explorers more often appeared as embodiments of a chauvinistic national identity that defined German colonialism as superior to other variants. This discursive shift was indicative, on the one hand, of the erosion of theBildungsbürgertum'scontrol of the meaning of German colonialism and, on the other, of the emergence of alternative colonialist identities through public engagement with the exploration of Africa.


Author(s):  
Ismael Arinas

Patent claims define the protection scope of the intellectual property sought by the patent applicant or patentee. Broad claims are valuable as they can describe more expansive rights to the invention. Therefore, if these claims are too broad a potential infringer will more easily argue against them. But if the claims are too narrow the scope of protection of the intellectual property is greatly reduced. Patent claims have to be, on the one hand, determinate and precise enough and, on the other hand, as inclusive as possible. Therefore patent applicants must find a balance in the broadness of the scope defined by their claims. This balance can be achieved by the choice of words with a convenient degree of semantic indeterminacy, by the choice of modifiers or other strategies. In fact, vagueness in patent claims is a desirable characteristic for such documents. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 350 U.S. patents provides a promising starting point to understand the linguistic instruments used to achieve the balance between property claim scope and precision of property description. To conclude, some issues relating vagueness and pragmatics are suggested as a line of further research.


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