• Rural Digital Europe
• Publicationsclose
• Research softwareclose
• Conference object close

Humans have multiple ways to adapt their arm dynamics to the task they have to perform. One way of doing this is through co-contraction of antagonist muscles. In telemanipulation this ability is easily lost due to time delays, quantization effects, bandwidth or hardware limitations. In this work a new concept for telemanipulation is presented. The end-point stiffness of a (simulated) telerobot is controlled via a variable impedance controller. The end effector stiffness scales with an estimate of the co-contraction around the elbow of the teleoperator. The telemanipulation concept was evaluated with ten subjects that performed two telemanipulation tasks in six different conditions. Three impedance levels: Low, high, and variable, and two delay settings. The first task was on positioning accuracy, the second task on impact minimization. We have shown that low and variable impedance performed significantly better on the force task than high impedance. We have also shown that high and variable impedance performed significantly better on the position task than low impedance. This shows that the human ability to control arm stiffness can effectively be transferred to a telemanipulated robot.

BAE SYSTEMS reports on a program to develop a high-fidelity model and simulation to predict the performance of angle-angle-range 3D flash LADAR Imaging Sensor systems. 3D Flash LADAR is the latest evolution of laser radar systems and provides unique capability in its ability to provide high-resolution LADAR imagery upon a single laser pulse; rather than constructing an image from multiple pulses as with conventional scanning LADAR systems. However, accurate methods to model and simulate performance from these 3D LADAR systems have been lacking, relying upon either single pixel LADAR performance or extrapolating from passive detection FPA performance. The model and simulation developed and reported here is expressly for 3D angle-angle-range imaging LADAR systems. To represent an accurate "real world" type environment, this model and simulation accounts for: 1) laser pulse shape; 2) detector array size; 3) atmospheric transmission; 4) atmospheric backscatter; 5) atmospheric turbulence; 6) obscurants, and; 7) obscurant path length. The angle-angle-range 3D flash LADAR model and simulation accounts for all pixels in the detector array by modeling and accounting for the non-uniformity of each individual pixel in the array. Here, noise sources are modeled based upon their pixel-to-pixel statistical variation. A cumulative probability function is determined by integrating the normal distribution with respect to detector gain, and, for each pixel, a random number is compared with the cumulative probability function resulting in a different gain for each pixel within the array. In this manner very accurate performance is determined pixel-by-pixel. Model outputs are in the form of 3D images of the far-field distribution across the array as intercepted by the target, gain distribution, power distribution, average signal-to-noise, and probability of detection across the array. Other outputs include power distribution from a target, signal-to-noise vs. range, probability of target detection and identification, and NEP vs. gain.

International audience; At present, there are large quantities of heterogeneous agriculture database in the network. Agriculture information resources sharing are the tendency of modern agriculture development. Being aimed at the problem of “information island”, “duplication of similar projects” and urgent need for agriculture information resources sharing existing in agriculture database construction, the feature of XML’s suitable for information sharing is analyzed, some key techniques of information sharing are studied, and the implementation plan of agriculture information resources sharing system is provided based on XML in this paper. The system realizes the information sharing and integration of heterogeneous agriculture databases making full use of the advantages of the XML’s independence with platform, easy extension and may format. The system has good extendibility.

The paper focuses on issues related to dialogue modelling that enables interaction between users and service systems, on topics that concern the experience and knowledge of people in the service industry. We discuss dialogue design that is based on the crowd-sourced data structured according to goal-directed ontological requirements, as well as architectural aspects and the human-centered companion view of IoT communication. Our ultimate aim is to create a framework for improving and reconstructing operations for service industries such as nursing, caregiving, and education, and for activities that promote health and create community through hobbies such as dance and music.

Malnutrition is a condition where the body is deprived of important nutrients required to maintain healthy tissues and organ function. Maintaining the right balance in food intake is very important, especially in infants where tremendous growth occurs. Unlike adults, infants require someone's assistance in their food intake. In the modern world, where most of the infants are being sent to daycare, an automated food monitoring system helps in keeping track of their food intake. In this paper an automated food monitoring system with predictions to help a balanced meal is proposed. This sensor system consists of a piezo-based sensor board which can help in analyzing the weight of each meal and a smart phone camera to obtain nutrition facts of the ingredients.

The passive microwave observations from geostationary earth orbit (GEO) are able to enhance the short-time forecasting of tropical cyclones (TCs) due to its ability to track and detect the internal structure of TCs. To assess the operational capabilities of the candidate GEO microwave instruments, the numerical simulations of GEO microwave observation for the three TC cases were carried out. This paper compares the abilities of 3 candidate passive microwave sensors, based on GEM/GOMAS, GeoSTAR and GIMS-II respectively, to observe the upwelling brightness temperatures of TCs at 50–57GHz band. The analysis is based on WRF model variables and radiative transfer mode DOTLRT.

A detailed spatially explicit evapotranspiration (ET) mapping at daily basis is of substantial benefit for agricultural water management. An integrated multi-sensor approach that combines the benefits of the high spatial resolution of Landsat and the high temporal resolution of MODIS and geostationary satellites to provide daily field-scale ET estimates is evaluated over two different agricultural landscapes. The ET data fusion methodology described here can provide detailed information about daily and seasonal water use patterns. This information can be of utility for irrigation managers at the scale of individual fields as well as for regional monitoring of water use toward allocation and conservation efforts.

Abstract The Agent-based Cooperating Smart Objects methodology (ACOSO-Meth) fully supports the systematic development of Internet of Things (IoT) systems from analysis to implementation by tackling their manifold requirements (e.g., self-management, distributed smartness, interoperability). At the same time, ACOSO-Meth allows the re-engineering of existing IoT systems, thus enhancing their maintainability, reusability and extensibility. In such direction, this paper (i) first presents the integration of the resource-oriented agent framework complying with the IETF Constrained RESTful Environment (CoRE) framework into ACOSO-Meth; then (ii) reports a case study to exemplify the re-engineering of a resource-constrained agent application through the ACOSO-Meth metamodel-driven approach.

A new, early fire automated alarm technique based on multi-temporal and multi-spectral analysis of satellite data is presented; it combines the multi-spectral capabilities of the TERRA/MODIS polar satellite to the high temporal frequency of the GOES/IMAGER geostationary satellite.