Robotic systems have yet to match humans in skill for movement planning and tool manipulation. For example, humans can robustly grasp and manipulate objects even under task variation. However, successful grasping methods for robotic manipulators are often limited to structured environmental conditions. Our dual goals are to understand manipulation actions in humans and to add such skills to a r...

In this paper, we describe the the planning system SGPlan6 participating in the satisficing tracks of the deterministic part of the Sixth Planning Competition (IPC6). SGPlan6 is designed to solve both temporal and non-temporal planning problems specified in PDDL3 which may have soft goals, derived predicates or ADL features. SGPlan6 inherited the parallel decomposition framework from SGPlan5 wh...

In the context of robotic path planning, a common strategy is to assume that the world is static and believed on heuristic approaches and obstacle avoidance to deal with changes in the environment. When planning is not considered for potential changes of the environment into account usually leads to poor performances. In this paper, we propose a hybrid ACO-PSO approach that exploits the travers...

Objective Over the past few years, virtual surgical planning (VSP) has evolved into a useful tool for the craniofacial surgeon. Virtual planning and computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) may assist in orthognathic, cranio-orbital, traumatic, and microsurgery of the craniofacial skeleton. Despite its increasing popularity, little emphasis has been placed on the learning curve. Meth...

OBJECTIVE To identify clinical features in behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia that may help predict tau-positive pathology. METHODS Clinical and historical features of patients with pathologically confirmed tau-positive and tau-negative frontotemporal lobar degeneration from 1970 to 2006 were retrospectively reviewed in a blinded fashion. The initial clinical features of those patient...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether pretreatment evaluation with contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) is effective for percutaneous radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with poor conspicuity on conventional ultrasonography (US). MATERIALS AND METHODS This retrospective study was approved by the institutional review board and informed consent was waived. From June 200...

This paper presents a set of artificial potential field functions that improves upon, in general, the motion planning and posture control, with theoretically guaranteed point and posture stabilities, convergence and collision avoidance properties of 3-trailer systems in a priori known environment. We basically design and inject two new concepts; ghost walls and the distance optimization techniq...