Pneumatic actuators convert pneumatic energy into mechanical motion. This motion can be linear or rotary. Linear motion is feasible with pneumatic cylinders (e. g. single-acting cylinder, double-acting cylinder, rodless cylinder) and pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). Pneumatic artificial muscle is the newest and most promising type of pneumatic actuators. PAM is a membrane that expands radia...

We study collections of identical, connected modules which may relocate relative to each other; such a collection is called a modular metamorphic system (see [CPE], [MKK], [PEC], [RV], [YMK]). While such a system must always remain connected, it is possible for such a system to reconfigure its shape through successive motions of individual modules, either by rotation and sliding (e.g., [MKK]) o...

While the bending sequence planning has been intensively studied, design of the motion path of a sheet metal part in the bending operation tends to be ignored by researchers. Because during the bending operation, the space for maneuvering a sheet metal part is very small, collisions between the part and bending tools are likely to occur. When a robot is used to handle the part, the role of an a...

The difficulty of many robot controls tasks stems from stochasticity and partial observability coupled with highly nonlinear dynamics. We propose to approximate nonlinear system dynamics using hybrid dynamics models and extend the POMDP framework to hybrid systems. To do this, we introduce a Bayesian inference based hybrid state evolution model that can be used to develop feasible motion plans ...

Recently, a variable block size(VBS) motion estimation technique has been employed to improve the performance of the motion compensated transform coding(MCTC). This technique allows larger blocks to be used when smaller blocks provide little gain, saving the bit rates, especially for areas containing more complex motion. However, the employment of the VBS motion estimation technique addresses a...

A real time navigating system, called Destination Driven Navigator, is developed. This paper presents a new obstacle representation method named Cross-Line, a new concept “work space” to reduce the robot’s search space and the environment storage cost, an Adapted Regression Model to predict the dynamic obstacles’ motion, and the Multi-State Path Repair rules to quickly translate an infeasible p...

This paper presents a method for motion recovery from monocular images containing human motions. Image processing techniques, such as spatial filter, linear prediction, cross correlation, least square matching etc, are applied to extract feature points from 2D human figures with or without markers. A 3D skeleton human model is adopted with encoded angular constraints. Energy Function is defined...

The basis for the high-level interpretation of observed patterns of human motion still relies on motion segmentation. Popular approaches based on background subtraction use colour information to model each pixel during a training period. Nevertheless, a deep analysis on colour segmentation problems demonstrates that colour segmentation is not enough to detect all foreground objects in the image...

A new 2-D array architecture for real-time video picture motion estimation is presented. Due to incorporated concepts of video memory distribution and sharing, the architecture ensures feasible solutions for the HDTV picture format with twice lower memory requirements. It features minimal I/O pin count, 100% processor utilization and is quite suitable for VLSI implementation.

We present a novel method for detecting moving objects in videos. The method represents videos using spatiotemporal blocks instead of pixels. Dimensionality reduction is performed to obtain a compact representation of each block's values. The block vectors provide a joint representation of texture and motion patterns. The motion detection and tracking experiments demonstrate that our method alt...