HYPOTHESIS Performing complex tasks requires greater muscle effort with laparoscopic instruments than with open surgical instruments. DESIGN A nonrandomized 2-condition trial. SETTING A semienclosed ergonomics station in the exhibit hall at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons. SUBJECTS Twenty-one surgeons volunteered to participate in the stu...

This paper addresses issues related to the design and implementation of robotic assembly tasks. Specifically, we consider automatic assembly systems with real-time visual sensing for the back shells of cellular phones. Typically, industrial assembly tasks are accomplished using either the look-then-move open-loop or the look-and-move closed-loop control approach. For either approach, successful...

The availability and adoption of open protocols allow applications to integrate Web services offered by different providers. Moreover, simple services can be dynamically composed to accomplish more complex tasks. This implies the delegation of both tasks and permissions. In fact, delegation is intertwined with some notion of risk, on the one hand, and trust, on the other hand. Well founded soci...

Scheduling tasks on a radar system can be modeled as a multioperation scheduling problem where tasks are composed of two operations separated by a fixed duration. Tasks have to be scheduled on a single machine and the aim is to minimize the makespan. The complexity status of this problem has been settled for various cases but the one where all tasks are identical remains open. This paper aims a...

Clear guidelines are set by the British Orthopaedic Association (BOA) and British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS) on the preoperative management of open fractures. This as well as the clinical consequences of poor management of open fractures means the patient workup for surgery is important as well as the timing of surgery. Experience suggests few patient...

For many navigation tasks, a single sensing modality is sufficiently rich to accomplish the desired motion control goals; for practical autonomous outdoor navigation, a single sensing modality is a crippling limitation on what tasks can he undertaken. In the research detailed in this paper, we open the door for a whole new suite of real-time autonomous navigation tasks previously unattainable. ...

This paper is inspired by a vision of self-sufficient robot collectives that adapt autonomously to deal with their environment and to perform user-defined tasks at the same time. We introduce the monee algorithm as a method of combining open-ended (to deal with the environment) and task-driven (to satisfy user demands) adaptation of robot controllers through evolution. A number of experiments w...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in the Power Spectrum Density (PSD) of the electroencephalography (EEG) in common sensorimotor balance training tasks of varying difficulty. Sensorimotor balance exercises including alteration of vision, base of support or surface compliance are used to improve postural control. These exercises are presumed to induce supraspina...

This paper describes the concept of a task within a control architecture called Intelligent Systems Architecture for Manufacturing (ISAM). The paper also describes the approach for modeling and developing the tasks and the controllers for ISAM based applications. 1 . Architectural Overview An architecture for intelligent manufacturing systems describes the structure of such systems, including t...