Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) constrains instrument motions to 4 DOF by precluding lateral motion at the incision. Robotic MIS systems can interpose arbitrary mappings between the surgeon’s motions at the master controller and the motions of instrument tips within the patient’s body. Our goal was to find the interface that was easiest to learn. We investigated the effects of different coordi...

Currently, full body exoskeletons still lack movability in their back and shoulder parts, resulting in limited applicability in, e.g., nursing care. An exoskeletal spine and shoulder mechanism called “exo-spine” has therefore been developed with the purpose of allowing 3 degree of freedom (DOF) spinal motion and 2 DOF shoulder girdle abduction. It consists of a mechanism of vertebras, shoulder ...

Demonstrating speedup for parallel code on a multicore shared memory PC can be challenging in MATLAB due to underlying parallel operations that are often opaque to the user. This can limit potential for improvement of serial code even for the so-called embarrassingly parallel applications. One such application is the computation of the Jacobian matrix inherent to most nonlinear equation solvers...

This paper deals with the experimental identification of the dynamic parameters of parallel machines. The dynamic parameters are estimated by using the weighted least squares solution of an over determined linear system obtained from the sampling of the dynamic model along a closed loop exciting trajectory. Experimental results are exhibited for the H4 robot, a fully parallel structure providin...

To explore an issue of a human-like motion, we have constructed a human-like biped robot called WABIAN-RII (WAseda BIped humANoid robot-Revised II) that has a total of fortythree mechanical degrees of freedom (DOF); two six DOF legs, two ten DOF arms, a four DOF neck, four DOF in the eyes and a torso with a three DOF waist. For human-robot symbiosis, the biped humanoid robot is required to have...

This paper describes the concurrent multi-frontal direct solver algorithm for a multi-physics Finite Element Method (FEM). The multi-physics FEM utilizes different element sizes as well as polynomial orders of approximation over element edges, faces, and interiors (element nodes). The solver is based on the concept of a node, and management of unknowns is realized at the level of nodes. The sol...