For certain applications, such as on-orbit inspection of orbital debris, defunct satellites, and natural objects, it is necessary to obtain a map of a rotating object from a moving observer, as well estimate the object’s center of mass. This paper addresses these tasks using an observer that measures its orientation, angular rate, acceleration, and is equipped with a dense 3D visual sensor such...

A kinematic singularity occurs when the Jacobian matrix associated with the forward kinematic map loses rank. At a singular connguration, the end-eeector velocities are restricted to a subspace of the task space velocities. Also, rate control schemes that require the inversion of the Jacobian matrix fail at such singulari-ties. However, even at a singular connguration, if the kinematic map is g...

In 7 experiments, undergraduates judged the force exerted by a videotaped standing puller, a computer-generated (stick-figure) puller, or a computer-generated inverted pendulum. Single and stepwise multiple regression analyses determined the kinematic variables exploited by the participants. Results show that (a) judgments correlated highly with force and improved with feedback; (b) judgments c...

In order to obtain precise kinematic global positioning systems (GPS) in medium to large scale networks, the atmospheric effects from tropospheric and ionospheric delays need to be properly modeled and estimated. It is also preferable to use multiple reference stations to improve the reliability of the solutions. In this study, GPS kinematic positioning algorithms are developed for the medium t...

We compute the differential distributions of two three-jet event-shape observables at the next-to-leading order accuracy at fixed values of the DIS kinematic variables. The observable Kout measures the out-of-event-plane momentum. The other observable y3 is the maximum value of the ycut resolution variable for which an event is classified as three-jet event. We also show the dependence of the f...

Biomimetic robotic fish is a new type of underwater robot with many superior characteristics such as high movement speed, high motion efficiency, high energy efficiency, and so on. However, the traditional kinematic model for biomimetic robotic fish has many shortcomings which limit their movement speed, such as the rigid shakes of the fish’s head when it swims, which is caused by neglecting th...

The deterministic nature of kinematic couplings enables closed-form characterization of interchangeability error, parametrized in terms of the magnitudes of manufacturing tolerances in the interface manufacturing and assembly processes. A process is suggested for calibrating kinematic couplings to reduce the interchangeability error, based on measurement of the contact points and calculation of...

In this paper, we describe a solution to the problem of determining the kinematic feasibility of a dextrous hand to grasp a given object at a desired connguration in the two dimensional space. We refer to this problem as kinematic graspability. The kinematic conngu-ration of a grasp is deened in terms of a set of contact pairs between the topological features of the hand and the object. We deri...

We present a method to automatically morph trajectories from one mechanical system into trajectories of another system with potentially very different dynamics. Our method relies on a mapping from the source system’s configuration space to that of the target system to create a desired trajectory for the target system. A projection operatorbased trajectory optimization finds a dynamically-admiss...

I Design is an important but little understood intelligent activity. Conceptual design is the transformation of functional specifications to an initial concept of an artifact that achieves them. Human designers rely heavily on the use of sketches, which can be thought of as qualitative models of a device. An appealing model of conceptual design is that of a mapping from qualitative functional s...