Quantitative measures of the space an individual can reach is essential for tracking the progression of a disease and the effects of therapeutic intervention. The reachable workspace can be used to track an individuals’ ability to perform activities of daily living, such as feeding and grooming. There are few methods for quantifying upper limb performance, none of which are able to generate a r...

Using an audio-only diagraming tool, sixteen pairs of sighted individuals collaborated in a workspace where they used sound as the only means to communicate with each other and to access and edit shared entity-relationship diagrams. We examined the effects of the means for delivering audio to such a workspace – using headphones or speakers – on pairs’ workspace awareness. Results showed that pa...

Bimanual manipulation of objects is receiving a lot of attention nowadays, but there is few literature addressing the design of the arms configuration. In this paper, we propose a way to analyze the relative positioning of two redundant arms, both equipped with spherical wrists, in order to obtain the best common workspace for grasping purposes. Considering the geometry of a robot with a spheri...

The apparent gravity force acting on the end-effector of an haptic device depends on its position inside the workspace. This thesis presents an offline recursive algorithm to automatically estimate the required gravity compensation terms to be applied to the end-effector at a given set of positions, corresponding to the vertices of a cubic grid contained into the device workspace. Online gravit...

We consider the estimation of the post-failure workspace of two two-link serial robots where the free-swinging failure of one robot’s last joint is handled by having the functional robot grasp the final link of the broken robot. We present an algorithm for finding the optimal placement of such synergistic robot arms and the optimal grasp point on the final link of the broken robot. To determine...

The workspace topologies of a family of 3-revolute (3R) positioning manipulators are enumerated. The workspace is characterized in a half-cross section by the singular curves. The workspace topology is defined by the number of cusps that appear on these singular curves. The design parameters space is shown to be divided into five domains where all manipulators have the same number of cusps. Eac...

In this paper, we introduce new performance indices to characterize the workspace of reconfigurable hyper-redundant robotic arms. These indices are then used to analyze the workspace of a type of hyper-redundant robotic arm using as modules lower mobility parallel platforms. The modules of the reconfigurable robotic arm are the three-legged translational universal–prismatic–universal (UPU) and ...

Relatively few studies have been reported that document how proprioception varies across the workspace of the human arm. Here we examined proprioceptive function across a horizontal planar workspace, using a new method that avoids active movement and interactions with other sensory modalities. We systematically mapped both proprioceptive acuity (sensitivity to hand position change) and bias (pe...

This work addresses the problem arising on all construction sites: the occurrence of workspace interference between construction activities. From a site space planning context, this problem can lead to an inevitable roadblock to the progress of the scheduled construction operations. In real situations, when the spatial congestions occur, they could reduce productivity of workers sharing the sam...

We examined the generalization of adjustment to a visuomotor rotation across the workspace in younger and older adults. Participants practiced in the right workspace with a single target direction and were tested in both the right and left workspace with eight different target directions. A set of tests served to identify implicit and explicit components of adjustment. Explicit, but not implici...