A power assist wheel chair robot by which a patient can climb over steps/curbs without any helper's assistance is proposed. A patient can maintain inverse pendulum control of the wheel chair after raising its front wheels. Next, a patient can move to the step maintaining the inverse pendulum control, and can climb over the step being assisted by DC motor force. A light weight wheel chair system...

Abstract: This paper presents an in-wheel vibration absorber for in-wheel-motor electric vehicles (IWM EVs), and a corresponding control strategy to improve vehicle ride comfort. The proposed in-wheel vibration absorber, designed for suppressing the motor vibrations, is composed of a spring, an annular rubber bushing, and a controllable damper. The parameters of the in-wheel spring and rubber b...

Entrainment of circadian behavior rhythms by daily exposure to a running wheel was examined in mice under constant darkness. Spontaneous movement was individually monitored for more than 6 mo by a thermal sensor. After establishment of steady-state free running, mice were placed in a different cage equipped with a running-wheel for 3 h once per day at 6 AM. The daily exchange was continued for ...

The center of mass (CoM) is a key descriptor in the understanding and the analysis of bipedal locomotion. Some approaches are based on the premise that humans minimize the CoM vertical displacement. Other approaches express walking dynamics through the inverted pendulum model. Such approaches are contradictory in that they lead to two conflicting patterns to express the CoM motion: straight lin...

Consumption of high-fat diet acutely alters the daily rhythm of eating behavior and circadian organization (the phase relationship between oscillators in central and peripheral tissues) in mice. Voluntary wheel-running activity counteracts the obesogenic effects of high-fat diet and also modulates circadian rhythms in mice. In this study, we sought to determine whether voluntary wheel-running a...

This paper introduces the LiDAR compass, a bounded and extremely lightweight heading estimation technique that combines a two-dimensional laser scanner and axis maps, which represent the orientations of flat surfaces in the environment. Although suitable for a variety of indoor and outdoor environments, the LiDAR compass is especially useful for embedded and real-time applications requiring low...

This paper presents results of an unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulation of a landing-gear flow field. The geometry of the four-wheel landing-gear assembly consists of several of the fine details including the oleo-strut, two diagonal struts, a door, yokes/pin and a flat-plate simulating the wing surface. The computational results, obtained by using 13.3 million grid points, are pr...

In the domain of design, there are two ways of viewing the competitiveness of evolved structures: they either improve in some manner on previous solutions; they produce alternative designs that were not previously considered; or they achieve both. In this paper we show that the way in which designs are genetically encoded influences which alternative structures are discovered, for problems in w...

Nonlinear observers for estimation of lateral and longitudinal velocity of automotive vehicles are proposed. The observers are based on a sensor suite that is standard in many new cars, consisting of acceleration and yaw rate measurements in addition to wheel speed and steering angle measurements. Two approaches are considered: first, a modular approach where the estimated longitudinal velocity...