We understand little about how animals adjust locomotor behaviour to negotiate uneven terrain. The mechanical demands and constraints of such behaviours likely differ from uniform terrain locomotion. Here we investigated how common pheasants negotiate visible obstacles with heights from 10 to 50% of leg length. Our goal was to determine the neuro-mechanical strategies used to achieve robust sta...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of 8 weeks aquatic exercise on the gait stability of the elderly using dynamic factors: center of mass (COM), velocity of center of mass (COMV), and center of pressure (COP). [Subjects] Eleven elderly participants (age: 77.18 ± 4.96 yrs, height: 149.48 ± 3.61 cm, body mass: 56.94 ± 6.62 kg, and leg length: 82.36 ± 2.98 cm), parti...

Behavioral studies of stick insects have identified six mechanisms which coordinate leg stepping. All six are active between ipsilateral leg pairs. As a first step towards locating the neurons mediating these interactions, the present study describes the effects of cutting one of the paired thoracic connectives. After the operation the following changes in step coordination occurred. The ipsila...

Quadruped robots have unique capabilities for motion over uneven natural environments. This article presents a stable gait for a quadruped robot in such motions and discusses the inverse-dynamics control scheme to follow the planned gait. First, an explicit dynamics model will be developed using a novel constraint elimination method for an 18-DOF quadruped robot. Thereafter, an inverse-dynamics...

SRAM cell read stability and write-ability are major concerns in CMOS technologies, due to the progressive increase in VDD and transistor scaling. In this paper, we studied and comparedthe performance of 7TN (with NMOS access transistor), 7TP (with PMOS access transistor) andconventional 6T structure.SRAM cells have been simulated in SPICE with 0.35 μm technology. The techniques that provide th...

Two online projects are described in this paper. Wara Blong Life and Sniff, Swing and Swipe were ten-week, online activity-based projects offered in 2001 to elementary, middle and junior secondary school classes from all over New Zealand.

The swing speed of the bat is one of the most important factors affecting the hit-ball speed. Most field studies tend to focus on measuring ball speed, which is easier to measure and quantify than bat speed. For this reason, relatively little data exist describing bat motion in field conditions. The following describes a relatively large swing speed field study involving bats of the same model ...

This paper concerns a swing-up control problem for an n-link revolute robot in a vertical plane with its first joint being passive and the rest being active. The objectives of this paper are: 1) to design a controller under which the robot can be brought into any arbitrarily small neighborhood of the upright equilibrium point, where all links of the robot remain in their upright positions; 2) t...

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) with atomic layer deposition (ALD) HfZnO (HZO) as channel layer and Al2O3 as gate insulator were successfully fabricated. Compared with ZnO-TFT, the stability of HZO-TFT was obviously improved as Hf doping can suppress the generation of oxygen related defects. The transfer characteristics of TFTs at different temperatures were also investigated, and temperature stab...