The development of reliable, robust and capable service robot platforms is expensive and time consuming. On the other hand, stable hardware is a prerequisite to be able to concentrate on the targeted research area. This paper proposes a strategy to make such high-end service robot platforms available as research platform, by means of the example of CareO-bot ® 3 developed at Fraunhofer IPA. Sev...

Larvae of the bot fly Cuterebra emasculator Fitch infest tree squirrels and chipmunks from the Atlantic Ocean to just west of the Mississippi River and from southern Canada to the Gulf Coast of the United States. Whether the species is present in all states and provinces in this region is not well documented. Because there are few published records of C. emasculator in South Carolina, we gather...

Sheryl Brahnam Missouri State University 1909 S. National Springfield, MO 65804 USA [email protected] In this paper, I present a preliminary study that examines the sexual comments and insults users directed at three conversational agents that differed in the gender impressions of their embodiment. The three types of embodiment explored in this study are male, female, and neuter-robotic. Resu...

The demand for janitorial robots has gone up with the rising affluence and increasingly busy lifestyles of people [1], both in offices and personal homes. All too often people forget to switch off lights, close doors, throw away garbage and so on; this is where a janitorial robot would come in handy. This kind of robot must have the necessary characteristics of being able to autonomously naviga...

Parallel applications can speed up their execution by accessing resources hosted by multiple autonomous providers. Applications following the message passing model demand processors to be available at the same time; a problem known as resource coallocation. Other application models, such as workflows and bag-of-tasks (BoT), can also benefit from the coordinated allocation of resources from auto...

s. Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 12-16, 2001. Botanical Society of America. Pp. 132. Panero, J.L., Baldwin, B.G., Schilling, E.E. & Clevinger, J.A. 2001c. Molecular phylogenetic studies of members of tribes Helenieae, Heliantheae, and Eupatorieae (Asteraceae). 3. General systematics and proposed taxonomic changes in current classification. In: Botany 2001 Abstracts. Albuquerque, New Mexico, A...

This paper demonstrates the applicability of reinforcement learning for first person shooter bot artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique where an agent learns a problem through interaction with the environment. The Sarsa( ) algorithm will be applied to a first person shooter bot controller to learn the tasks of (1) navigation and item collection, and (2) ...

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a bot to play the arcade game Breakout. Instead of manually writing the bot, we use reinforcement learning techniques to learn a strategy by repeated sessions of Breakout where the learner is rewarded for advancing through the game and punished for losing. We show that our bot’s game performance increases with repeated plays, though it ...

PURPOSE To quantitatively evaluate the pulse waveform changes in macular choroidal blood flow by using laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG) with regression of acute central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC). METHODS This retrospective observational case series included 20 eyes of 20 patients with acute CSC. Laser speckle flowgraphy was performed at baseline and after 6 months. On the LSFG monochrome ...

Botnets are a major threat to the security of computer systems and the Internet. An increasing number of individual Internet sites have been compromised by attacks from all across the world to become part of various kinds of malicious botnets. The Internet security research community has made significant efforts to identify botnets, to collect data on their activities, and to develop techniques...