Production of California table olives has declined significantly in recent years due to hand harvesting costs, often over 60% gross return. Mechanical could sharply decrease harvest increasing economic viability. harvester efficiency is a combination the percentage total fruit on tree removed by harvester, and time required do so. A comparison between an experimental canopy contact shaker comme...

The former Imperial County Services Building was a six-story reinforced concrete structure in the El Centro, California, severely damaged by the 1979 Imperial Valley earthquake. It represents a rare case of an instrumented building that has been damaged, and thus can serve as a full-scale benchmark to evaluate and further develop structural health monitoring methods. This paper presents an anal...

Visually-guided locomotion is important for autonomous robotics. However, there are several difficulties, for instance, the head shaking that results from the robot locomotion itself that constraints stable image acquisition and the possibility to rely on that information to act accordingly. In this article, we propose a controller architecture that is able to generate locomotion for a quadrupe...

Successful islet isolation is crucial for islet transplantation and cell treatment for type 1 diabetes. Current isolation methods are able to obtain 500-1,000 islets per rat, which results in a waste of ≥50% of total islets. In the present study, a facile mechanical shaking method for improving islet yield (up to 1,500 per rat) was developed and summarized, which was demonstrated to be more eff...