This paper describes the use of piezoelectric polymers in order to harvest energy from people walking, together with the electronics needed to increase energy transfer and storage efficiency. An electrostatic generator was also included in order to increase energy harvesting. There have been independent solutions in increasing the harvesting efficiency either on the mechanical harvester or on i...

Research of autonomous mobile robots has mostly emphasized interaction and coordination that are natually inspired from biological behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, and sharing. However, most research has been only focused on autonomous behaviors in order to perform robots like animals, whereas it is lacked of determinant to those behaviours: energy. Approach...

Wireless autonomous sensor systems become steadily standard components in our environment and they become smaller, cheaper and more sophisticated. Energy harvesters fabricated by micro-system technology can realize the autonomy of those systems. An overview of latest results and remaining challenges will be given with the focus on vibration energy harvesters. These harvesters are of specific in...

Portable digital systems tend to be not just low power but power efficient as they are powered by low batteries or energy harvesters. Energy harvesting systems tend to provide nondeterministic, rather than stable, power over time. Existing memory systems use delay elements to cope with the problems under different Vdds. However, this introduces huge penalties on performance, as the delay elemen...

In a color superconductor the diquark condensates break spontaneously both the color and ordinary electromagnetism, leaving a remaining rotated U(1) symmetry unbroken. The gauge interactions associated with this rotated symmetry may be considered as the in-medium electromagnetism. We compute the in-medium photon self-energy in the presence of diquark condensates at high baryonic density and wea...

We present a variational Expectation-Maximization algorithm to learn probabilistic mixture models. The algorithm is similar to Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Map algorithm and not limited to Gaussian mixtures. We maximize the variational free-energy that sums data loglikelihood and Kullback-Leibler divergence between a normalized neighborhood function and the posterior distribution on the components...

This study used a path analysis approach to examine the relationship between feelings of energy, exerciserelated self-efficacy beliefs, and exercise participation. A cross-sectional mailing survey design was used to measure feelings of physical and mental energy, task and scheduling self-efficacy beliefs, and voluntary moderate and vigorous exercise participation in 368 healthy, full-time under...