Solid Recovered Fuels made from commercial/industrial and MSW type waste streams containing high heat value plastics do offer a number of synergies for biomass combustors [1]. The paper covers technical and operational synergies to increase biomass combustion efficiency in a grate fired system typical for waste to energy technology. Results from small laboratory scale tests have proven a more s...

This paper introduces the CFI-funded project Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and two of its regional components. This four-year project is a national distributed platform with a wide range of tools to support the creation, distribution, access and archiving of digital objects such as journal articles. It will enable the distributio...

In this paper we review the works related to muscle synergies that have been carried-out in neuroscience and control engineering. In particular, we refer to the hypothesis that the central nervous system (CNS) generates desired muscle contractions by combining a small number of predefined modules, called muscle synergies. We provide an overview of the methods that have been employed to test the...

Muscle synergies are considered to be building blocks underlying motor behaviors. The goal of this study is to explore an objective and effective method to assess the upper limb motor dysfunction of cerebral palsy (CP) children from the aspect of muscle synergy analysis. Fourteen CP children and 10 typically developed (TD) children were recruited to perform three similar upper limb motion tasks...

Loss of motor coordination is one of the main problems for patients after stroke. Muscle synergy is widely accepted as an indicator of motor coordination. Recently, the characteristics of muscle synergy were quantitatively evaluated using nonnegative matrix factorization (NNMF) with surface electromyography. Previous studies have identified that the number and structure of synergies were associ...

Movement primitives or synergies have been extracted from human hand movements using several matrix factorization, dimensionality reduction, and classification methods. Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used to obtain the first few significant eigenvectors of covariance that explain most of the variance of the data. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is also used as a supervised lear...

During goal-directed locomotion, descending signals from supraspinal structures act through spinal interneuron pathways to effect modifications of muscle activity that are appropriate to the task requirements. Recent studies using decomposition methods suggest that this control might be facilitated by activating synergies organized at the level of the spinal cord. However, it is difficult to di...

Recent work on the analysis of natural and robotic hands has introduced the notion of postural synergies as a principled organization of their complexity, based on the physical characteristics of the hand itself. Such characteristics include the mechanical arrangements of joints and fingers, their couplings, and the low-level control reflexes, that determine the specific way the concept of “han...

Robotic hands differ in kinematics, dynamics, programming, control and sensing frameworks. Their common character is redundancy, which undoubtedly represents a key feature for dexterity and flexibility, but it is also a drawback for integrated automation since it typically requires additional efforts to seamlessly integrate devices, particularly robotic hands, in industrial scenario. This paper...

Controlling the movement of the arm to achieve a goal, such as reaching for an object, is challenging because it requires coordinating many muscles acting on many joints. The central nervous system (CNS) might simplify the control of reaching by directly mapping initial states and goals into muscle activations through the combination of muscle synergies, coordinated recruitment of groups of mus...