Source reduction efforts have helped to keep waste generation rates under control. The state of the economy has a direct impact on consumption and waste generation. With the strong economic growth that has occurred throughout the 1990's, waste generation has continued to increase. Despite this, the total per capita waste generation has remained unchanged from 1997 to 1998. On-site yard waste co...

Remote and autonomous operation of robotic platforms is revolutionizing the way in which work is done and information is gathered. Through the removal of the human element, costs decrease, quality of work increases, and continuous operation is achievable at little to no additional cost. Remote control offers almost all individuals regardless of physical limitations the ability to operate machin...

Advancements in robotic technology are opening up the opportunity to integrate robot workers into the labor force to increase productivity and efficiency. However, removing control from human-workers for the sake of efficiency may create resistance from the human workers, preventing this technology from being successfully integrated into the workplace. We describe our ongoing work developing an...

The integration of solutions to small problems is nec essary to solve larger ones However this integration does not need the consensus of the entire robotics community Individual research groups can integrate the necessary pieces to build solutions for larger prob lems Community wide standardization may lead to research stagnation To address the issues of integra tion ve of the many research e ...

The continuous increase in the cost of fuel and effect emission gases from burned into atmosphere when operating engine powered lawn mower has necessitated use abundant solar energy sun as a power source mower. A was designed, fabricated assembled on basis general principle mowing. components are; direct current (DC) motor, rechargeable battery, panel, galvanized steel blade various thicknesses...

We present the case of a 72-year-old man with hemoptysis after a thoracic projectile injury, which occurred while mowing the lawn. Chest radiograph followed by a computed tomography angiogram revealed a metallic foreign body in the right middle lobe of the lung. The patient underwent a right anterolateral thoracotomy where the object was successfully retrieved. The patient had an uneventful pos...

In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl-garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within ea...

Current surgical robotic systems in orthopaedics lack realistic pre-operative simulations and utilize invasive methods to register bone intra-operatively. A multidisciplinary group of researchers is addressing these de ciencies in the context of robotic cementless hip replacement surgery. In this paper we outline our current research progress and a road-map for the short-term future of our rese...

A key challenge in designing robot teams is determining how to allocate team members to specific roles according to their abilities and the demands of the environment. In this paper we explore this issue in the context of multi-robot foraging, and we show that optimal foraging theory can be used to evaluate our work in learned multi-robot foraging tasks. We present a means by which members of a...