This paper describes recent work on manipulation strategies that rely on “coarsefine” robot hardware and direct sensing of partworkpiece relationships. The experiments reported use an extremely precise, highbandwidth planar “wrist” and an industrial vision system to perform accurate alignment of small parts. The system architecture, experimental hardware, and programming methods employed are al...

The work was aimed to develop a robust virtual sensing design methodology for sensing and active control applications of vibro-acoustic systems. The proposed virtual sensor was designed to estimate a broadband acoustic interior sound pressure using structural sensors, with robustness against certain dynamic uncertainties occurring in an acoustic-structural coupled enclosure. A convex combinatio...

Conductometric gas sensors made of gas permeable metal oxide ultrathin membranes can combine the functions of a selective filter, preconcentrator, and sensing element and thus can be particularly promising for the active sampling of diluted analytes. Here we report a case study of the electron transport and gas sensing properties of such a membrane made of nanoporous Ta₂O₅. These membranes demo...

The Tactile Helmet is designed to augment a wearer's senses with long-range touch. Tactile specialist animals e.g. rats are capable of rapidly acquiring detailed environmental information from their whiskers using task-sensitive strategies. Providing similar information about the environment, in tactile form, to a human operator could prove invaluable for search and rescue, or partially-sighted...

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) incorporating active piezoelectric layers offer integrated actuation, sensing, and transduction. The broad implementation of such active MEMS has long been constrained by the inability to integrate materials with giant piezoelectric response, such as Pb(Mg(1/3)Nb(2/3))O(3)-PbTiO(3) (PMN-PT). We synthesized high-quality PMN-PT epitaxial thin films on vicinal...

Acquisition of 3-D scene information has focused on either passive 2-D imaging methods (stereopsis. structure from motion etc.) or 3-D range sensing methods (structured lighting, laser scarming etc.). Little work. has been done in using active touch sensing with a multi-fingered robotic hand to acquire scene descriptions. even though it is a well developed human capability. Touch sensing differ...

The fitness of behaving agents depends on their knowledge the environment, which demands efficient exploration strategies. Active sensing formalizes as reduction uncertainty about current state environment. Despite strong theoretical justifications, active has had limited applicability due to difficulty in estimating information gain. Here we address this issue by proposing a linear approximati...

This paper proposes a deep learning approach to class of active sensing problems in wireless communications which an agent sequentially interacts with environment over predetermined number time frames gather information order perform or actuation task for maximizing some utility function. In such setting, the needs design adaptive strategy based on observations made so far. To tackle challengin...

Individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF) are commonly colonized with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The chronic infections caused by P. aeruginosa are punctuated by acute exacerbations of the lung disease, which lead to significant morbidity and mortality. As regulators of virulence determinants, P. aeruginosa quorum-sensing systems may be active in the chronic lung infections associated with CF. We have...