• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.585-589
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• 2016

Recently, the robotic assist system for cardiovascular intervention gets continuously growing interest. The robotic cardiovascular intervention systems are largely two folds, systems for cardiac ablation procedure assist and systems for vascular intervention assist. For the systems, the clinician controls the catheter inserted through blood vessel to the heart via a master console or master manipulator. Most of the current master manipulators have structure of joystick-like pivoting 2 degree of freedom (DOF) handle in the core, which is used in parallel with other sliding switches and input devices. It however is desirable to have customized and optimized design manipulator that can provide clinician with intuitive control of the catheter motion fully utilizing the advantage of the use of robotic structure. A 6 DOF kinematic mechanism that can capture the motion control intention of the clinician in translational 3 DOF and rotational 3 DOF is proposed in this paper. Also, a master-slave motion relationship specially designed for the cardiac catheter manipulation motion is proposed and implemented in an experimental prototype. Design revision for implementation of more efficient motion and experiment in combination with an experimental slave robot system for catheter manipulation are underway.

• BMB Reports
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.93-98
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• 2016

Germline stem cells (GSCs) are the best understood adult stem cell types in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and have provided an important model system for studying stem cells and their cell fate in vivo, in mammals. In this review, we propose a mechanism that controls GSCs and their cell fate through selective activation, repression and mobilization of the specific mRNAs. This mechanism is acutely controlled by known signal transduction pathways (e.g., Notch signaling and Ras-ERK MAPK signaling pathways) and P granule (analogous to mammalian germ granule)-associated mRNA regulators (FBF-1, FBF-2, GLD-1, GLD-2, GLD-3, RNP-8 and IFE-1). Importantly, all regulators are highly conserved in many multi-cellular animals. Therefore, GSCs from a simple animal may provide broad insight into vertebrate stem cells (e.g., hematopoietic stem cells) and their cell fate specification.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.193-207
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• 2000

The possible application of a spatially placed passive tuned liquid column damper system for suppressing coupled lateral-torsional responses of tall buildings is investigated in this paper. The wind loads acting on rectangular tall buildings are analytically expressed as 3-D stochastic model. Meanwhile, the 3-D responses of tall buildings may be coupled due to eccentricities between the stiffness and mass centers of the buildings. In these cases, torsional responses of the buildings are rather larger, and a TLCD system composed of several TLCD located near the sides of the buildings is more effective than the same TLCD placed at the building center in reducing both translational and torsional responses of the buildings. In this paper, extensive analytical and numerical work has been done to present the calculation method and optimize the parameters of such TLCD systems. The numerical examples show that the spatially placed TLCD system can reduce coupled along-wind, across-wind and torsional responses significantly with a fairly small mass ratio.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1146-1154
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• 2008

This paper presents a method for the acceleration analysis of multi-legged walking robots in consideration of the frictional ground contact. This method is based on both unified dynamic equation for finding the acceleration of a robot's body and constraint equation for satisfying no-slip condition. After the dynamic equation representing relationship between actuator torques and body acceleration, is derived from the force and acceleration relationship between foot and body's gravity center, the constraint equation is formulated to reconfigure the maximum torque boundaries satisfying no-slip condition from given original actuator torque boundaries. From application of the reconfigured torques to the dynamic equation, interested acceleration boundaries are obtained. The approach based on above two equations, is adapted to the changes of degree-of-freedoms of legs as well as friction of ground. And the method provides the maximum translational and rotational acceleration boundaries of body's center that are achievable in every direction without occurring slipping at the contact points or saturating all actuators. Given the torque limits in infinite normsense, the resultant accelerations are derived as a polytope. From the proposed method, we obtained achievable acceleration boundaries of 4-legged and 6-legged walking robot system successfully.

• Transactions on Control, Automation and Systems Engineering
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.217-222
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• 2001

We propose a new two-degree of freedom parallel mechanism for a haptic device and will refer to the mechanism as the SenSation. The SenSation is designed in order to improve the kinematic performanced and to achieve static balance. We use the panto graph mechanisms in order to change the location of active joints, which leads to transform a direct kinematic singularity into a nonsingularity. The direct kinematic singular configurations of the SenSation occur near the workspace boundary. Using the property that position vector of rigid body rotating about a fixed point is normal to the velocity vector, Jacobian matrix is derived. Using the vector method, two different types of singularities of the SenSation can be identified and we discuss the physical significance of each of the three types of singularities. We will compare the kinematic performances(force manipulability ellipsoid, kinematic isotropy) of the SenSation with those of five-var parallel mechanism. By specifying that the potential energy be fixed, the conditions for the static balancing of the SenSation is derived. The static balancing is accomplished by changing the center of mass of the links.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.3583-3587
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• 2012

SUMOylation has emerged as an important post-translational modification that modulates the localization, stability and activity of a broad spectrum of proteins. A dynamic process, it can be reversed by a family of SUMO-specific proteases (SENPs). However, the biological roles of SENPs in mammalian development and pathogenesis remain largely elusive. Here, we demonstrated that SENP2 plays a critical role in the control of hepatocellular carcinoma cell growth. SENP2 was found to be down-regulated in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues and over-expression suppressed the growth and colony formation of HCC cells. In contrast, silencing of SENP2 by siRNAs promoted cancer cell growth. We further found that stability of ${\beta}$-catenin was markedly decreased when SENP2 was over-expressed. Interestingly, the decrease was dependent on the de-SUMOylation activity of SENP2, because over-expression of a SENP2 catalytic mutant form had no obviously effects on ${\beta}$-catenin. Our results suggest that SENP2 might play a role in hepatocellular carcinoma cell growth control by modulating the stability of ${\beta}$-catenin.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.698-704
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• 1999

There are several types of defects of SMDs mounted on PCB, that is, missing components, misalignment, wrong parts and poor solder joints. This research study mainly focuses on measuring of deviation of SMD leads using the partial image of component, not using the full image. This processing based on the partial image has the advantage of the reduction in calculation time compared to the full image. Since position of lead is calculated with respect of the reduction in calculation time compared to the full image. Since position of lead is calculated with respect to pad, the accuracy of the system is not dependent on percise positioning stage. The grabbed image of gray scale is converted into binary format using a cutomatic threshold. After small fragments in the image is removed by a series of morphology operations such as opening and closing, the centroids of PCB pads and SMD leads is obtained together with labeling of blobs. Translational shift and rotationial angle of SMD are succedingly estimated using above information and chip data. The expression that can calculate the maximum deviation of leads with respect to PCB pads has been derived, and inferior mounting of SMD is judged by a given criterion. Some experiments have been executed to verify this measuring scheme.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.445-450
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• 2005

In this paper, we suggest an integrated tactile display system that provides kinesthetic force, pressure distribution, vibration and slip/stretch. The system consists of two parts: a 2 DOF force feedback device for kinesthetic display and a tactile feedback device for displaying the normal stimulation to the skin and the skin slip/stretch. Psychophysical experiments measure the effects of fingerpad selection, the direction of finger movements and the texture width on tactile sensitivity. We also investigate the characteristics of lateral finger movement while subjects perceive different textures. From the experimental results, the principal parameters for designing a tactile display are suggested. A tactile display device, using eight piezoelectric bimorphs and a linear actuator, Is implemented and attached to a 2 DOF translational force feedback device to simultaneously simulate the texture and stiffness of the object. As a result, we find out that the capability of the suggested device is sufficient to display physical quantities to display the texture.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.989-994
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• 2011

This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a visual servoing-based paired structured light (SL) robot for estimating structural displacement under various external loads. The former paired SL robot, which was proposed in the previous study, was composed of two screens facing with each other, each with one or two lasers and a camera. It was found that the paired SL robot could estimate the translational and rotational displacement each in 3-DOF with high accuracy and low cost. However, the measurable range is fairly limited due to the limited screen size. In this paper, therefore, a visual servoing-based 2-DOF manipulator which controls the pose of lasers is introduced. By controlling the positions of the projected laser points to be on the screen, the proposed robot can estimate the displacement regardless of the screen size. We performed various simulations and experimental tests to verify the performance of the newly proposed robot. The results show that the proposed system overcomes the range limitation of the former system and it can be utilized to accurately estimate the structural displacement.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.414-424
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• 2017

This paper introduces an experimental device which can measure accurate aerodynamic forces without support interference in wide experimental region for wind tunnel test of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). A stereo pattern recognition (SPR) method was introduced to a magnetic suspension and balance system (MSBS), which can eliminate support interference by levitating the experimental model, to establish wider experimental region; thereby MSBS-SPR integrated system was developed. The SPR method is non-contact, highly accurate three-dimensional position measurement method providing wide measurement range. To evaluate the system performance, a series of performance evaluations including SPR system measurement accuracy and 6 degrees of freedom (DOFs) position/attitude control of the MAV model were conducted. This newly developed system could control the MAV model rapidly and accurately within almost 60mm for translational DOFs and 40deg for rotational DOFs inside of $300{\times}300mm$ test section. In addition, a static wind tunnel test was conducted to verify the aerodynamic force measurement capability. It turned out that this system could accurately measure the aerodynamic forces in low Reynolds number, even for the weak forces which were hard to measure using typical balance system, without making any mechanical contact with the MAV model.