When treating highly infectious diseases, patient compliance with caregiver recommendations is crucial. Many patients who contract Ebola Virus Disease have symptoms including vomiting and severe diarrhea and die from the resulting dehydration if they do not drink enough fluids. Telepresence robots are useful in the context of Ebola treatment for...
This thesis aims to determine the impact that Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have on social interactions, and then improves the AAC user experience through a user focus design process. AAC devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and make...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
Numerous diseases and injuries can limit a person's ability to perform everyday tasks -- things like getting dressed, bathing, and eating. Anything that requires physical activity can be affected; even simple things like turning on the lights can become difficult or impossible. Until recently, the only way for a person...
Automating pick-and-place operations for large steel castings in a foundry is challenging, particularly from a perception point of view. Accurately estimating the identity and orientation of a given part is an open and complex problem, especially if that part sits in a bin of very similar parts. The problem is...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
Recent studies have shown that novel continuous dropout methods can be viewed as a Bayesian interpretation of model parameters, though most such studies have shown results using normal distributions. As the posterior distributions over neural network nodes and parameters are intractable, given that they are a result of artificial construction...
This work describes the design and modification of a commercial children’s ride-on car to effectively collect usage data. The design is cheap and could be easily modified to gather more information. This will serve as a viable way to collect information about how motorized independence can help children with developmental...
Robotic global navigation is often based on the assumption that the world is static. It assumes that obstacles present in maps will be there later and new obstacles will be dealt with by a local planning algorithm. When robots interact in an environment inhabited by people, this assumption does not...
A small eddy viscosity or mass diffusivity that varies with height has been found to have unexpected effects on the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability of a stably stratified shear layer near the neutral stability boundary. In particular, varying viscosity can increase the growth rate of the instability in contrast to the...
The analysis of the distribution of monoterpenes through the leaf pairs of a single shoot of Mentha piperita supports Reitsema's contention that the first terpenes formed are unsaturated ketones and that saturated terpenes are produced from these. The growth of Mentha piperita under varying conditions of temperature and the leaf-by-leaf...
Solid solution alloying was employed in an attempt to produce some
relatively ductile form of beryllium. If the c/a ratio could be significantly
altered, it was felt new or different slip systems could be activated. The
following elements were selected on the basis of atomic size, melting point,
crystal structure...
A method for measuring the spark-shower radiance of metals
when abraded on an abrasive grinding wheel was developed for
evaluating their sparking tendency. One hundred metals were tested
and rated relative to commercially pure iron. The radiance was
measured in units of energy per solid angle per area of the...
The 865 ewe production records taken from three lamb crops, were
analyzed to study breed effects, heterosis, environmental effects and
interactions between them, and breed and heterosis x environment interaction
effects on ewe production traits. In each of two environments,
approximately 144 ewes were mated in a three breed reciprocal...
High purity single crystals of zirconium were produced and
mechanically strained in the temperature range from 4.2°K to 293°K.
The crystals were produced by thermal treatment with a specially
constructed electron beam zone refiner which provided the abrupt
temperature gradient necessary for crystal growth. Specimens were
electrolytically machined to have...
The erratic behavior of the room temperature yield strength of
high purity commercial tantalum sheet was studied. Critical factors
in the production process were postulated and then investigated to
determine their effects on strength properties. Chemical composition
was found to be the most important factor contributing to the strength;
thermomechanical...
Genetic and environmental factors affecting age of first estrus,
wool production, reproduction and lamb production were examined in
eight groups of crossbred ewe lambs from two birth years. The 399
ewe lambs whose first year production was analyzed were from eight
crossbred groups resulting from mating North Country Cheviot, Dorset,...