Variable geometry trusses are composed, in general, of unit cells which can be modeled as bars connected by spherical joints. Under mild conditions, it has been shown that the only feasible cells are topologically equivalent ...

This paper presents a numerical method to compute all possible conformations of distance-constrained molecular loops, i.e., loops where some interatomic distances are held fixed, while others can vary. The method is general ...

Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the ...

Distance constraints are an emerging formulation that offers intuitive geometrical interpretation of otherwise complex problems. The formulation can be applied in problems such as position and singularity analysis and path ...

Existing sampling-based robot motion planning methods are often inefficient at finding trajectories for kinodynamic systems, especially in the presence of narrow passages between obstacles and uncertainty in control and ...

The conformational space of a flexible molecular loop includes the set of conformations fulfilling the geometric loop-closure constraints and its energy landscape can be seen as a scalar field defined on this implicit set. ...

Planning a precision grasp for a robot hand is usually decomposed into two main steps. First, a set of contact points over the object surface must be determined, ensuring they allow a stable grasp. Second, the inverse ...

This paper presents a procedure to optimize the quality of robotic grasps for objects that need to be held and manipulated in a specific way, characterized by a number of tight contact constraints. The main difficulties ...

An analysis of the existing hand-eye calibration methods reveals that most of them are far from trivial. And, what is worse, their intrinsic complexity makes it difficult to elucidate under which circumstances they fail ...

Several clinical trials are working on drug development for Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophy (DMD and BMD) treatment, and, since the expected increase in dystrophin is relatively subtle, high-sensitivity quantification ...