Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

From the Publisher: 
The accessible presentation of this book gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail to be able to build useful applications. Users learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods. A CD-ROM with every copy of the text contains source code for programming practice, color images, and illustrative movies. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this book includes essential topics that either reflect practical significance or are of theoretical importance. Topics are discussed in substantial and increasing depth. Application surveys describe numerous important application areas such as image based rendering and digital libraries. Many important algorithms broken down and illustrated in pseudo code. Appropriate for use by engineers as a comprehensive reference to the computer vision enterprise.

Computer vision : a modern approach = 计算机视觉 : 一种现代的方法

The European Position Paper on Rhinosinusitis and Nasal Polyps 2020 is the update of similar evidence based position papers published in 2005 and 2007 and 2012. The core objective of the EPOS2020 guideline is to provide revised, up-to-date and clear evidence-based recommendations and integrated care pathways in ARS and CRS. EPOS2020 provides an update on the literature published and studies undertaken in the eight years since the EPOS2012 position paper was published and addresses areas not extensively covered in EPOS2012 such as paediatric CRS and sinus surgery. EPOS2020 also involves new stakeholders, including pharmacists and patients, and addresses new target users who have become more involved in the management and treatment of rhinosinusitis since the publication of the last EPOS document, including pharmacists, nurses, specialised care givers and indeed patients themselves, who employ increasing self-management of their condition using over the counter treatments. The document provides suggestions for future research in this area and offers updated guidance for definitions and outcome measurements in research in different settings. EPOS2020 contains chapters on definitions and classification where we have defined a large number of terms and indicated preferred terms. A new classification of CRS into primary and secondary CRS and further division into localized and diffuse disease, based on anatomic distribution is proposed. There are extensive chapters on epidemiology and predisposing factors, inflammatory mechanisms, (differential) diagnosis of facial pain, allergic rhinitis, genetics, cystic fibrosis, aspirin exacerbated respiratory disease, immunodeficiencies, allergic fungal rhinosinusitis and the relationship between upper and lower airways. The chapters on paediatric acute and chronic rhinosinusitis are totally rewritten. All available evidence for the management of acute rhinosinusitis and chronic rhinosinusitis with or without nasal polyps in adults and children is systematically reviewed and integrated care pathways based on the evidence are proposed. Despite considerable increases in the amount of quality publications in recent years, a large number of practical clinical questions remain. It was agreed that the best way to address these was to conduct a Delphi exercise . The results have been integrated into the respective sections. Last but not least, advice for patients and pharmacists and a new list of research needs are included. The full document can be downloaded for free on the website of this journal: http://www.rhinologyjournal.com.

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European Position Paper on Rhinosinusitis and Nasal Polyps 2020

Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd the perception of the visual world to read.

The Perception of the Visual World. By James J. Gibson. U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London). Price 35s.

System Identification I

This paper outlines the requirements and components for a proposed Document Analysis System, which assists a user in encoding printed documents for computer processing. Several critical functions have been investigated and the technical approaches are discussed. The first is the segmentation and classification of digitized printed documents into regions of text and images. A nonlinear, run-length smoothing algorithm has been used for this purpose. By using the regular features of text lines, a linear adaptive classification scheme discriminates text regions from others. The second technique studied is an adaptive approach to the recognition of the hundreds of font styles and sizes that can occur on printed documents. A preclassifier is constructed during the input process and used to speed up a well-known pattern-matching method for clustering characters from an arbitrary print source into a small sample of prototypes. Experimental results are included.

Document analysis system

Block segmentation and text extraction in mixed text/image documents

This paper introduces a new method for motion-trajectory generation of mechanical systems with multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs). The key feature of this new concept is that motion trajectories are generated online, i.e., within every control cycle, typically every millisecond. This enables systems to react instantaneously to unforeseen and unpredictable (sensor) events at any time instant and in any state of motion. As a consequence, (multi)sensor integration in robotics, in particular the development of control systems enabling sensor-guided and sensor-guarded motions, becomes greatly simplified. We introduce a class of online trajectory-generation algorithms and present the mathematical basics of this new approach. The algorithms presented here consist of three steps: calculation of the minimum synchronization time for all DOFs, synchronization of all DOFs, and calculation of output values. The theory is followed by real-world experimental results indicating new possibilities in robot-motion control.

Online Trajectory Generation: Basic Concepts for Instantaneous Reactions to Unforeseen Events

In the last twenty years many approaches for contact-free measurement techniques for object surfaces and approaches for 3d object reconstruction have been proposed; but often they still require complex and expensive equipment. Not least due to the rapidly increasing number of efficient 3d hard- and software system components, alternative low-cost solutions are in great demand. We propose such a low-cost system for 3d data acquisition and fast pairwise surface registration. The only hardware requirements are a simple commercial hand-held laser and a standard grayscale camera.

/pdf/low-cost-laser-range-scanner-and-fast-surface-registration-37b94f3rvo.pdf

Low-Cost laser range scanner and fast surface registration approach

This paper presents a new method to decompose complex sequences of assembly operations into skill primitives. This can be realized by analyzing hyper-arcs of the underlying AND/OR graphs representing automatically generated assembly plans. Features like local depart spaces, symbolic spatial relations, and the necessary tools classify the type of assembly operation (peg in hole, placements, alignments, etc.). Skill primitives are robot movements or commands for grippers and tools. The unified modeling language is used to model the robot tasks and skill primitives. A robot control system uses the skill primitives as input to select the desired control scheme (position, force, or hybrid). In addition to this, we use an algorithm to identify assembly process states considering static friction under uniform gravity to execute skill primitives. This enables a robot to select and modify its motion strategies adequately according to the state of the assembly operation.

Friedrich M. Wahl

Papers

Document analysis system

Block segmentation and text extraction in mixed text/image documents

Online Trajectory Generation: Basic Concepts for Instantaneous Reactions to Unforeseen Events

Low-Cost laser range scanner and fast surface registration approach

Automatic decomposition of planned assembly sequences into skill primitives