Sharif Digital Repository

Robotics has become a rapidly growing science that will enter the life of all classes of people in a few years. That is why we have tried to work in this field. The project that we are going to describe here is a robotic rescue team that uses its designed systems and utilized detection methods to help people and help rescuers to accurately detect victims when natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes occur. However, in addition to the functions listed, this robotic team can help in the identification of historic centers, help to protect the environment, be useful in mapping, and help the traffic police. The technologies used in this project can be implemented in various industrial... 

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in information technology that creates environments able to detect and respond to users’ needs, actions, behaviors and feelings. User trust plays an important role in accepting Ambient Intelligence environments. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a virtual reality based testbed for studying trust in Ambient Intelligence Environments  

In this paper, we have presented a novel virtual reality setup with the ability to teach music to children with autism as well as perform automatic assessment of their behaviors. This setup contains Social Virtual Reality Robots (V2Rs) and virtual musical instruments (i.e. xylophone and drum). After conducting a game-session pilot study, we observed that the acceptance rate of the virtual reality headset is about 65% among children with autism, while all of the typically developing children attending the session used the headset. Furthermore, using statistical analysis, it is indicated that the performance of children with autism in music assignments was significantly weaker than their... 

In this paper, two different systems for taking exams through the Internet are described and analyzed. They have been designed and executed in Yazd and Shahed Universities. These systems enable us to take the multiple-choice and descriptive exams. In these systems, the exam questions are prepared by the instructor of the concerned lesson and placed in the system database. The students who have taken that lesson can be connected to the system from wherever they want. After entering their username and password they can take part in the exam. One of these systems has been created on the basis of the synchronous model and another one has been developed on the basis of the asynchronous model.... 

Many theoretical-based comparison studies, relying on the graph theoretical viewpoints with using structural and algorithmic properties, have been conducted for the hypercube and the star graph. None of these studies, however, considered real working conditions and implementation limits. We have compared the performance of the star and hypercube networks for different message length and virtual channels and considered two implementation constraints, namely the constant bisection bandwidth and constant node pin-out. We use two accurate analytical models already proposed for the star graph and hypercube and implement the parameter changes imposed by technological implementation constraints.... 

An advanced method using progressive concept of geometrical correspondence is applied to create a new wheel/rail contact model based on virtual penetration theory. The geometry and contact mechanism are solved simultaneously because of the independency in a defined correspondence. The model takes the penetrated profiles of wheel and rail and also associated creeps as inputs, and produces driving contact forces as output. The advantage of this model is that it doesn't require pretabulation of rigid contact situation. The method allows calculating flexible, non-elliptical, multiple contact patches during integration of the model. Consequently the rails with substructures can vibrate separately... 

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a growing technology that has been used in various fields of psychology, education, and therapy. One group of potential users of VR are children with autism who need education and have poor social interactions; this technology could help them improve their social skills through real-world simulation. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of conducting virtual music education programs with automatic assessment system for children with autism at treatment/research centers without the need to purchase a robot, resulting in the possibility of offering schedules on a larger scale and at a lower cost. Intervention sessions were conducted for five children... 

This paper will focus on the design and development of a new gait training robotic device (LOKOIRAN) for patients with balance and locomotion disorders. The process of rehabilitation in this system is based on partial weight bearing system and programmable foot-plate training. The system consisted of several subsystems following: Driving and transmission system, back supporting system, leg exoskeleton, body weight support system and control system. A virtual reality environment was also designed and integrated to the system in order to motivate patients during rehabilitation protocol. The experimental tests on healthy subjects were performed to evaluate the performances of mechanical and... 

Kernel learning is one of the most important and recent approaches to constrained clustering. Until now many kernel learning methods have been introduced for clustering when side information in the form of pairwise constraints is available. However, almost all of the existing methods either learn a whole kernel matrix or learn a limited number of parameters. Although the non-parametric methods that learn whole kernel matrix can provide capability of finding clusters of arbitrary structures, they are very computationally expensive and these methods are feasible only on small data sets. In this paper, we propose a kernel learning method that shows flexibility in the number of variables between... 

The aim of this paper is the design and development of a novel user interface to interact with a meta system. Our focus is rather on interacting with Ambient Intelligence as a whole, which would for example enable users to influence the overall behaviors and attributes of dynamic device compositions. We call such interfaces Meta User Interfaces. The design details of a proposed user interface as well as a cognitive walkthrough evaluation are presented in this paper  

Ambient Intelligence environments detect and respond to users needs, actions, behaviors and feelings. In the presence of interaction conflicts, user trust plays an important role in accepting Ambient Intelligence environments for living, working, etc. In this paper, we propose a multimedia-supported virtual experiment for online user–system trust studies. We conduct web-based experiments to gather data from a large number of online participants. Subjects experience the environment through an intelligent environment web-based 3D simulator. Our proposed approach can be utilized to measure trust not only in the presence of interaction conflicts, but also in the presence of any other variability... 

Ambient Intelligence environments detect and respond to users needs, actions, behaviors and feelings. In the presence of interaction conflicts, user trust plays an important role in accepting Ambient Intelligence environments for living, working, etc. In this paper, we propose a multimedia-supported virtual experiment for online user–system trust studies. We conduct web-based experiments to gather data from a large number of online participants. Subjects experience the environment through an intelligent environment web-based 3D simulator. Our proposed approach can be utilized to measure trust not only in the presence of interaction conflicts, but also in the presence of any other variability... 

In this paper we propose a new architecture based on Z-order curve and kd-tree that can efficiently handle issues related to update messages distribution to interested entities' locations in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments where locations are described in terms of 3D coordinates. We also aim to minimize the number of routing hops in distribution of update messages, especially when updates are forwarded to a specific range of users/entities in the virtual environment. Our results are promising and show improvements in both of the objectives. ©2009 IEEE  

This paper presents a new approach for trajectory planning of manipulator robots based on Virtual Potential Field (VPF) in presence of static obstacles. In this method, a series of via points between starting point and goal point is obtained by traverse end-effector of manipulator in affected by different VPF while avoiding obstacles in the Cartesian space. An optimum trajectory is generated by using pattern search algorithm which determines strength of potential fields to minimize the value of desired objective function. Cubic splines are used to generate a smooth trajectory through path points in joint space that are obtained by inverse kinematics solution of corresponding points in the... 

In this research, we will use an accelerator for MD simulations, called Atomic Approximation Method, which leads to more efficient simulations without harming the physical properties in simulations. The main idea of this method is to define a virtual material with lower number of atoms, which has the same physical properties as the original material. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed technique the modal analysis results are compared with the ones of the conventional molecular dynamics method. It is shown that this method accelerates conventional MD simulations significantly. Copyright © 2006 by ASME  

Virtual learning is a new idea that has gotten a new form with the emergence of new technologies such as the wireless networks. The mobile phone (cell phone) is a device that is used by most people nowadays. Therefore, one can use the mobile phone for virtual learning on a wide scale. One of the popular and at the same time simple and inexpensive services on the mobile phone is the SMS (Short Message Service). In this paper I propose a method for taking multiple-choice quizzes by using the SMS on mobile phones. In the provision of these tests, some SMS messages were sent to the student along with the answers of the questions, which were steganography in an image. The student, after receiving... 

Most of previous studies have assessed the performance issues for regular buffer and virtual channel organiza-tions and have not considered overall buffer size constraint. In this paper, the performance of mesh-based interconnection networks (mesh, torus and hypercube networks) under different traffic patterns (uniform, hotspot, and matrix-transpose) is studied. We investigate the effect of the number of virtual channels and their buffer lengths, on the performance of these topologies when the total buffer size associated to each physical channel (and thus router buffer size) is fixed.The results show that the optimal number of virtual channels and buffer length highly depends on the traffic... 

Real-time linear robust control of a two phase hybrid stepper motor with Quantitative Feedback Theory method in micro-stepping operation is considered in this paper. Utilizing the phase currents as inputs, linear robust controller is derived for a Hybrid Stepper Motor that achieves robustness to parametric and dynamic uncertainties such as viscous friction, load torque, flux linkage and other uncertainties. Simulation and experimental studies are presented to show the efficiency of the control design approach