In recent years, robots have made substantial in-roads in the medical field and are gradually finding their way into clinical practice. Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robot broke ground in 1998 by performing the first tele-robotic surgery to repair a heart valve (Salis-bury, 1998; Guthart & Salisbury, 2000). Accuray’s CyberKnife radiotherapy robot began treating head, neck and upper spine tumors in 1999 by combining image guidance with a robotically-directed radiation beam (Adler et al., 1997). In 2002, Interactive Motion Technology began therapy of stroke patients with the InMotion2 robot, also known as the MIT-Manus (Krebs et al., 2002). These devices and many others under development have provided researchers and doctors alike with capabilities not previously available.

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Фантастика стала ещё на один шажок ближе к реальности. Новая рука для робота — это замечательный пример комбинации принципов биомиметики и мехатроники. Увидев её, кто-то непременно вспомнит Терминатора, но изобретение должно найти массу мирных областей применения.

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An exoskeleton is an external structural mechanism with joints and links corresponding to those of the human body. With applications in rehabilitation medicine and virtual reality simulation, exoskeletons offer benefits for both disabled and healthy populations. A pilot database defining the kinematics and dynamics of the upper limb during daily living activities was one among several factors guiding the development of an anthropomorphic, 7-DOF, powered arm exoskeleton. Additional design inputs include anatomical and physiological considerations, workspace analyses, and upper limb joint ranges of motion. The database was compiled from 19 arm activities of daily living. The cable-actuated dexterous exoskeleton for neurorehabilitation (CADEN)-7 offers remarkable opportunities as a versatile human-machine interface and as a new generation of assistive technology. Proximal placement of motors and distal placement of cable-pulley reductions were incorporated into the design, leading to low inertia, high-stiffness links, and backdrivable transmissions with zero backlash. The design enables full glenohumeral, elbow, and wrist joint functionality. Potential applications of the exoskeleton as a wearable robot include: 1) a therapeutic and diagnostics device for physiotherapy, 2) an assistive (orthotic) device for human power amplifications, 3) a haptic device in virtual reality simulation, and 4) a master device for teleoperation.

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It is quite possible that in the future, the Next Generation Robots (NGRs) will work with humans in industrial sectors to lift heavy materials, fetch parts, assist in mounting parts, etc. Gradually the physical safety barriers surrounding these industrial robots will be replaced with virtual barriers such as sensors and safety controllers. The mixing of humans, humanoids, and industrial robots will depend on the safety of the affected workers. This study looks for the availability of humanoid robots, which could be used, to test industrial robots safety systems. Because the study was conducted using public infor-mation, not every field for all the humanoids can be completed.

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To maximize performance and power efficiency, future multi-core architec-tures may be heterogeneous, incorporating some accelerator cores alongside the IA cores. Accelerator Exoskeletons provide a shared virtual memory heterogeneous multi-threaded programming paradigm for these accelerators using novel CPU instruction set extensions and software tool chains with an Intel Architec-ture (IA) look-n-feel. Firstly, we introduce the proposed architectural extensions known as the Exoskeleton Sequencer (EXO), which represents heterogeneous accelerators as ISA-based MIMD architecture resources, and a shared virtual memory heterogeneous multi-threaded program execution model that tightly couples specialized accelerator cores with general-purpose CPU cores. Then we introduce the C for Heterogeneous Integration (CHI) programming environment that includes a compiler, runtime, debugger, and performance-analysis tools. The CHI compiler extends the OpenMP pragma for heterogeneous multi-threading programming, and it produces a single fat binary with code sections corresponding to different instruction sets. The runtime can judiciously spread parallel computation across the heterogeneous cores to optimize performance and power.

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