Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS): Technical and Scoring Manual (3rd Edition)

The BMIS scale is an open-source mood scale consisting of 16 mood-adjectives to which a person responds (e.g., Are you happy ?). The scale can yield measures of overall pleasant-unpleasant mood, arousal-calm mood, and it also can be scored according to positive-tired and negative-calm mood

CT diagnosis of small bowel obstruction caused by internal hernia from persistent attachment of a Meckel's diverticulum to the umbilicus by the obliterated omphalomesenteric duct

We report a case of small bowel obstruction (SBO) caused by internal hernia from persistent attachment of a Meckel's diverticulum (MD) to the umbilicus by the obliterated omphalomesenteric duct that was diagnosed by multidetector CT and confirmed during laparoscopic surgery. Although clinical, pathological and radiological features of MD and its complications are well known, the diagnosis of MD is difficult to establish preoperatively. CT findings that allow the diagnosis of this very unusual cause of SBO are presented here with laparoscopic surgery correlation

Micro-Bullet Assembly: Interactions of Oriented Dipoles in Confined Nematic Liquid Crystal

Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in 4-cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB) nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cells and form oriented elastic dipoles with a nematic point defect located near the curved end. This feature allows us to study particle interactions as a function of dipole alignment. By careful control of the surface anchoring at the particle surface and the confining boundaries, we study the interactions and assembly of microbullets under various conditions. When microbullets with homeotropic surface anchoring are dispersed in a planar cell, parallel dipoles form linear chains parallel to the director, similar to the observations of spherical particles in a planar cell, while antiparallel dipoles orient side-to-side. In a homeotropic cell, however, particles rotate to orient their long axis parallel to the director. When so aligned, parallel dipoles repel and form 2D ordered assemblies with hexagonal symmetry that ripen over time owing to attraction between antiparallel neighbors. Further, we show that the anchoring conditions inside the cell can be altered by application of an electrical field, allowing us to flip microbullets to orient parallel to the director, an effect driven by an elastic torque. Finally, we detail the mechanisms that control the formation of 1D chains and hexagonal lattices with respect to the elasticity of the NLC.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, the full catastrophe, version to be publishe

3D sensors for the HL-LHC

In order to increase its discovery potential, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator will be upgraded in the next decade. The high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) period demands new sensor technologies to cope with increasing radiation fluences and particle rates. The ATLAS experiment will replace the entire inner tracking detector with a completely new silicon-only system. 3D pixel sensors are promising candidates for the innermost layers of the Pixel detector due to their excellent radiation hardness at low operation voltages and low power dissipation at moderate temperatures. Recent developments of 3D sensors for the HL-LHC are presented.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, International Workshops on Radiation Imaging Detectors 201

Risk and Fault Tolerance Analysis for Robotics and Manufacturing

This paper describes a novel method for analyzing, within one framework, several important types of risk associated with robotics and manufacturing applications. We will build on the established technique of Fault Tree Analysis to analyze the risk/benefits of the physical process, and extend the concept to build a dual structure for environmental costs/benefits. In addition, our framework includes the ability to perform financial cost-benefit analyses.NASA Graduate FellowshipNational Science Foundatio

Elasticity-Dependent Self-assembly of Micro-Templated Chromonic Liquid Crystal Films

We explore micropatterned director structures of aqueous lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) films created on square lattice cylindrical-micropost substrates. The structures are manipulated by modulating the LCLC mesophases and their elastic properties via concentration through drying. Nematic LCLC films exhibit preferred bistable alignment along the diagonals of the micropost lattice. Columnar LCLC films, dried from nematics, form two distinct director and defect configurations: a diagonally aligned director pattern with local squares of defects, and an off-diagonal configuration with zig-zag defects. The formation of these states appears to be tied to the relative splay and bend free energy costs of the initial nematic films. The observed nematic and columnar configurations are understood numerically using a Landau-de Gennes free energy model. Among other attributes, the work provide first examples of quasi-2D micropatterning of LC films in the columnar phase and lyotropic LC films in general, and it demonstrates alignment and configuration switching of typically difficult-to-align LCLC films via bulk elastic properties.Comment: 9 pages; 9 figures; accepted for publication in Soft Matte

Fault Residual Generation via Nonlinear Analytical Redundancy

Fault detection is critical in many applications, and analytical redundancy (AR) has been the key underlying tool for many approaches to fault detection. However, the conventional AR approach is formally limited to linear systems. In this brief, we exploit the structure of nonlinear geometric control theory to derive a new nonlinear analytical redundancy (NLAR) framework. The NLAR technique is applicable to affine systems and is seen to be a natural extension of linear AR. The NLAR structure introduced in this brief is tailored toward practical applications. Via an example of robot fault detection, we show the considerable improvement in performance generated by the approach compared with the traditional linear AR approach

Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance in Robotics

Robots are used in inaccessible or hazardous environments in order to alleviate some of the time, cost and risk involved in preparing men to endure these conditions. In order to perform their expected tasks, the robots are often quite complex, thus increasing their potential for failures. If men must be sent into these environments to repair each component failure in the robot, the advantages of using the robot are quickly lost. Fault tolerant robots are needed which can effectively cope with failures and continue their tasks until repairs can be realistically scheduled. Before fault tolerant capabilities can be created, methods of detecting and pinpointing failures must be perfected. This paper develops a basic fault tree analysis of a robot in order to obtain a better understanding of where failures can occur and how they contribute to other failures in the robot. The resulting failure flow chart can also be used to analyze the resiliency of the robot in the presence of specific faults. By simulating robot failures and fault detection schemes, the problems involved in detecting failures for robots are explored in more depth. Future work will extend the analyses done in this paper to enhance Trick, a robotic simulation testbed, with fault tolerant capabilities in an expert system package.National Science FoundationMitre Corporation Graduate FellowshipNSF Graduate Fellowshi

The Use of Fault Trees for the Design of Robots for Hazardous Environments

This paper addresses the application of fault trees to the analysis of robot manipulator reliability and fault tolerance. Although a common and useful tool in other applications, fault trees have only recently been applied to robots. In addition, most of the fault tree analyses in robotics have focused on qualitative, rather than quantitative, analysis. Robotic manipulators present some special problems, due to the complex and strongly coupled nature of their subsystems, and also their wild response to subsystem failures. Additionally, there is a lack of reliability data for robots and their subsystems. There has traditionally been little emphasis on fault tolerance in the design of industrial robots, and data regarding operational robot failures is relatively scarce.National Science FoundationSandia National LaboratoryNAS