Practical approaches to exploiting body dynamics in robot motor control

Motor control systems in the brain of humans and mammals are hierarchically organised, with each level controlling increasingly complex motor actions. Each level is controlled by the higher levels and also receives sensory and/or proprioceptive feedback. Through learning, this hierarchical structure adapts to its body, its sensors and the way these interact with the environment. An even more integrated view is taken in morphological or embodied computation. On the one hand, there is both biological and mechanical (robotics) evidence that a properly chosen body morphology can drastically facilitate control when the body dynamics naturally generate low level motion primitives. On the other hand, several papers have used robot bodies as reservoirs in a reservoir computing setup. In some cases, reservoir computing was used as an easy way to obtain robust linear feedback controllers for locomotion. In other cases, the body dynamics of soft robots were shown to perform general computations in response to some input stimulation. In general, very specific highly compliant bodies were used. At Ghent University’s Reservoir Lab, we have previously used reservoir computing to generate locomotion on quite different robot platforms: the highly compliant tensegrity robot Recter and the far less compliant quadruped robot Oncilla and a new low cost modular quadruped puppy robot. In all cases, we succeeded in generating stable gaits. However, not surprisingly, not all robot bodies are equally suitable to help generating their own motor actuations. As a result, the reservoir computing principle alone was not always sufficient. We present an overview of our experience with these different robot platforms and give practical guidelines for applying physical reservoir computing to new robots. We finally discuss some perspectives on a more systematic evaluation between body morphology, compliance and the complexity of generating stable gaits for locomotion

Optimizing Teaching English as Efl in Novice Level Through Students' Optimism

Mengoptimalkan pengajaran bahasa inggris dengan menanamkan rasa optimisme pada siswa mempunyai pengaruh sangat penting dalam belajar bahasa inggris terutama dalam tingkat dasar. Siswa akan mempunyai inisiatif, berani mengambil resiko dan akan lebih banyak terlibat dalam setiap kegiatan sehingga mereka dapat meningkatkan kemampuan bahasa serta mempunyai kemampuan akademik yang tinggi

Improving Students' Skill to Write Islamic Historical Texts Through Dicstom Technique, the Trial Web Shift Design, and Engagement Strategy at Stai Bumi Silampari Lubuklinggau

This study aims to find the ability of third semester students, Prodi PAI (Islamic Religious Education) in writing texts of Islamic history in English. Students are taught 3 ways to write; (1) Dicstom, (2) Web Shift Trial, (3) Engagement, and (4) without technique. This research uses Quasi-experimental design method, and one-way ANOVA. The results showed that there is a difference between the students' ability in writing Islamic history text in English using the 3 ways mentioned above

Preaching with all you\u27ve got: embodying the word

Title: Preaching with all you\u27ve got: embodying the word. Author: Day, David Preaching with all you\u27ve got 186 p. Publisher: Peabody, Mass : Hendrickson, 2006

The Fossilization Error Made by the Second Semester Students of Islamic Communication and Broadcasting Prody (Kpi) at Stai Bumi Silampari Lubuklinggau

Kesalahan yang memfosilisasi didalam mengucapkan kata dalam Bahasa Inggris didalam Penelitian ini difokuskan pada kesalahan mereka mengucapkan kata yang mempunyai huruf vocal (/i:/, /I/, /e/, /ӕ/) mahasiswa semester II, Prodi KPI (Komunikasi Penyiaran Islam), dalam penelitian ini ditemukan ada enam kata yang sangat memfosil siswa mengucapkannya yaitu kata: 1) Listening  /lis:ning/ 2) She  /sh:i/ 3) Pizza /fɪ:tzaʃ/ 4) Mosque /mos:k/, 5) Eight /eɪt/ and 6) Accent /æksent . Penelitian ini mengunakan metode Descriptive. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa fosilisasi terjadi karena tiga sumber kesalahan dari guru, kawan, dan buku paket

Investigation of rainfall data with regard to low-level wind flow regime for east central Florida

Previous research has been conducted to investigate the effect of the low-level wind region on summertime convective storms in the east central Florida area. These effects were described by analyzing the distribution of lightning flashes within classifications based on the low-level wind regime for the months June through September of 1987 to 1990. The present research utilizes the same classification strategy to study rainfall patterns for data gathered for the CaPE (Convection and Precipitation/Electrification Experiment) field program. The CaPE field program was conducted in east central Florida from July 8, 1991 to August 18, 1991

Immigrant experience: the relation between skin color and pay

There is considerable evidence of discriminatory treatment of immigrants in employment and access to housing, and the author’s research suggests that factors such as height and darkness of skin may influence how immigrants are treated.Immigrants ; Discrimination in employment ; Discrimination in housing

Blind source separation of tensor-valued time series

The blind source separation model for multivariate time series generally assumes that the observed series is a linear transformation of an unobserved series with temporally uncorrelated or independent components. Given the observations, the objective is to find a linear transformation that recovers the latent series. Several methods for accomplishing this exist and three particular ones are the classic SOBI and the recently proposed generalized FOBI (gFOBI) and generalized JADE (gJADE), each based on the use of joint lagged moments. In this paper we generalize the methodologies behind these algorithms for tensor-valued time series. We assume that our data consists of a tensor observed at each time point and that the observations are linear transformations of latent tensors we wish to estimate. The tensorial generalizations are shown to have particularly elegant forms and we show that each of them is Fisher consistent and orthogonal equivariant. Comparing the new methods with the original ones in various settings shows that the tensorial extensions are superior to both their vector-valued counterparts and to two existing tensorial dimension reduction methods for i.i.d. data. Finally, applications to fMRI-data and video processing show that the methods are capable of extracting relevant information from noisy high-dimensional data.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure