This paper presents a tele-operated robotic hand controlled by replication of human hand motions and is focused on the description of technical solutions for detection and tele-replication of movements, in order to control a robotic hand. The purpose of such research is justified by the need of high precision human controlled operations in special environments. The system is based on a flex sensors set with processing units and has as effectors a robotic arm and an anthropomorphic hand. The current article displays the modality of achieving an anthropomorphic robotic arm capable of efficiently handling objects of different sizes. In order to implement and test the technical and computing solutions, the authors have used a commercial product as experimental platform and improved it both in its mechanical structure and in its command and control system. For implementing the motion algorithms of the robotic arm, a method was developed for decoding arm movements performed by a human operator. To this end, bending sensors placed at the human operator's joints (shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers) were used. Signals collected from the sensors during the realization of these different movements by the human operator were decoded, processed and implemented in the drive system corresponding to the anthropomorphic robotic arm. In this regard, all sets of complex movements by the human arm operator were duplicated and implemented in the anthropomorphic robotic arm. The results obtained in handling various objects by means of using the anthropomorphic robotic arm have certified the effectiveness of this method.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Autonomous weather monitoring applications, especially the distributed ones, implies low power consumption both for sensors and computing/storage facilities. Making the autonomous system more efficient requires optimizing consumption for the computing and storage facilities are they require more energy to function than the sensors. Modern embedded systems are a solution, as they have to continuously balance the need for increased performance, increased miniaturization and decrease in power requirements for the full product to run. This is of special importance if the embedded system is designed to work outside of the normal power grid and instead rely on solar or battery power, as in the case of our autonomous weather station. Miniaturization leads to using increasingly complex system on chip devices in the embedded device in increasingly smaller nanometric geometries. These geometries favor the consumption due to leakage instead of digital transistor switching, thus minimizing the silicon clock frequency has impact in the final power consumption. This paper studies the effects of frequency in power consumption on a modern RISC based system implementation, Texas Instruments' OMAP3 family of devices. In order to study the impact of frequency scaling alone (without the additional effects brought to by voltage scaling or methods of idling the silicon) a modern microkernel is used as the basis of a software operating system.