This paper describes the results of an interview study investigating facilitators and barriers to adoption of patient portals among low-income, older adults in rural and urban populations in the southeastern United States. We describe attitudes of this population of older adults and their current level of technology use and patient portal use. From qualitative analysis of 36 patient interviews and 16 caregiver interviews within these communities, we derive themes related to benefits of portals, barriers to use, concerns and desired features. Based on our initial findings, we present a set of considerations for designing the patient portal user experience, aimed at helping healthcare clinics to meet U.S. federally-mandated 'meaningful use' requirements.

Warfighter safety can be significantly increased by offloading critical reconnaissance and surveillance missions to robotic assets. The subtleties of these tasks require significant operator involvement--usually carried out locally to the robot's deployment. Human soldiers use gestures to communicate movements and commands when engaged in this type of task. While considerable work has been done with robots visually observing humans to interpret their gestures, we propose a simpler, more field-appropriate system that allows robot operators to use their natural movements and gestures (via inertial measurement units [IMUs]) to teleoperate a robot while reducing the physical, as well as the cognitive, load on the soldier.

Smartphones have put video communications, computation, and proprioceptive sensing (e.g. accelerometers and gyros) into the hands of hundreds of millions of consumers. These small, microelectromechanical systems can be used in many applications, including remote control. This study proposes using smartphones with proprioception as handheld robot controllers and aims to determine feasibility of accelerometers as control inputs for tele-operation while defining heuristics for use. Initial results indicate accelerometers are suitable for tele-operation commands, but identify specific design characteristics meriting further investigation.

Over the last five years, a number of powerful robotics controllers have become available. Only a small percentage of these are suitable for general use in robotics. In particular, they trivially interface with a large variety of sensors and effectors, have a well constructed software IDE that works with a standard programming language, are self contained and are easy to use. The CBC2 is a new robot controller that meets these conditions. The CBC2 includes an ARM 7 based DAQ/Motor control system, an ARM 9-based CPU/Vision processor running LINUX, an integrated color display and touch screen. The CBC2 is both a USB host (allowing the use of standard cameras, mass storage and network interfaces) and a USB device for software downloads. This paper describes the CBC2, its capabilities and the KISS-C IDE and associated libraries which include functionality ranging from color tracking to PID motor control. The CBC/KISS-C system was adopted by the Botball Robotics Education program in 2009, and was used in about three hundred schools. Based on feedback from that experience, design improvements were made and the CBC2 is being used in the 2010 Botball program and is also being made available for other uses.

There is a substantial population of wheelchair users who do not have the motor capabilities needed to efficiently operate a power wheelchair on their own. Various interfaces have been devised including some simple voice controlled chairs that can understand simple commands. However, such systems are awkward and slow to use. This demonstration shows operation of a smart wheelchair through a spoken conversational interface. By using a more capable dialogue, rather than a simple command paradigm, the chair can leverage off of the user's perceptual capabilities in order to process natural, high-level commands such as take me to the desk, which initiates a conversation with the chair to determine which desk and -if it is not immediately detected by the chair's sensors - where the desk is located.

Much robotics research is carried out using either PICs and processors that are a decade or more out of date The alternative is custom built electronics that is expensive and/or must be reinvented every time a new project is begun. The XBC is a new design for a robot controller merging a modern ARM processor with an FPGA that allows high performance - especially in vision processing and motor control - for a cost similar to controllers with a fraction of its capabilities. Additionally, the XBC uses a new, and still free, software development system, already in wide use. The XBC is being mass produced (at least in research hardware terms) so it is readily available and does not require computer hardware or electronics skills in order to be obtained. This paper describes the system, its capabilities and some potential applications.

This paper presents the sensor and control system for SR2, a planetary rover prototype capable of km+/day traverses through Mars-like terrain. The control system described allowed the rover to successfully navigate Mars-like terrain given a set of way-points spaced approximately 100 m apart. The control system uses input from a variety of sensors including heading, roll, pitch, an array of proximity sensors, voltage and current sensors, and a depth from stereo camera system. The control system is adequate, when combined with the rover's mobility system to make its way over or around almost all hazards a rover is likely to encounter, and to know when it is getting diverted so far off course that it needs to ask for help. In a recent field test, the robot autonomously navigated through 1.3 km of Mars like terrain to reach its goal. The SR2 is a solar powered, four-wheeled rover that masses 21 kg and fits inside a 90/spl times/65/spl times/40 cm envelope.

A common explanation for the limited distance traveled by NASA's past and planned Mars rovers is the limits of solar power. This paper explores this hypothesis and documents a series of experiments with a solar powered rover. A detailed comparison between our rover and Sojourner, with regards to power usage, is presented. Experiments and analysis clearly show that other factors dominate in limiting the range of NASA's solar powered robots when operating on Mars.

Terrain categorization and target detection algorithms applied to Hyperspectral Imagery (HSI) typically operate on the measured reflectance (of Sun and sky illumination) by an object or scene. Since the reflectance is a non-dimensional ratio, the reflectance by an object is nominally not affected by variations In lighting conditions. Atmospheric Correction (also referred to as Atmospheric 'Compensation', 'Characterization', etc.) Algorithms (ACAs) are used in applications of remotely sensed HSI data to correct for the effects of atmospheric propagation on measurements acquired by air and space-borne systems. The Fast Line-of-sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes (FLAASH) algorithm is an ACA created for HSI applications in the visible through shortwave infrared (Vis-SWIR) spectral regime. FLAASH derives its 'physics-based' mathematics from MODTRAN4.

This paper describes an implementation of the 3T robot architecture which has been under development for the last eight years. The architecture uses three levels of abstraction and description languages which are compatible between levels. The makeup of the architecture helps to coordinate planful activities with real-time behaviours for dealing with dynamic environments. In recent years, other architectures have been created with similar attributes but two features distinguish the 3T architecture: (1) a variety of useful software tools have been created to help implement this architecture on multiple real robots; and (2) this architecture, or parts of it, have been implemented on a variety of very different robot systems using different processors, operating systems, effectors and sensor suites.

Many people who are mobility impaired are incapable, for a variety of reasons, of using an ordinary wheelchair. In some instances, a power wheelchair also cannot be used, usually because of the difficulty the person has in controlling it (often due to additional disabilities). This paper describes a low-cost robotic addition to a power wheelchair that assists the rider of the chair in avoiding obstacles, going to predesignated places, and manoeuvring through doorways and other narrow or crowded areas. This system can be interfaced to a variety of input devices, and can give the operator as much or as little moment by moment control of the chair as they wish.>

Abstract Task level animation of articulated figures, such as the human body, requires the ability to generate collision‐free goal‐directed motion of individual limbs in the presence of obstacles. This paper describes a new articulated limb motion planner for goal‐directed point‐to‐point reaching motions. The produced motion avoids obstacles while optimizing an objective function. This two‐phase algorithm uses heuristic guided Monte Carlo techniques to create a consistent underlying paradigm. The first phase consists of an existing potential field based random path planner which generates a population of candidate paths. This initial population is fed into the second phase, a genetic algorithm, which iteratively refines the population as it optimizes with respect to the objective function. The refinement process works on the principle ofpath coherency, the idea that a family of closely related collision‐free paths lies in the vicinity of a given collision‐free path. This paper focuses on seven different optimization functions. Optimized trajectories produced by the new motion planner are compared to those generated solely by the random path planner. The presented algorithm is flexible in that a wide range of objective functions can be optimized. Applications of the algorithm include task level animation, ergonomics and robotics.

This paper describes a series of robots developed at JPL to demonstrate the feasibility of using a behavior-control approach to control small robots on planetary surfaces. The round-trip light-time delay makes direct teleoperation of a mobile robot on a planetary surface impossible. Planetary rovers must therefore possess a certain degree of autonomy. However, small robots can only support small computers (due mostly to power, not size constraints). Behavior control provides a means of autonomous control that requires very little computation. The robots described in this paper all used 8-bit, 1-MIP microprocessors with as little as 4 k and no more than 40 k of memory, and extremely simple sensors. Despite these limitations they reliably perform both autonomous navigation and manipulation in both indoor and outdoor rough-terrain environments.>

A path planner and an execution monitoring planner that will enable the rover to navigate to its various destinations safely and correctly while detecting and avoiding hazards are described. An overview of the complete architecture is given. Implementation and testbeds are described. The robot can detect unforeseen obstacles and take appropriate action. This includes having the rover back away from the hazard and mark the area as untraversable in the rover's internal map. The experiments have consisted of paths roughly 20 m in length. The architecture works with a large variety of rover configurations with different kinematic constraints.>

Pumping lemmas appear in courses that study formal languages such as automata theory and the theory of computation.Converses of pumping lemmas, which a.re generally false, are ignored by most of the books tha,t treat formal languages.This is unfortunate since converses of pumping lemmas arise in a natural way and students typically ask whether converses of particular pumping lemmas are true.We give counterexamples to the converse of a pumping lemma for regular langua.gesand to th e converse of Ogden's Lemma, a pumping lemma for context-free languages.We also show tha.t converses to these lemmas are true for languages over a single symbol.We conclude by discussing the counterexa.mple to the converse of Ogden's Lemma with reference to Par&h's necessary condition for a language to be context-free.

This paper describes a planning architecture that supports a form of hierarchical planning well suited to applications involving deadlines, travel time, and resource considerations. The architecture is based upon a temporal database, a heuristic evaluator, and a decision procedure for refining partial plans. A partial plan consists of a set of tasks and constraints on their order, duration, and potential resource requirements. The temporal database records the partial plan that the planner is currently working on and computes certain consequences of that information to be used in proposing methods to further refine the plan. The heuristic evaluator examines the space of linearized extensions of a given partial plan in order to reject plans that fail to satisfy basic requirements (e.g., hard deadlines and resource limitations) and to estimate the utility of plans that meet these requirements. The information provided by the temporal database and the heuristic evaluator is combined using a decision procedure that determines how best to refine the current partial plan. Neither the temporal database nor the heuristic evaluator is complete and, without reasonably accurate information concerning the possible resource requirements of the tasks in a partial plan, there is a significant risk of missing solutions. A specification language that serves to encode expectations concerning the duration and resource requirements of tasks greatly reduces this risk, enabling useful evaluations of partial plans. Details of the specification language and examples illustrating how such expectations are exploited in decision making are provided.