In this Work in Progress, we believe that our education systems are not capable of evolving at the rate necessary to meet the challenges presented by rapidly changing technology epitomized by Industry 4.0 and the digital transformation. In particular, there are relatively slow and inaccurate feedback mechanisms for the academic program content needs of employers, students and universities. The objective of this research is to create the feedback mechanisms and interactions by which educators, students and employers can communicate their specific educational capabilities, desires and needs, that will provide the dynamic feedback necessary to accelerate the development and evolution of educational programs.

Since the start of COVID-19, there has been several relevant corpora from various sources that were released to support research in this area. While these corpora are valuable in supporting analysis for this specific pandemic, researchers will benefit from additional benchmark corpora that contain other epidemics for better generalizability and to facilitate cross-epidemic pattern recognition and trend analysis tasks. During our research, we discover little disease related corpora in the literature that are sizable and rich enough to support such cross-epidemic analysis tasks. To address this issue, we present EPIC30M, a large-scale epidemic corpus that contains more than 30 million micro-blog posts, i.e., tweets crawled from Twitter, from year 2006 to 2020. EPIC30M contains a subset of 26.2 million tweets related to three general diseases, namely Ebola, Cholera and Swine Flu, and another subset of 4.7 million tweets of six global epidemic outbreaks, including the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu, 2010 Haiti Cholera, 2012 Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), 2013 West African Ebola, 2016 Yemen Cholera and 2018 Kivu Ebola. Furthermore, we explore and discuss the properties of this corpus with statistics of key terms and hashtags and trends analysis for each subset. Finally, we discuss the potential value and impact that EPIC30M could generate through a discussion of multiple use cases of cross-epidemic research topics that attract growing interest in recent years. These use cases span multiple research areas, such as epidemiological modeling, pattern recognition, natural language understanding and economical modeling. The corpus is publicly available at https://www.github.com/junhua/epic.

Plane-to-plane transitioning has been a significant challenge for climbing robots. To accomplish this, additional actuator or robot module is usually required which significantly increases both size and weight of the robot. This paper presents a two-wheg miniature climbing robot with a novel passive vertical tail component which results in robust transitioning capabilities. The design decision was derived from an indepth force analysis of the climbing robot while performing the transition. The theoretical analysis is verified through a working prototype with robust transitioning capabilities whose performance follows closely the analytical prediction. The climbing robot is able to climb any slope angles, 4-way internal transitions, and 4-way external transitions. This work contributes to the understanding and advancement of the transitioning capabilities and the design of a simple climbing robot, which expands the possibilities of scaling down miniature climbing robot further.

Development of mesoscale robots is gaining interest in security and surveillance domains due to their stealth and portable nature in achieving tasks. Their design and development require a host of hardware, controls, and behavioral innovations to yield fast, energy-efficient, distributed, adaptive, robust, and scalable systems. We extensively describe one such design and development process by: (1) the genealogy of our embedded platforms; (2) the key system architecture and functional layout; (3) the developed and implemented design principles for mesoscale robotic systems; (4) the various key algorithms developed for effective collective operations of mesoscale robotic swarms, with applications to urban sensing and mapping. This study includes our perception of the embedded hardware requirements for reliable operations of mesoscale robotic swarms and our description of the key innovations made in magnetic sensing, indoor localization, central pattern generator control, and distributed autonomy. Although some elements of the design process of such a complex robotic system are inevitably ad-hoc, we focus on the system-of-systems design process and the component design integration. This system-of-systems process provides a basis for developing future systems in the field, and the designs represent the state-of-the-art development that may be benchmarked against and adapted to other applications.

This paper presents the design and fabrication of ORION-II for autonomous Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). ORION-II is a miniature climbing robot equipped with all the necessary electronic components to achieve ISR tasks. It consists of a robot chassis (tail) carrying the electronics and two DC motors each driving a wheel-leg (wheg) with four “flaps” equipped with bilayer compliant tapes. Two types of tapes are used for attachment of ORION-II: bilayer PDMS/foam and bilayer micro-suction/foam. The two types of tapes are tested on different climbing surfaces, and the climbing performance is reported. ORION-II could climb rougher surfaces when using the PDMS/foam tape, and perform internal climbing transitions when using the micro-suction/foam tape. The total weight of ORION-II is 153.18 g as compared with 71.5 g of our previous version ORION-I.

This paper presents trajectory following control experiments of a miniature spherical rolling and spinning robot mechanism on three different types of outdoor surfaces. The research is inspired from the efficient locomotory rolling patterns of various insects in unstructured environment. A nonlinear adaptive sliding mode (ASMC) feedback method maintains the robot stability and robustness in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The proposed trajectory following control policy is developed, implemented and tested for the miniature spherical robot on three different types of irregular surfaces in outdoors. Trajectory following accuracy, roll angle stability and wheel velocity response are three parameters measured to evaluate robot performance. ASMC controller is compared with an integral sliding (ISMC) controller. Experimental results show that proposed control policy is able to manage an accurate trajectory following amidst robust control of a rolling and spinning robot on three types of irregular surface in practical outdoor conditions.

Global warming, and the resultant climate change, has become an urgent global issue. One potential partial solution to this problem and the focus of this paper is to design energy management mechanisms for buildings that encourage users’ acceptance of the technology for increased environmental sustainability. Particularly, this paper focuses on the design of an energy management technique for the air-conditioning (AC) systems in residential buildings that considers users’ views on how they use such technology. Note that while a large number of energy management mechanisms are available in the literature for ACs, most of these studies, however, do not consider how well the users may accept their use in the building. To address this issue, this paper first synthesizes somemotivational psychologyliterature to understand users’ attitudes toward adopting such management techniques for the ACs within the building. Then, the obtained insights from various motivational models are incorporated into the design of an energy management scheme that encourages consumers to accept the technology that reduces electricity consumption, the cost of electricity, peak power from the grid; and the generation of CO2in the residential building. Finally, some experimental results are provided to illustrate how the designed energy management mechanism validates the motivational psychology models in terms of providing various benefits to the users, and thus shows the potential of being accepted by them.

This paper presents a novel caterpillar inspired rolling gait generation and control mechanism of a spherical robot. The research investigates efficient locomotory rolling gaits of Pleurotya caterpillar in unstructured environment. A similar rhythmic rolling pattern is produced for the spherical robot locomotion. A synergetically combined feedforward - feedback control strategy is further proposed. The feedforward component is generated from centrally connected pattern generators (CPGs)in conjunction with nonlinear robot dynamics. A nonlinear integral sliding mode (ISMC) feedback method regulates these rhythmic patterns to adjust robot stability and robustness in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The proposed control strategy is developed, implemented and tested for the spherical robot on both smooth and irregular surfaces. The robot performance is quantified by measuring the stability in roll angle and wheel velocities. Experimental results show that proposed novel strategy is efficient in producing a stable rolling gait and robust control of a spherical robot on different types of surface conditions.

In small mobile robots, decreasing the number of actuators is usually desirable to reduce the size and weight of the robot, but it is usually at the expense of the robot's degree of freedom (DOF). This work presents the development and preliminary experimental testing of a novel Legged Piezoelectric Miniature Robot (LPMR) driven only by a single piezoelectric unimorph actuator and yet fully capable of being maneuvered to move forward, turn right, or turn left. The underactuated motion is achieved by exploiting the bending vibration modes disparity of the piezoelectric actuator at different driving frequencies and designing specific positions of the robot's legs to generate a differential-drive-like mechanism. The speed of the robot can be controlled through regulating the magnitude of the applied voltage. The proposed underactuated system is experimentally verified and a preliminary characterization of the LPMR in terms of its forward and turning speed versus applied voltage and payload is investigated and reported.

In this paper, we developed a kinematic model for a legged piezoelectric miniature robot driven by standing wave. The robot consists of a piezoelectric bending actuator with rigidly attached legs. The kinematic model allows us to compute the velocity analytically so that the robot motion can be predicted. To construct the kinematic model, the behavior of the robot at the contact instances with the ground during the up and down stages is studied. A prototype is fabricated so as to verify our kinematic model experimentally, measured using a motion capture system. The result shows that the measured speed was in close agreement with what was predicted by our model.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a Legged Piezoelectric Miniature Robot (LPMR) propelled by standing wave vibrations at the legs, which are biologically inspired by the bounding gait locomotion of animals. The LPMR comprises of a single piezoelectric patch, a metal beam, two contact joints, two rigid legs and is able to achieve tether-less remote controlled operation. Through analysis of the bending modes of vibrations and driving frequency, a forward and backward motion of the underactuated system is achieved by choosing specific positions for the legs. At 100 V amplitude, the LPMR with the weight of 6.27 g, length of 50 mm, width of 10 mm and height of 1.5 mm achieves a maximum linear speed of 246.5 mm/s for forward motion and 302 mm/s for backward motion. The LPMR is also able to carry a payload of 100 g at a speed of 49.6 mm/s for forward motion and 87.9 mm/s for backward motion when applying 100 V amplitude. The corresponding maximum force generated by the LPMR is 9.8 mN during forward motion and 12 mN during backward motion at the same applied voltage. An experimental characterization for the LPMR in terms of speed versus applied voltage, speed versus embedded mass and blocking force for different applied voltages is explored and evaluated in this study.

This paper presents a novel approach to providing a service for electric-vehicle (EV) battery charge replenishment. This is an alternate system in which the charge replenishment is provided by mobile chargers (MCs). These chargers could have two possible configurations: a mobile plug-in charger (MP) or a mobile battery-swapping station (MS). A queuing-based analytical approach is used to determine the appropriate range of design parameters for such a mobile charging system. An analytical analysis is first developed for an idealized system with a nearest-job-next (NJN) service strategy explored for such a system. In a NJN service strategy, the MC services the next spatially closest EV when it is finished with its current request. An urban environment approximated by Singapore is then analyzed through simulation. Charging requests are simulated through a trip generation model based on Singapore. In such a realistic environment, an updated practical NJN service strategy is proposed. For an MP system in an urban environment such as Singapore, there exists an optimal battery capacity with a threshold battery charge rate. Similarly, the battery swap capacity of an MS system does not need to be large for the system to perform.

In this paper, a miniature nonholonomic spherical rolling robot capable of navigating over two dimensional surfaces is described. This 55 gram spherical robot consists of a 6 cm diameter external spherical shell driven by an internal two-wheeled differential drive cart. A gravity powered pendulum effect is produced as the internal device climbs up the internal surface of the shell, propelling the robot forward up to a speed of 0.16m/s. We derived its dynamic model using Lagrangian, and studied its dynamics and performance under various applied torques. The spherical robot is built and its overall mechanical, hardware and control architecture are elaborated. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the robot open and closed loop performance on a linear trajectory, captured using an optical motion capture system. We showed that with our implemented PD controller, the robot can follow the desired orientation.

Magnetic localization systems based on passive permanent magnets (PM) are of great interest due to their ability to provide non-contact sensing and without any power requirement for the PM. Medical procedures such as ventriculostomy can benefit greatly from real-time feedback of the inserted catheter tip. While the effects of the number of sensors on the localization accuracy in such systems has been reported, the spatial design of the sensor layout has been largely overlooked. Here in this paper, a framework for determining an optimal sensor assembly for enhanced localization performance is presented and investigated through numerical simulations and direct experiments. Two approaches are presented: one based on structured grid configuration and the other derived using Genetic Algorithms. Simulation results verified by experiments strongly suggest that the layout of the sensors not only has an effect on the localization accuracy, but also has an effect far more pronounced than improvements brought by increasing the number of sensors.