This paper describes an R&D project aimed at experimentally validating a generic contact-dynamics toolkit in a Simulink based satellite docking simulator. The simulation software was developed to support the design and verification of the space station robotic systems and several satellite on-orbit robotic servicing systems. The hardware experiment was performed using an air-bearing supported docking testbed specially designed for testing different docking and capture mechanisms. Simulation model parameters were separately identified from the hardware. The simulation results compare favourably with the measured experimental data, which demonstrates the validity of the simulator and increases the confidence of using the simulator for design of various robotics-based satellite servicing missions such as the shuttle-return-to- flight, orbital express, and the potential hubble telescope robotic repair missions

The Cybermedia Center, Osaka University (CMC) is a research institution that offers resource with knowledge and technology of all advanced research in the area of large-scale computation, information and communication, multimedia content and education. Currently, CMC involves in Japanese national grid projects such as JGN II (Japan Gigabit Network) and BioGrid. Not limited to Japan, CMC also takes an active part in international activities such as PRAGMA. In these projects and international collaboration, CMC has developed the Grid system that allows scientists to perform their analysis by remotely controlling the world-largest ultra-high voltage electron microscope located in Osaka University. On the other, CMC has been taking a leading role at BioGrid sharing experience and knowledge on the system development for biology. In this paper, we will describe BioGrid project overview and introduce progress of Telescience group which collaborates with Telescience project lead by National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR).

Scientific imaging instruments are used in a variety of disciplines to gather vital data for research and study. Specifically, in the biomedical field various types of biological imaging instruments, such as electron microscopes and light microscopes, are used everyday to acquire 2D and 3D datasets for further understanding of biological structures. Remote operation or "teleoperation" of instruments has become a popular solution for research scientists to acquire and share data across research domains separated by geographical barriers. A generalized software architecture solution is presented in this paper to use emerging software technologies to develop a reusable framework to easily integrate instruments for remote-operation in a safe and secure fashion. Web services have emerged as a popular technology to provide software applications with a framework to achieve interoperability and integration with other applications. This generalized software architecture was developed to take advantage of Web service middleware technology and to provide a solution for easily plugging in scientific imaging instruments for teleoperation. The architecture has also incorporated grid technology to achieve a more scalable and robust solution for handling the enormous data sets produced from these instruments. Finally a set of client libraries is presented to demonstrate a useful API for developers to quickly develop a graphical user interface to communicate and acquire data from these instruments

Distributed applications require information to effectively utilize the network. Some of the information they require is the current and maximum bandwidth, current and minimum latency, bottlenecks, burst frequency and congestion extent. This type of information allows applications to determine parameters like the optimal TCP buffer size. In this paper, we present a cooperative information-gathering tool called the Network Characterization Service (NCS). NCS runs in the user space and is used to acquire network information. Its protocol is designed for scalable and distributed deployment, similar to DNS. Its algorithms provide efficient, speedy and accurate detection of bottlenecks, especially dynamic bottlenecks. On current and future networks, dynamic bottlenecks do and will affect network performance dramatically.

The authors reply to the comments by Koppelaar and Tolhuizen (see ibid. vol.46, no.9, p.573, 1998). They state that the optimum choice of the slopes used to perform the encoding process in a projection code always results in maximizing the minimum Hamming distance so that d=2/sup r/.