Design and development of a dextrous manipulator

This paper develops a novel method of actuation for robotic hands. The solution employs Bowden cable routed to each joint as the means by which the finger is actuated. The use of Bowden cable is shown to be feasible for this purpose, even with the changing frictional forces associated with it's use. This method greatly simplifies the control of the hand by removing the coupling between joints, and allows for direct and accurate translation between the joints and the motors driving the Bowden wires. The design also allows for two degrees of freedom (with the same centre of rotation) to be realised in the largest knuckle of each finger, meaning biological finger kinematics are more accurately emulated.

Design and development of a dextrous manipulator

This paper describes a novel method of actuation for robotic hands. The solution employs a Bowden cable routed to each joint. The use of a Bowden cable is shown to be feasible for this purpose, ever, with the changing frictional forces associated with it. This method greatly simplifies the control of the hand by removing the coupling between joints, and provides for direct and accurate translation between the joints and the servo motors driving the cables. The design also allows for two degrees of freedom with the same centre of rotation to be realized in the largest knuckle of each finger; thus biological finger kinematics are more closely emulated.

A benchmark-driven modelling approach for evaluating deployment choices on a multicore architecture

The complexity of current and emerging high performance architectures provides users with options about how best to use the available resources, but makes predicting performance challenging. In this work a benchmark-driven performance modelling approach is outlined that is appro- priate for modern multicore architectures. The approach is demonstrated by constructing a model of a simple shallow water code on a Cray XE6 system, from application-specific benchmarks that illustrate precisely how architectural char- acteristics impact performance. The model is found to recre- ate observed scaling behaviour up to 16K cores, and used to predict optimal rank-core affinity strategies, exemplifying the type of problem such a model can be used for.