DEVELOPMENT OF A HUMANOID ROBOT ARM FOR USE IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

The Bucknell Humanoid Robot Arm project was developed in order toprovide a lightweight robotic arm for the IHMC / Bucknell University bipedal robot that will provide a means of manipulation and facilitate operations in urban environments. The resulting fabricated arm described in this thesis weighs only 13 pounds, and is capable of holding 11 pounds fully outstretched, lifting objects such as tools, and it can open doors. It is also capable of being easily integrated with the IHMC / Bucknell University biped. This thesis provides an introduction to robots themselves, discusses the goals of the Bucknell Humanoid Robot Arm project, provides a background on some of the existing robots, and shows how the Bucknell Humanoid Robot Arm fits in with the studies that have been completed. After reading these studies, important items such as design trees and operational scenarios were completed. The completion of these items led to measurable specifications and later the design requirements and specifications. A significant contribution of this thesis to the robotics discipline involves the design of the actuator itself. The arm uses of individual, lightweight, compactly designed actuators to achieve desired capabilities and performance requirements. Many iterations were completed to get to the final design of each actuator. After completing the actuators, the design of the intermediate links and brackets was finalized. Completion of the design led to the development of a complex controls system which used a combination of Clanguage and Java.

Assessing Commonality and Differentiation for Packaging-Family Planning with Application to Medication Labels

This thesis presents a metric for assessing the commonality and differentiation of packaging-family planning with application to medical labels along with supporting background research and findings. Consumable products such as medications rely on the package or label to represent the contents. Package confusion has been widely recognized as a major problem for both over-the-counter and pharmacy-dispensed medications with potentially lethal consequences. It is critical to identify a medication as a member of a product family and differentiate its contributing elements based on visual features on the package or label to avoid consumer confusion and reduce dispensing errors. Indices that indicate degrees of commonality and differentiation of features in consumer products such as batteries, light bulbs, handles, etc for platforms have been shown to benefit development of engineered product families [6]. It is possible to take a similar approach for visual features in packaging such as typography, shape/form, imagery and color to benefit packaging-family development. This thesis establishes a commonality differentiation index for prominence of visual features on over-the-counter and pharmacy-dispensed medications based on occurrence, size, and location of features. It provides a quantitative measure to assist package designers in evaluating alternatives to satisfy strategic goals and improve safety. The index is demonstrated with several medications that have been identified by the Institute for Safe Medication Practice as commonly confused.