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The demands placed on automation of cell production processes for IT products are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Dual-arm robots are drawing particular attention as a process solution because they offer flexibility and can work in a similar manner to a human operator. In this paper, we propose an automation system for cellular phone packing processes that uses two dual-arm robots. The applied robots are designed with specifications that meet the requirements of the cellular phone packing tasks. In addition, a robotic cell production system is proposed that applies a task allocation method to perform an efficient packing job for cellular phones. In particular, each task is assigned with the intention of reducing the takt time , which is the time taken to finish a single product in the production line and to avoid collisions between the two robots. Finally, we implement some of our results in a demonstration of a packing job that involves filling five unit boxes with seven kinds of accessories.

Direct teaching of an industrial robot is a novel technique to easily teach manipulators. However, the human-hand generated teaching data can have significant noise errors ranging from low to high frequency. To use the teaching data, a post-processing method to correct the teaching trajectory is required. Currently there is no suitable way to correct the direct teaching trajectory other than conventional simple-line smoothing methods. Here, a novel shape-based trajectory correction method to rebuild the teaching data with the curvature and velocity information is proposed. The proposed method is tested on three real objects using a physical direct-teaching manipulator.

The aim of this study was to investigate the risk factors of postoperative anastomotic stricture after excision of choledochal cysts and hepaticojejunostomy. Among 65 patients who underwent surgery for choledochal cyst between March 1995 and June 2005, we selected 34 adult patients who were diagnosed as having choledochal cyst. We divided patients into two groups, depending on postoperative anastomotic stricture developed or not. Medical records and radiological findings of each patient were reviewed retrospectively. HE stain and Masson-Trichrome stain of each specimen of the resected cyst were performed, and thickness of cyst wall, the grade of fibrosis, loss of smooth muscle layer, loss of mucosa, and infiltration of inflammatory cells were measured. Of the 34 patients, excision of choledochal cyst and hepaticojejunostomy were done in 33 patients, and 1 patient with chronic pancreatitis underwent pylorus-preserving pancreaticoduodenectomy. Anastomotic stricture and intrahepatic duct stones postoperatively developed in eight patients; one patient of 19 type I cyst and seven patients of 15 type IVa, developing significantly more in the type IVa choledochal cyst (P0.05). The size of choledochal cyst in the stricture group was 7.0 cm, and that of the non-stricture group, 4.2 cm, showing significant difference between the two groups (P0.05). The stricture group presented shorter duration of symptoms (27.63+/-61.72 days; ranged, 1 approximately 180 days) than the non-stricture group (483.33+/-916.41 days; ranged, 1 approximately 3,560 days), and it was statistically significant (P0.05). Pathologically, significant difference was found between anastomotic stricture and infiltration of inflammatory cells (P0.05). The results indicate that anastomotic stricture is influenced by the type IVa choledochal cyst, size of cyst, duration of symptoms, and the grade of infiltration of inflammatory cells. Therefore, closed careful follow-up is important in patients who underwent cyst excision with hepaticojejunostomy for type IVa choledochal cyst. If the anastomotic stricture develops, nonoperative management should be recommended, rather than operation, as much as possible.

In this article, we describe an algorithm for acquiring occupancy grid maps with mobile robots. The standard occupancy grid mapping developed by Elfes and Moravec in the mid-1980s decomposes the high-dimensional mapping problem into many one-dimensional estimation problems, which are then tackled independently. Because of the independencies between neighboring grid cells, this often generates maps that are inconsistent with the sensor data. To overcome this, we propose a cluster that is a set of cells. The cells in the clusters are tackled dependently with another occupancy grid mapping with an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. The occupancy grid mapping with an EM algorithm yields more consistent maps, especially in the cluster. As we use the mapping algorithm adaptively with clusters according to the sensor measurements, our mapping algorithm is faster and more accurate than previous mapping algorithms.

The application of the hybrid self-organizing fuzzy (SOF) PID controller to a multiinput multioutput nonlinear biped robot is studied in this article. The SOF-PID controller was initially studied by H.B. Kazemian in 1998. Actually, his SOF-PID controller has limits. The supervisory capacity of the SOF-PID controller can adjust only certain kinds of parameters. Here the hybrid SOF-PID controller is introduced to tune some kinds of parameters, and it was tested on a MIMO biped robot. In the experiment, the hybrid SOF-PID controller shows a better performance than the SOF-PID.

Dopaminergic systems are implicated in stress-related behaviour. Here we investigate behavioural responses to chronic stress in dopamine D2 receptor knockout mice and find that anxiety-like behaviours are increased compared with wild-type mice. Repeated stress exposure suppresses cocaine-induced behavioural sensitization, cocaine-seeking and relapse behaviours in dopamine D2 receptor knockout mice. Cocaine challenge after drug withdrawal in cocaine-experienced wild-type or dopamine D2 receptor knockout mice is associated with inhibition of long-term depression in the nucleus accumbens, and chronic stress during withdrawal prevents inhibition after cocaine challenge in cocaine-experienced dopamine D2 receptor knockout mice, but not in wild-type mice. Lentiviral-induced knockdown of dopamine D2 receptors in the nucleus accumbens of wild-type mice does not affect basal locomotor activity, but confers stress-induced inhibition of the expression of cocaine-induced behavioural sensitization. Stressed mice depleted of dopamine D2 receptors do not manifest long-term depression inhibition. Our results suggest that dopamine D2 receptors have roles in regulating synaptic modification triggered by stress and drug addiction.