Computer Engineering Commons^™

Task-Based Robotic Grasp Planning, Yun Lin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Grasp should be selected intelligently to fulfill different stability properties and manipulative requirements. Currently, most grasping approaches consider only pick-and-place tasks without any physical interaction with other objects or the environment, which are common in an industry setting with limited uncertainty. When robots move to our daily-living environment and perform a broad range of tasks in an unstructured environment, all sorts of physical interactions will occur, which will result in random physical interactive wrenches: forces and torques on the tool.

In addition, for a tool to perform a required task, certain motions need to occur. We call it "functional tool …

Generalized Conditional Matching Algorithm For Ordered And Unordered Sets, Ravikiran Krishnan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Designing generalized data-driven distance measures for both ordered and unordered set data is the core focus of the proposed work. An ordered set is a set where time-linear property is maintained when distance between pair of temporal segments. One application in the ordered set is the human gesture analysis from RGBD data. Human gestures are fast becoming the natural form of human computer interaction. This serves as a motivation to modeling, analyzing, and recognition of gestures. The large number of gesture categories such as sign language, traffic signals, everyday actions and also subtle cultural variations in gesture classes makes gesture …

Using Embedded Systems To Determine The Configuration Of A Static Wheelchair Mounted Robotic Arm, Daniel Ashley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The calibration of a 9 degree of freedom (DOF) robotic manipulator using multiple three axis accelerometers and an embedded system will be accomplished in this work. The 9-DOF robotic system used in this study is a 7-DOF robotic arm attached to a 2-DOF power wheelchair. Combined they create a Wheelchair Mounted Robotic Arm (WMRA). The problem that will be solved by this thesis is the calibration of the robotic system during start up. The 7 DOF robotic arm is comprised of rotational joints only. These joints have dual channel encoders to determine the joint position, among other useful data. The …

Human Mirna Sequence Based Variations Database, Nadim Georges Bou Zeidan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are studied as key genetic elements that regulate the gene expression involved in different human diseases. Clinical sequence based variations like copy number variations (CNVs) affect miRNA biogenesis, dosage and target recognition that may represent potentially functional variants and relevant target bindings.

To systematically analyze miRNA-related CNVs and their effects on related genes, a user-friendly free online database was developed to provide further analysis of co-localization of miRNA loci with human genome CNV regions. Further analysis pipelines such as miRNA-target to estimate the levels or locations of variations for genetic duplications, insertions or deletions were also offered. Such …

Analysis And Prevention Of Code-Injection Attacks On Android Os, Grant Joseph Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Injection attacks are the top two causes of software errors and vulnerabilities, according to the MITRE Common Vulnerabilities list [1]. This thesis presents a threat analysis of injection attacks on applications built for Android, a popular but not rigorously studied operating system designed for mobile devices. The following thesis is argued: Injection attacks are possible on off-the-shelf Android systems, and such attacks have the capacity to compromise the device through resource denial and leaking private data. Specifically, we demonstrate that injection attacks are possible through the OS shell and through the SQLite API. To mitigate these attacks, we augment the …

A Hybrid Privacy-Preserving Mechanism For Participatory Sensing Systems, Idalides Jose Vergara

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory Sensing (PS) is a new data collection paradigm in which people use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit data of interest to address a collective problem that would have been very difficult to assess otherwise. Although many PS-based applications can be foreseen to solve interesting and useful problems, many of them have not been fully implemented due to privacy concerns. As a result, several privacy-preserving mechanisms have been proposed. This dissertation presents the state-of-the-art of privacy-preserving mechanisms for PS systems. It includes a new taxonomy and describes the most important issues in the design, implementation, and evaluation …

An Analysis Of (Bad) Behavior In Online Video Games, Jeremy Blackburn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies bad behavior at large-scale using data traces from online video games. Video games provide a natural laboratory for exploring bad behavior due to their popularity, explicitly defined (programmed) rules, and a competitive nature that provides motivation for bad behavior. More specifically, we look at two forms of bad behavior: cheating and toxic behavior.

Cheating is most simply defined as breaking the rules of the game to give one player an edge over another. In video games, cheating is most often accomplished using programs, or "hacks," that circumvent the rules implemented by game code. Cheating is a threat …

A Brain Robot Interface For Autonomous Activities Of Daily Living Tasks, Don Indika Upashantha Pathirage

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There have been substantial improvements in the area of rehabilitation robotics in the recent past. However, these advances are inaccessible to a large number of people with disabilities who are in most need of such assistance. This group includes people who are in a severely paralyzed state, that they are completely "locked-in" in their own bodies. Such persons usually retain full cognitive abilities, but have no voluntary muscle control.

For these persons, a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is often the only way to communicate with the outside world and/or control an assistive device. One major drawback to BCI devices is …

Performance And Power Optimization Of Gpu Architectures For General-Purpose Computing, Yue Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Power-performance efficiency has become a central focus that is challenging in heterogeneous processing platforms as the power constraints have to be established without hindering the high performance. In this dissertation, a framework for optimizing the power and performance of GPUs in the context of general-purpose computing in GPUs (GPGPU) is proposed. To optimize the leakage power of caches in GPUs, we dynamically switch the L1 and L2 caches into low power modes during periods of inactivity to reduce leakage power. The L1 cache can be put into a low-leakage (sleep) state when a processing unit is stalled due to no …

A Multi-Case Study Of Student Interactions With Educational Robots And Impact On Science, Technology, Engineering, And Math (Stem) Learning And Attitudes, Stephanie Holmquist

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The demand for STEM trained workers continues to increase not only in the United States, but globally. Reports have indicated that the United States is not doing a good job encouraging students to pursue STEM oriented degrees. In particular, it has become increasingly important to emphasize STEM connections at an early level in order to encourage student career exploration as they continue their education. Educational robots represent a unique alternative to traditional methods, especially at the elementary level. Considering the use of educational robots have largely been ignored at this level, the purpose of this study was to describe the …

Scene-Dependent Human Intention Recognition For An Assistive Robotic System, Kester Duncan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order for assistive robots to collaborate effectively with humans for completing everyday tasks, they must be endowed with the ability to effectively perceive scenes and more importantly, recognize human intentions. As a result, we present in this dissertation a novel scene-dependent human-robot collaborative system capable of recognizing and learning human intentions based on scene objects, the actions that can be performed on them, and human interaction history. The aim of this system is to reduce the amount of human interactions necessary for communicating tasks to a robot. Accordingly, the system is partitioned into scene understanding and intention recognition modules. …