Validation of a 3D Markerless Motion Capture Tool Using Multiple Pose and Depth Estimations for Quantitative Gait Analysis.

Gait analysis is essential for evaluating walking patterns and identifying functional limitations. Traditional marker-based motion capture tools are costly, time-consuming, and require skilled operators. This study evaluated a 3D Marker-less Motion Capture (3D MMC) system using pose and depth estimations with the gold-standard Motion Capture (MOCAP) system for measuring hip and knee joint angles during gait at three speeds (0.

Oncilla Robot: A Versatile Open-Source Quadruped Research Robot With Compliant Pantograph Legs.

We present Oncilla robot, a novel mobile, quadruped legged locomotion machine. This large-cat sized, 5.1 kg robot is one of a kind of a recent, bioinspired legged robot class designed with the capability of model-free locomotion control.

Toward unified hybrid simulation techniques for spiking neural networks.

In the field of neural network simulation techniques, the common conception is that spiking neural network simulators can be divided in two categories: time-step-based and event-driven methods. In this letter, we look at state-of-the art simulation techniques in both categories and show that a clear distinction between both methods is increasingly difficult to define. In an attempt to improve the weak points of each simulation method, ideas of the alternative method are, sometimes unknowingly, incorporated in the simulation engine.

Event management for large scale event-driven digital hardware spiking neural networks.

The interest in brain-like computation has led to the design of a plethora of innovative neuromorphic systems. Individually, spiking neural networks (SNNs), event-driven simulation and digital hardware neuromorphic systems get a lot of attention. Despite the popularity of event-driven SNNs in software, very few digital hardware architectures are found.

Locomotion without a brain: physical reservoir computing in tensegrity structures.

Embodiment has led to a revolution in robotics by not thinking of the robot body and its controller as two separate units, but taking into account the interaction of the body with its environment. By investigating the effect of the body on the overall control computation, it has been suggested that the body is effectively performing computations, leading to the term morphological computation. Recent work has linked this to the field of reservoir computing, allowing one to endow morphologies with a theory of universal computation.

Fast and exact simulation methods applied on a broad range of neuron models.

Recently van Elburg and van Ooyen (2009) published a generalization of the event-based integration scheme for an integrate-and-fire neuron model with exponentially decaying excitatory currents and double exponential inhibitory synaptic currents, introduced by Carnevale and Hines. In the paper, it was shown that the constraints on the synaptic time constants imposed by the Newton-Raphson iteration scheme, can be relaxed. In this note, we show that according to the results published in D'Haene, Schrauwen, Van Campenhout, and Stroobandt (2009), a further generalization is possible, eliminating any constraint on the time constants.

Accelerating event-driven simulation of spiking neurons with multiple synaptic time constants.

The simulation of spiking neural networks (SNNs) is known to be a very time-consuming task. This limits the size of SNN that can be simulated in reasonable time or forces users to overly limit the complexity of the neuron models. This is one of the driving forces behind much of the recent research on event-driven simulation strategies.

Compact hardware liquid state machines on FPGA for real-time speech recognition.

Hardware implementations of Spiking Neural Networks are numerous because they are well suited for implementation in digital and analog hardware, and outperform classic neural networks. This work presents an application driven digital hardware exploration where we implement real-time, isolated digit speech recognition using a Liquid State Machine. The Liquid State Machine is a recurrent neural network of spiking neurons where only the output layer is trained.

An experimental unification of reservoir computing methods.

Three different uses of a recurrent neural network (RNN) as a reservoir that is not trained but instead read out by a simple external classification layer have been described in the literature: Liquid State Machines (LSMs), Echo State Networks (ESNs) and the Backpropagation Decorrelation (BPDC) learning rule. Individual descriptions of these techniques exist, but a overview is still lacking. Here, we present a series of experimental results that compares all three implementations, and draw conclusions about the relation between a broad range of reservoir parameters and network dynamics, memory, node complexity and performance on a variety of benchmark tests with different characteristics.

Campylobacter jejuni peritonitis complicating continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis.

We report the occurrence of Campylobacter jejuni peritonitis complicating C. jejuni enteritis in a patient treated with continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis. Cure followed oral administration of erythromycin and intraperitoneal therapy with gentamicin.