As the elderly population grows, there is a need for caregivers, which may become unsustainable for society. In this situation, the demand for automated help increases. One of the solutions is service robotics, in which robots have automation and show significant promise in working with people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: This paper presents a conceptual design and implementation of a soft, compliant 3D printed gripper (SurgGrip), conceived for automated grasping of various surgery-based thin-flat instruments. The proposed solution includes (1) a gripper with a resilient mechanism to increase safety and better adaptation to the unstructured environment; (2) flat fingertips with mortise and tenon joint to facilitate pinching and enveloping based grasping of thin and random shape tools; (3) a soft pad on the fingertips to enable the high surface area to maintain stable grasping of the surgical instruments; (4) a four-bar linkage with a leadscrew mechanism to provide a precise finger movement; (5) enable automated manipulation of surgical tools using computer vision. Our gripper model is designed and fabricated by integrating soft and rigid components through a hybrid approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Service robots are defined as reprogrammable, sensor-based mechatronic devices that perform useful services in an autonomous or semi-autonomous way to human activities in an everyday environment. As the number of elderly people grows, service robots, which can operate complex tasks like dressing tasks for disabled people, are being demanded increasingly. Consequently, there is a growing interest in studying dressing tasks, such as putting on a t-shirt, a hat, or shoes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVinorelbine (VNR) is a semi-synthetic Vinca rosea alkaloid that has been employed both as a single agent and in combination, and has shown significant antitumor activity. As little is known about VNR activity on human leukemia, we studied its in vitro cytotoxic effect on human leukemia cell lines (FLG 29.1, HL60, K562, Balm 4, CEM and Daudi) and on fresh leukemia cells from 28 patients: 2 acute myeloid leukemia (AML); 3 chronic myeloid leukemia in blastic phase (CML-BP); 5 acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL); 18 B-chronic lymphatic leukemia (B-CLL), employing the colorimetric INT assay and determining the IC50.
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