It was reported that about 10% of people suffer from painful knee arthritis, and a quarter of them were severely disabled. The core activities of daily living were severely limited by knee osteoarthritis (KOA). In order to reduce knee pain and prolong the life of the knee joint, there has been an increasing demand on the development of exoskeletons, for prevention and treatment. The course of KOA was closely related to the biomechanics of knee joint, and the pathogenesis was summarized based on the biomechanics of knee joint. For the prevention and clinical treatment, exoskeletons are classified into three categories: prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation after the operation. Furthermore, the design concepts, actuators, sensors, control strategies, and evaluation criteria were presented. Finally, the shortcomings and limitations were summarized. It is useful for researchers to develop suitable exoskeletons in the future.

In this article, a novel mechanism for planar one-legged hopping robots is proposed. The robot consists of a flat foot which is pinned to the leg and a reciprocating mass which is connected to the leg via a prismatic joint. The proposed mechanism performs the hopping by transferring linear momentum between the reciprocating mass and its main body. The nonlinear equations of the motion of the robot are derived using the Euler–Lagrange equations. To accomplish a stable jump, appropriate trajectories have been planned. To guarantee a stable response for this nonlinear system, a sliding-mode controller is implemented. The performance of the hopping robot is investigated through numerical simulations. The results confirm the stability of the hopping robot through the jump cycle on a flat surface and in climbing up and down ramp and stairs.

Impedance control is one of the interaction and force control methods that has been widely applied in the research of robotics. In this paper, a new position-based fractional-order impedance control scheme is proposed and applied to a 2 DOF serial manipulator. An RR robot manipulator with full arm dynamics and its environment were designed using Matlab/Simulink. The position control of the manipulator was utilized based on computed torque control to cancel out the nonlinearities existing on the dynamic model of the robot. Parameters of classical impedance controller (CIC) and proposed fractional-order impedance controller (FOIC) were optimized in order to minimize impact forces for comparison of the results in three conditions. In CIC condition: three constant parameters of the impedance controller were optimized: in Frac_λμ condition: Only non-integer parameters of the FOIC were re-optimized after the parameters in CIC had been accepted, and in Frac_all condition: all parameters of the FOIC were re-optimized. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, simulations were conducted for all cases and performance indices were computed for the interaction forces. Results showed that impacts were reduced with an improvement of 26.12% from CIC to Frac_ λμ and an improvement of 47.21% from CIC to Frac_all. The proposed scheme improves the impedance behavior and robustness showing better impact absorption performance, which is needed in many challenging robotic tasks and intelligent mechatronic devices.

Severe COVID-19 cases place immediate pressure on hospital resources. To assess this, we analysed survival duration in the first 39 fatal cases in Wuhan, China. Time from onset and hospitalization to death declined rapidly, from ~40 to 7 days, and ~25 to 4 days, respectively, in the outbreak’s first month.

This paper considers the customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal joining–balking behavior in a single-server Markovian queue with a single working vacation and Bernoulli interruptions. The model is motivated by practical service systems where the service rate can be adjusted according to whether or not the system is empty. Specifically, we focus on a single-server queue in which the server's service rate is reduced from a regular to a lower one when the system becomes empty. This lower rate period is called a working vacation for the server which may represent that part of the service facility is under a maintenance process or works on other non-queueing job, or simply for saving the energy (for a machine server case). In this paper, we assume that the working vacation period is terminated after a random period or with probability p after serving a customer in a non-empty system. Such a system is called a queue with single working vacation and Bernoulli interruptions. Customers are strategic and can make choice of joining or balking based on different levels of system information. We consider four scenarios: fully observable, almost observable, almost unobservable, and fully unobservable queue cases. Under a reward-cost structure, we analyze the customer's equilibrium and social-optimal strategies. In addition, the effects of system parameters on optimal strategies are illustrated by numerical examples.

A novel 3-R(RRR)R+R (R as revolute joint) hybrid antenna mechanism (HAM) is proposed for noncircular polarized antenna. First, its mobility characteristic is analyzed. Besides, its kinematics is deduced, and the velocity and acceleration are obtained. Afterward, its dynamic model is established. The actuation torques of each actuation joint are obtained. Its actuation torques are verified by mathematical model analysis and dynamic simulation. Furthermore, its workspace is also presented. Finally, the motion characteristics experimental results show that the 3-R(RRR)R+R HAM can carry out the azimuth and pitch motion. This research work serves as a fundamental theoretical basis for its further application.

In this research, a dynamic model is first established based on screw theory and the principle of virtual work for a bilaterally symmetrical hybrid robot. By combining a novel composite error (NCE) with second-order nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode (SONFTSM) control method, a NCE-based SONFTSM dynamic control method is further presented to guarantee better trajectory tracking performance and synchronization performance simultaneously. The asymptotic convergence of proposed errors and the stability of the proposed control method have been proved theoretically. Finally, the simulation and experiment are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

In this paper, an integrated mathematical model for the balancing and sequencing problems of a mixed-model assembly line (MMAL) is developed. The proposed model minimizes the total overload and idleness times. For the sake of reality, the impact of operator’s learning and fatigue issues on the optimization of the assembly line balancing and sequencing problems is considered. Furthermore, it is assumed that the Japanese mechanism is used in this assembly line to deal with the overload issue. With respect to the complexity level of the proposed model, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve the model. In order to set the parameters of the developed genetic algorithm, the well-known Taguchi method is used and the efficiency of this solution method is compared with the GAMS software using several test problems with different sizes. Finally, the sensitivity of the balancing and sequencing problems to the parameters such as station length, learning rate, and fatigue rate are analyzed and the impact of changing these parameters on the model is studied.