Does hemispheric lateralization influence therapeutic effects of transcranial direct current stimulation?

This study investigated the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation（t DCS） polarity depending on lateralized function of task property in normal individuals performing visuomotor and simple repetitive tasks. Thirty healthy participants with no neurological disorders were recruited to participate in this study. Participants were randomly allocated into active or control condition. For the active condition, t DCS intensity was 2 m A with stimulation applied for 15 minutes to the right hemisphere（t DCS condition）. For the sham control, electrodes were placed in the same position, but the stimulator was turned off after 30 seconds（sham condition）. The tapping and tracking task tests were performed before and after for both conditions. Univariate analysis revealed significant difference only in the tracking task. For direct comparison of both tasks within each group, the tracking task had significantly higher Z score than the tapping task in the t DCS group（P 〈 0.05）. Thus, our study indicates that stimulation of the right hemisphere using t DCS can effectively improve visuomotor（tracking） task over simple repetitive（tapping） task.

Bioinspired Closed-loop CPG-based Control of a Robot Fish for Obstacle Avoidance and Direction Tracking

This paper presents a study on bioinspired closed-loop Central Pattern Generator(CPG)based control of a robot fish for obstacle avoidance and direction tracking.The biomimetic robot fish is made of a rigid head with a pair of pectoral fins,a wire-driven active body covered with soft skin,and a compliant tail.The CPG model consists of four input parameters:the flapping amplitude,the flapping angular velocity,the flapping offset,and the time ratio between the beat phase and the restore phase in flapping.The robot fish is equipped with three infrared sensors mounted on the left,front and right of the robot fish,as well as an inertial measurement unit,from which the surrounding obstacles and moving direction can be sensed.Based on these sensor signals,the closed-loop CPG-based control can drive the robot fish to avoid obstacles and to track designated directions.Four sets of experiments are presented,including avoiding a static obstacle,avoiding a moving obstacle,tracking a designated direction and tracking a designated direction with an obstacle in the path.The experiment results indicated that the presented control strategy worked well and the robot fish can accomplish the obstacle avoidance and direction tracking effectively.

Fast and accurate visual odometry from a monocular camera

This paper aims at a semi-dense visual odometry system that is accurate,robust,and able to run realtime on mobile devices,such as smartphones,AR glasses and small drones.The key contributions of our system include:1)the modified pyramidal Lucas-Kanade algorithm which incorporates spatial and depth constraints for fast and accurate camera pose estimation;2)adaptive image resizing based on inertial sensors for greatly accelerating tracking speed with little accuracy degradation;and 3)an ultrafast binary feature description based directly on intensities of a resized and smoothed image patch around each pixel that is sufficiently effective for relocalization.A quantitative evaluation on public datasets demonstrates that our system achieves better tracking accuracy and up to about 2X faster tracking speed comparing to the state-of-the-art monocular SLAM system:LSD-SLAM.For the relocalization task,our system is 2.0X∼4.6X faster than DBoW2 and achieves a similar accuracy.