Robert Bosch (Japan)

AIM: Burnout is a psychological condition that may occur in all workers after being exposed to excessive work-related stresses. We investigated suicidal ideation and burnout among Japanese psychiatric trainees as a part of the Burnout Syndrome Study (BoSS) International. METHODS: In the Japanese branch, 91 trainees fully completed suicide ideation and behaviour questionnaire (SIBQ) and Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS). RESULTS: Passive suicidal ideation was reported by 38.5% of Japanese trainees and 22.0% of them had experienced active suicidal ideation. The burnout rate among Japanese subjects was 40.0%. These results were worse compared to the all 1980 trainees who fully completed the main outcome measure in BoSS International, 25.9%, 20.4% and 36.7%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest a higher risk of suicide among Japanese residents. Japan has a higher suicide rate than other countries. Early detection of, and appropriate intervention for, suicidal ideation is important in preventing suicide in psychiatry residents.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS) for motorcycles have already contributed significantly to the safety of powered two-wheelers (PTW) on public roads by improving bike stability and controllability in emergency braking situations.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">In order to address further riding situations, another step forward has been achieved with Motorcycle Stability Control (MSC) system. By combining ABS, electronically combined braking system (eCBS), traction control and inertial sensors even in situations like braking and accelerating in corners the riders' safety can be improved. The MSC system controls the distribution of braking and traction forces using an algorithm that takes into account all available vehicle information from wheels, power train and vehicle attitude. With its ability to control fundamental vehicle dynamics, the MSC system will be a basis for further development and integration of comprehensive safety systems.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">The contribution of ABS towards motorcycle safety has been confirmed by numerous international research studies, making it the safety technology with the highest possible benefit for motorcycles available today. Recent investigations by Bosch accident researchers show the contribution of the MSC system to further increase the safety benefit for motorcycle riders by extending the acceleration and braking control functions to cover more riding situations. The MSC systems could avoid more than every 3<sup>rd</sup> accident with casualties involving a motorcycle in Germany.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">This paper focuses on these new motorcycle technologies developed with centralized system architecture and their safety benefits in preventing and mitigating motorcycle accidents with injuries and fatalities.</div></div>

The main characteristics of service robots are their human-centered working environment and their non-expert users. Therefore, service robots need to exhibit human robot interaction that lets users feel comfortable in order for them to accept these robots at home. In this research, we propose a concept of a kitchen assistant robot supporting people in completing stressful cooking tasks. The stressful cooking tasks in this study are also verified to gain the understanding of the applicability of service robots in a wider sense. For the proposed concept a prototype of the kitchen assistant robot is constructed which consists of a robot arm and a control device Myo gesture armband. 18 university students experienced the prototype by completing the stressful tasks and gave feedback by answering questionnaires. This study investigates the usability and users' acceptance of the kitchen assistant robot.

Electromyographic (EMG) activity is often used as a diagnostic tool in hospitals. In addition, in the last decade, EMG signals are used for the control of assistive devices such as active exoskeletons and prostheses. Conventional surface electrodes used for the acquisition of EMG signals can cause irritation, discomfort, skin allergy, and inflammation. To cope with these issues capacitive contactless EMG electrodes have been developed. The method proposed in this paper is based on the use of short time Fourier transform and spectral distance computation to detect muscle activation from signals recorded using capacitive sensors. The method has been experimentally tested on five young healthy subjects. To assess the reliability of our method, we quantified the latency between the output of the detection algorithm and results of a gold standard protocol created by an expert bioengineer. The results show reliable off-line EMG detection. In the future, we plan to test whether the method could be used for online EMG detection.

A new adaptive motor controller was constructed, and tested on the control of a 2-wheeled balancing robot in simulation and real world. The controller consists of a feedback (PD) controller and a cerebellar neuronal network model. The structure of the cerebellar model was configured based upon known anatomical neuronal connection in the cerebellar cortex. Namely it consists of 120 granular (Gr) cells, 1 Golgi cell, 6 basket/stellate cells, and 1 Purkinje (Pk) cell. Each cell is described by a typical artificial neuron model that outputs a weighted sum of inputs after a sigmoidal nonlinear transformation. The 2 components of the proposed controller work in parallel, in a way that the cerebellar model adaptively modifies the synaptic weights between Gr and Pk as in the real cerebellum to minimize the output of the PD controller. We demonstrate that the proposed controller successfully controls a 2-wheeled balancing robot, and the cerebellar model rapidly takes over the PD controller in simulation. We also show that an abrupt load change on the robot, which the PD controller alone cannot compensate for, can be adaptively compensated by the cerebellar model. We further confirmed that the proposed controller can be applied to the control of the robot in real world.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The Side View Assist is the World’s first rider assistance system for two-wheelers. This is a Blind Spot Warning system, which uses four ultrasonic sensors to monitor the surrounding of the rider. Whenever there is a vehicle (i.e. a car, truck, or another motorbike) in the rider’s blind spot, the technology warns the rider with an optical signal close to the mirror. This will allow the rider to avoid a collision when changing lanes.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">In the current vehicle application, Side View Assist is active at speeds ranging from 25 to 80 kilometers per hour and supports riders whenever the difference in relative speed to other road users is small. The system helps to improve safety especially in cities, where heavy traffic makes it necessary to change lanes more often.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Originally such systems have been developed for cars and different system solutions for cars have been in serial production for several years. The challenge was to adapt these systems so they would work for two-wheelers as well.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Using the system components of car solutions is highly beneficial, because the hardware as well as the corresponding software already exists. However, adapting car components to motorcycles generated new problems for the developer: <ul class="list disc"><li class="list-item"><div class="htmlview paragraph">lean angle;</div></li><li class="list-item"><div class="htmlview paragraph">ultrasonic noise generated by the motorcycle itself;</div></li><li class="list-item"><div class="htmlview paragraph">installation of the ultrasonic sensors; and</div></li><li class="list-item"><div class="htmlview paragraph">high vibration at the fixation of the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) compared to cars.</div></li></ul></div></div>

This paper presents a slip ratio controller using sliding mode control for electric vehicle with parameter variations, which is important in obtaining desired vehicle motion in acceleration. A robust sliding mode controller is designed to obtain the maximum driving force by maintaining the value of slip ratio at a reference value. The simulations for one wheel model of vehicle under variations in mass of vehicle and road conditions are performed and analyzed to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

This paper introduces UniVote, a system supporting mobile phone-based interaction with public displays. The case study carried out at Lancaster University indicates that the campus "bubble" in which students live can lead to feelings of isolation within an insular community cut off from the outside world. UniVote makes use of a voting system to help elicit user involvement, keep users informed of campus- and world-wide events and news and create a sense of community. Findings of this preliminary study suggest that the campus “bubble” can indeed be broken, and the voting component of the system particularly fosters interaction and human connectedness.

Abstract Deep neural network is the widely applied technology in this decade. In spite of the fruitful applications, the mechanism behind that is still to be elucidated. We study the learning process with a very simple supervised learning encoding problem. As a result, we found a simple law, in the training response, which describes neural tangent kernel. The response consists of a power law like decay multiplied by a simple response kernel. We can construct a simple mean-field dynamical model with the law, which explains how the network learns. In the learning, the input space is split into sub-spaces along competition between the kernels. With the iterated splits and the aging, the network gets more complexity, but finally loses its plasticity.

To realize a high computational efficiency, a 3-D stacked chip multi-vector processor (CMVP) has been proposed. However, the 3-D stacked CMVP has not been evaluated well in terms of energy consumption. Therefore, to clarify the potential of the 3-D stacked CMVP, this paper evaluates and analyzes the energy consumption of the 3-D stacked CMVP using real scientific applications. Especially, this paper focuses on the energy reduction effects given by a large scale vector cache, which can be realized by 3-D die stacking technologies. The evaluation results show the vector cache on the 3-D stacked CMVP has enough potential to achieve a low energy and high performance processing of the cutting edge scientific applications.

Abstract Generative adversarial networks are popular deep neural networks for generative modeling in the field of artificial intelligence. In the generative modeling, we want to output a sample with some random numbers as an input. We train the artificial neural network with a training data set for the purpose. The network is known with astonishingly fruitful demonstrations, but we know the difficulty in the training because of the complex training dynamics. Here, we introduce an ecological analogy for the training dynamics. With the simple ecological model, we can understand the dynamics. Furthermore, a controller for the training can be designed based on the understanding. We then demonstrate how the network and the controller work with an ideal case, MNIST.

The trade-off between the number and closeness of friendships is one of the important features of communication systems. This distinguishes asynchronous text communication through the Internet (lig...

A hydrostatic and ice coupled model was developed to analyze circulation and thermohaline structures in the Caspian Sea. The northern part of the Caspian Sea freezes in the winter. Waters start icing in November and ices spread during December and January. The northern part of the Caspian Sea is covered by ices in severe winters. Ice-covered area is at its maximum during January and February, and then ices begin melting in March and disappear in April. The occurrence of ices must have significant effects on circulation and thermohaline structures as well as ecosystem in the northern Caspian Sea. In the present study, formation of ices is modeled assuming that ices do not move but spread and shrink on water surface. Under the ices, it is assumed that the exchange of momentum flux is impeded and the fluxes of heat and brine salt are given at sea-ice boundary. The ice model was coupled with a hydrostatic model based on MEC (Marine Environmental Committee) Ocean Model developed by the Japan Society of Naval Architect and Ocean Engineers. Numerical simulation was carried out for 20 years to achieve stable seasonal changes in current velocity, water temperature, and salinity. The fluxes of momentum, heat, and salt were estimated by using measurement data at 11 meteorological stations around the Caspian Sea. Inflow of Volga River was taken into account as representative of all the rivers which inflow into the Caspian Sea. Effects of icing event on circulation and thermohaline structures were discussed using the results of numerical simulation in the last year. As a result, the accuracy of predicting water temperature in the northern Caspian Sea was improved by taking the effects of icing event into account. Differences in density in the horizontal direction create several gyres with the effects of Coriolis force. The differences were caused by differences in heat capacity between coastal and open waters, differences in water temperature due to climate, and inflow of rivers in the northern Caspian Sea. The water current field in the Caspian Sea is formed by adding wind-driven current to the dominant density-driven current, which is based on horizontal differences in water temperature and salinity, and Coriolis force.

Microwave dielectric properties, quality factor, dielectric constant and temperature coefficient of resonant frequency, are discussed based on the crystal structure analysis of two systems. The tungstenbronze-type like Ba/sub 6-3x/R/sub 8+2x/Ti/sub 18/O/sub 54/ (R = rare earth) solid solutions and Y/sub 2/BaCuO/sub 5/ green phase are addressed as examples. The quality factor (Q/spl middot/f) is improved by ordering due to phase transformation, compositional ordering of cations and purifying the composition. Dielectric constant (/spl epsiv//sub r/) is affected by volume of cation polyhedron, tilting of TiO/sub 6/ octahedron and polarizability of cations. Temperature coefficients of resonant frequency is studied by crystal structural analysis with different temperature.

Abstract This paper proposes a new method for properly estimating the rotor initial phase (i.e., the position) of the newly emerging self‐excited hybrid‐field synchronous motors (SelE‐HFSMs), which have the rotor held by both a permanent magnet and a diode‐shorted held winding. The proposed method injects a spatially rotating high‐frequency voltage and detects the rotor phase directly by evaluating the norm of the associated current. The method is very simple, but has a high degree of usability. 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 173(3): 49–58, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience. wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.21027