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Previous studies showed that the unconscious-intuitive strategy resulted in a better choice for it is more predictive of actual interest. This benefit may be influenced by occupational engagement, for the dual process of career decisions takes it as a tool for multidevelopment and optimal adjustment. Thus, we replicated (and extended) the study of Motl et al. (2018) through two experiments to identify the role of three pre-decisional strategies and then explore the combined effects of occupational engagement and these strategies. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The authors replicated (and extended) the study of Motl et al. (2018) through two experiments. First, both studies adopted generalized linear mixed-effects models for statistical analyses to distinguish random and fixed effects. Second, Study 2 used a computer-based process-tracing program called “Mouselab” to explore the effect of the pre-decisional strategy self-generated on participants' interest appraisals over time.

Study 1 found that engagement helped promote participants' interest experience when decisions as usual and the intuitive strategy did not produce optimal choices. Further, people with more prior knowledge about situations no longer achieved as many benefits from their allocated strategy (i.e. rational strategy) as those with less. Study 2 failed to find adequate advantages of the intuitive strategy. Specifically, people with less search depth (the heuristic-intuitive strategy) were more interested in their choices. Nevertheless, when the strategy was manipulated as variability of search (VS), it only found the promotion of engagement, but it neither found the interaction between engagement and strategy nor did strategy itself.

The present paper provides mixed support for adaptive career decision-making. Career counselors can use occupational engagement levels as a reference for pre-decisional strategy selection and coach clients to adopt a proper decision-making process/method to make interest forecasts.

Robot-assisted system for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been attracting more and more attentions. Compared with a traditional MIS, the robot-assisted system for MIS is able to overcome or reduce defects, such as poor hand-eye coordination, heavy labour intensity and limited motion of the instrument. The purpose of this paper is to design a novel robotic system for MIS applications.

A robotic system with three separate slave arms for MIS has been designed. In the proposed robot, a new mechanism was designed as the remote centre motion (RCM) mechanism to restrain the movement of instrument or laparoscope around the incision. Moreover, an improved instrument without coupling motion between wrist and grippers was developed to enhance its manipulability. A control system architecture was also developed, and an intuitive control method was applied to realize hand-eye coordination of the operator.

For the RCM mechanism, the workspace was analyzed and the positioning accuracy of the remote centre point was tested. The results show that the RCM mechanism can be applied to MIS. Furthermore, the master-slave trajectory tracking experiments reveal that slave robots are able to follow the movement of the master manipulators well. Finally, the feasibility of the robot-assisted system for MIS is proved by performing animal experiments successfully.

This paper offers a novel robotic system for MIS. It can accomplish the anticipated results.

This paper aims to present an intuitive control system for robotic manipulators that pairs a Leap Motion, a low-cost optical tracking and gesture recognition device, with the ability to record and replay trajectories and operation to create an intuitive method of controlling and programming a robotic manipulator. This system was designed to be extensible and includes modules and methods for obstacle detection and dynamic trajectory modification for obstacle avoidance.

The presented control architecture, while portable to any robotic platform, was designed to actuate a six degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator of our own design. From the data collected by the Leap Motion, the manipulator was controlled by mapping the position and orientation of the human hand to values in the joint space of the robot. Additional recording and playback functionality was implemented to allow for the robot to repeat the desired tasks once the task had been demonstrated and recorded.

Experiments were conducted on our custom-built robotic manipulator by first using a simulation model to characterize and quantify the robot’s tracking of the Leap Motion generated trajectory. Tests were conducted in the Gazebo simulation software in conjunction with Robot Operating System, where results were collected by recording both the real-time input from the Leap Motion sensor, and the corresponding pose data. The results of these experiments show that the goal of accurate and real-time control of the robot was achieved and validated our methods of transcribing, recording and repeating six degree-of-freedom trajectories from the Leap Motion camera.

As robots evolve in complexity, the methods of programming them need to evolve to become more intuitive. Humans instinctively teach by demonstrating the task to a given subject, who then observes the various poses and tries to replicate the motions. This work aims to integrate the natural human teaching methods into robotics programming through an intuitive, demonstration-based programming method.

The purpose of this paper is to present a five-fingered, multisensory prosthetic hand integrating both intuitive myoelectric control and sensory feedback.

The artificial hand’s palm has a three-arcuate configuration and the thumb can move along a cone surface, improving the resemblance with the biological hand. By using a coupling linkage mechanism, each finger is independently actuated by a direct current motor. Both torque and position sensors are embedded in the finger to sense the hand’s status and its interaction with the outer environment. The proposed human-in-the-loop control system consists of an internal motion control scheme and an external human–machine interface. The pattern recognition-based electromyography (EMG) control scheme is adopted to control the motion of the hand, and the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is utilized to feedback the hand’s sensory information to its user.

The hand prototype shows that it has an anthropomorphic appearance (85 per cent to an average human hand), low weight (420 g), great power (10 N on the fingertip) and eligible dexterity. Clinical evaluation of the prosthetic hand on transradial amputees also approves the hand design.

From a systematic view, the paper details the design concepts of the HIT–DLR prosthetic hand IV, especially on its appearance, mechanism, myoelectric control and sensory feedback.

This paper aims to propose a new technique for programming robotized machining tasks based on intuitive human–machine interaction. This will enable operators to create robot programs for small-batch production in a fast and easy way, reducing the required time to accomplish the programming tasks.

This technique makes use of online walk-through path guidance using an external force/torque sensor, and simple and intuitive visual programming, by a demonstration method and symbolic task-level programming.

Thanks to this technique, the operator can easily program robots without learning every robot-specific language and can design new tasks for industrial robots based on manual guidance.

The main contribution of the paper is a new procedure to program machining tasks based on manual guidance (walk-through teaching method) and user-friendly visual programming. Up to now, the acquisition of paths and the task programming were done in separate steps and in separate machines. The authors propose a procedure for using a tablet as the only user interface to acquire paths and to make a program to use this path for machining tasks.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the frame of a missile formation cooperative control system, and present an optimal keeping controller of a missile formation in the cooperative engagement.

A missile relative motion model is established directly based on the kinematics relationships in the relative coordinated frame, following that is the detailed process of designing an optimal formation controller, which is analyzed through the small disturbance linearized method and transforming control variables method, respectively, these two methods both have themselves properties. The equations and control variables are intuitive during the linearized analysis, but errors brought by the linearized method are unavoidable, which will reduce the control precision. As for the transforming method, the control accuracy is greatly increased although the control form is a little complex, so in this paper the transforming control variable method is mainly researched to design an optimal formation controller. Considering the states of a leader as input perturbation variables, we design an optimal formation controller based on the linear quadric theory, which has quadric optimal performances of the missile flight states and control quantity. In order to obtain a higher accurate solution, the precise integration algorithm is introduced to solve the Riccati Equation that significantly affects the accuracy of an optimal control problem.

The relative motion model established directly in the relative coordinate frame has intuitive physical significance, and the optimal controller based on this relative motion model is capable of restraining the invariable or slowly varying perturbation brought by the velocity of a leader and the input perturbations caused by the maneuver of the leader, at the same time this optimal controller can implement formation reconfiguration and keeping to an expected states rapidly, steadily and exactly; the steady errors can be greatly decreased by analyzing the relative motion model through transforming control variables method compared to the small disturbance linearized operation.

The main frame of a missile formation cooperative engagement system can be found in this paper, which shows a clear structure and relations of each part of this complex system. The relations between each subsystem including the specific input and output variables can also be used to guide and restrict how to design each subsystem. The emphasis of this paper is on designing an optimal formation keeping controller which can overcome slowly varying or invariable perturbations and implement quadric optimal keeping control rapidly, stably and accurately.

This paper provides a new method to analyze the missile relative motion model. The proposed proportional and integral (PI) optimal controller based on this model, and utilizing the Precise Integration Algorithm to solve this optimal controller are also new thoughts for formation control problems.

In many countries, governmental organizations decentralized their organization structures, leading to an increased relevance of performance information. This paper identifies two approaches to measure performance in the not‐for‐profit sector: an output‐focused and a throughput‐focused approach. Furthermore, the paper sets a contingency framework concerning the applicability of these two approaches. The two most important contingent variables, i.e., whether output can be identified and whether activities are repetitive, determine the possibilities to apply the two approaches. If it is possible to apply both approaches, the ambiguity of organizational objectives, the hierarchical position of information users and the relevance of efficiency and quality are additional contingent variables that influence the approach to assess performance. Finally, the paper identifies how the approach to measure performance relates to management control types. If none of the two approaches is applicable, the organization has to rely on a management control type without an explicit system to measure performance, i.e., political or judgmental control. Routine or trial‐and‐error control fit with both approaches to measure performance. Expert and intuitive control are control types that rely on output‐based approaches to measure performance.

To avoid harm to humans, environment, and capital goods, hazardous or explosive gases that are possibly escaping from industrial and infrastructure facilities of the gas and oil processing industry have to be detected and located quickly and reliably. Project RoboGasInspector aims at the development and evaluation of a human-robot system that applies autonomous robots equipped with remote gas detection devices to detect and locate gas leaks. This article aims to focus on the usability of telemanipulation in this context.

This paper presents four user studies concerning human-robot interfaces for teleoperation in industrial inspection tasks. Their purpose is to resolve contradictory scientific findings regarding aspects of teleoperation and to verify functionality, usability, and technology acceptance of the designed solution in the actual context of use. Therefore, aspects concerning teleoperation that were separately examined before are evaluated in an integrated way. Considered aspects are influence of media technology on telepresence, simulator sickness and head slaved camera control, usability of different input devices for telemanipulation, and identification of intuitive gestures for teleoperation of mobile robots.

In general, the implemented interaction concepts perform better compared to conventional ones used in contemporary, actually applied robot systems. Otherwise, reasons are analyzed and approaches for further improvements are discussed. Exemplary results are given for each study.

The solution combines several technical approaches that are so far separately examined. Each approach is transferred to the innovative domain of industrial inspections and its applicability in this context is verified. New findings give design recommendations for remote workplaces of robot operators.

The introduction of laparoscopy in surgery offered clear advantages to patients. Surgeons, however, had to deal with various types of problems inherent to the essential differences in surgical approach. One of these problems, reduced dexterity, was solved at the end of the previous decade by the introduction of robotic surgery systems. Discusses the backgrounds for development of the Intuitive Surgical “Da Vinci” systems and gives an overview of current status and functionality.

In recent times, the operating landscape of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) environment can be described as constantly changing. Their performance is more dependent on the managers' ability to implement effective control/management practices suitable for their context and operating environment. Through a multi-site case study, we examine the peculiarities of control/management practices in four SMEs in the city of Bukavu to ascertain whether and how those practices contribute to SMEs' performance. Our findings indicate the predominance of informal practices, which include coordination methods similar to the balanced scorecard, budgeting practices, cost imputation, cash monitoring and inventory management. Compared to the results from literature, these practices did not differ much from those observed in the SMEs of developed countries and are likely to contribute to performance achievement, which corroborates the proposition of the contingency theory.