Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe a compact wheelchair, which has two 3-degrees of freedom (DOF) legs and a 1-DOF base (the total DOF of the leg system is 7) for stair-climbing, and wheels for flat surface driving.

The proposed wheelchair climbs stairs using the two 3-DOF legs with boomerang-shaped feet. The leg mechanisms are folded into the compact wheelchair body when the wheelchair moves over flat surfaces. The authors also propose a simple estimation method of stair shape using laser distance sensors, and a dual motor driving system to increase joint power.

The proposed wheelchair can climb arbitrary height and width stairs by itself, even when they are slightly curved. During climbing, the trajectory of the seat position is linear to guarantee the comfort of rider, and the wheelchair always keeps a stable condition to ensure the stability in an emergency stop.

The wheelchair mechanism with foldable legs and driving wheels enables smooth stair climbing, efficient flat surface driving and additional useful motions such as standing and tilting.

China is currently developing and promoting an industrial cluster policy at the government level. By enacting the ‘Opinion on promoting industrial cluster development’, China is supporting the development of industrial clusters. Building an industrial cluster is done by using a single factor but requires many additional factors like regional characteristics, competitiveness factors are also diversified. To evaluate the competitiveness of the Chinese automobile industry cluster, a competitiveness element index should be developed and a competitiveness evaluation method is needed to evaluate the importance of each element. To accomplish this objective, this research applied the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and focused on the importance of the competitiveness elements.

This research investigated the character is tics regarding cases of clusters and also analyzed the competitiveness of the Changchun automobile cluster located in northeastern China. The purpose of this research is to help Korean enterprises who enter China in the hopes that Korea will emerge as a top automobile production country.

When purchasing digital content (DC), consumers are typically influenced by various information sources on the website. Prior research has mostly focused on the individual effect of the information sources on the DC choice. To fill the gap in the previous studies, this research includes three main effects: information cascades, recommendations and word of mouth. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the interaction effect of information cascades and recommendations on the number of software downloads.

The authors use the panel generalized least squares estimation to test the hypotheses by using a panel data set of 2,000 pieces of software at download.cnet.com over a month-long period. Product ranking and recommendation status are used as key independent variables to capture the effects of information cascades and recommendations, respectively.

One of this study’s findings is that information cascades positively interact with recommendations to influence the number of software downloads. The authors also show that the impact of information cascades on the number of software downloads is greater than one of the recommendations from a distributor does.

Information cascades and recommendations have been considered as the primary effects for online product choices. However, these two effects typically are not considered together in one research. As previous studies have mainly focused on each effect, respectively, the authors believe that this study may fill the gap by examining how these effects are interacted to one other to influence customers’ choices. The authors also show that the impact of information cascades on the number of software downloads is greater than one of the recommendations from a system does.