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Recent research efforts have yielded significant advancements in manipulating objects under homogeneous settings where the robot is required to either manipulate rigid or deformable (soft) objects. However, the manipulation under heterogeneous setups that involve both deformable and rigid objects remains an unexplored area of research. Such setups are common in various scenarios that involve the transportation of heavy objects via ropes, e.g., on factory floors, at disaster sites, and in forestry. To address this challenge, we introduce DeRi-Bot, the first framework that enables the collaborative manipulation of rigid objects with deformable objects. Our framework comprises an Action Prediction Network (APN) and a Configuration Prediction Network (CPN) to model the complex pattern and stochasticity of soft-rigid body systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeRi-Bot in moving rigid objects to a target position with ropes connected to robotic arms. Furthermore, DeRi-Bot is a distributive method that can accommodate an arbitrary number of robots or human partners without reconfiguration or retraining. We evaluate our framework in both simulated and real-world environments and show that it achieves promising results with strong generalization across different types of objects and multi-agent settings, including human-robot collaboration., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures

In this work, a new red phosphor with high color purity, Eu3+ ions doped Ba(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3 phosphor has been prepared by wet chemical method. The structure analysis suggests BMN:x%Eu phosphors have a hexagonal phase and Ba2+ ions are replaced by Eu3+ ions in BMN. Upon excitation of NUV light, the BMN:x%Eu phosphors emit strong red light around 615 nm, derived from the 5D0-7F2 transition of Eu3+ ions. The relationship between luminescent properties and structure of BMN:x%Eu was discussed. The Judd-Ofelt intensity parameters (Ω2, Ω4) were calculated to analyze the asymmetry of the Eu3+ ions site occupancy further, and the quantum efficiency of BMN:3%Eu was found to be 77.26%. In addition, the decay curve indicates the decay time(τ) of BMN:3%Eu is determined to be 1.34 ms and Eu3+ ions occupy only one type of site. The CIE chromaticity coordinate (0.656,0.344) of BMN:3%Eu is quite close to the red phosphors standard value (0.670, 0.330), which indicates BMN:x%Eu can be a suitable red phosphor used in NUV-based white LEDs.

Numerical simulation and analysis of the influence of electrode shrinkage cavity on electroslag remelting (ESR) process of IN718 alloy ingot with a diameter of 430 mm were carried out using the self-developed ESR process model. Electromagnetic fields of ESR system were simulated by a specially designed shrinkage cavity with different shapes and sizes in the electrode. The results show that the contacting area changes between the electrode and the slag owing to the cavity, which plays a predominant role in the distribution of the Joule heat and electromagnetic force in the slag, while the effect of axial dimension change of the shrinkage cavity is negligible. Constant melt rate ESR processes were simulated for different radius cavity situations. It is shown that, at a constant melt rate, the shrinkage cavity has no effect on the ESR process as its radius is less than 0.025 m, and only a small influence on the slag flow when the radius reaches 0.05 m. As the radius increases over 0.05 m, an increasingly evident influence on the slag zone appears via the weakened center downward flow and the increased temperature. Nevertheless, the cavity has no obvious influence on the ingot including the melt pool and mush zone. There is a nonlinear relation between the shrinkage cavity radius and the ESR melting parameters such as current and power, and the critical value of the radius is approximately 0.05 m. Below the critical value, faint or even no change in the parameters appears, while, above the value, the parameters of power and current increase rapidly in an approximately linear manner. From the standpoint of process control stability, the shrinkage cavity radius should be controlled below 0.05 m.

Identifying molecular cancer drivers is critical for precision oncology. Multiple advanced algorithms to identify drivers now exist, but systematic attempts to combine and optimize them on large datasets are few. We report a PanCancer and PanSoftware analysis spanning 9,423 tumor exomes (comprising all 33 of The Cancer Genome Atlas projects) and using 26 computational tools to catalog driver genes and mutations. We identify 299 driver genes with implications regarding their anatomical sites and cancer/cell types. Sequence- and structure-based analyses identified >3,400 putative missense driver mutations supported by multiple lines of evidence. Experimental validation confirmed 60%-85% of predicted mutations as likely drivers. We found that >300 MSI tumors are associated with high PD-1/PD-L1, and 57% of tumors analyzed harbor putative clinically actionable events. Our study represents the most comprehensive discovery of cancer genes and mutations to date and will serve as a blueprint for future biological and clinical endeavors.

We present a new method to localize a camera within a previously unseen environment perceived from an egocentric point of view. Although this is, in general, an ill-posed problem, humans can effortlessly and efficiently determine their relative location and orientation and navigate into a previously unseen environments, e.g., finding a specific item in a new grocery store. To enable such a capability, we design a new egocentric representation, which we call ECO (Egocentric COgnitive map). ECO is biologically inspired, by the cognitive map that allows human navigation, and it encodes the surrounding visual semantics with respect to both distance and orientation. ECO possesses three main properties: (1) reconfigurability: complex semantics and geometry is captured via the synthesis of atomic visual representations (e.g., image patch); (2) robustness: the visual semantics are registered in a geometrically consistent way (e.g., aligning with respect to the gravity vector, frontalizing, and rescaling to canonical depth), thus enabling us to learn meaningful atomic representations; (3) adaptability: a domain adaptation framework is designed to generalize the learned representation without manual calibration. As a proof-of-concept, we use ECO to localize a camera within real-world scenes---various grocery stores---and demonstrate performance improvements when compared to existing semantic localization approaches.

The temperature dependence of the self-energy of a particle is studied in semiinfinite nuclear matter. Based on the finite temperature Green's function Matsubara formalism and applying it to the single particle-states in 208Pb, the calculated results show that the characteristic enhancement of the effective mass at near the Fermi energy disappears at temperature T=3 MeV, and correspondingly, as a consequence the level-density parameter should decrease in agreement with recent empirical data.

Metal–semiconductor contact has been a critical topic in the semiconductor industry because it influences device performance remarkably. Conventional metals have served as the major contact material in electronic and optoelectronic devices, but such a selection becomes increasingly inadequate for emerging novel materials such as two-dimensional (2D) materials. Deposited metals on semiconducting 2D channels usually form large resistance contacts due to the high Schottky barrier. A few approaches have been reported to reduce the contact resistance but they are not suitable for large-scale application or they cannot create a clean and sharp interface. In this study, a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique is introduced to produce large-area semiconducting 2D material (2H MoTe2) planarly contacted by its metallic phase (1T′ MoTe2). We demonstrate the phase-controllable synthesis and systematic characterization of large-area MoTe2 films, including pure 2H phase or 1T′ phase, and 2H/1T′ in-plane heterostructure. Theoretical simulation shows a lower Schottky barrier in 2H/1T′ junction than in Ti/2H contact, which is confirmed by electrical measurement. This one-step CVD method to synthesize large-area, seamless-bonding 2D lateral metal–semiconductor junction can improve the performance of 2D electronic and optoelectronic devices, paving the way for large-scale 2D integrated circuits.