A significant challenge of autonomous robotics in transportation, exploration, and search-and-rescue missions lies in the area of motion planning. The overall objective is to enable robots to automatically plan the low-level motions needed to accomplish assigned high-level tasks. Toward this goal, this thesis proposes a novel multi-layered approach, ...

Volume visualization of large volume data sets is traditionally based on surface fitting algorithms. With recent advances in graphics computation and memory capabilities, direct volume rendering techniques to produce interactive volume rendering for large data sets have become feasible. We implement a custom texture based volume rendering algorithm ...

Conflict-aware replication is a novel lazy replication technique for scaling the back-end database of a dynamic content web server using a cluster of commodity computers. This technique provides both throughput scaling and 1-copy serializability. It has generally been believed that this combination is hard to achieve through replication because of ...

Injuries to the fibrocartilage of the knee, the medial and lateral menisci, present a particular challenge: the tissue is incapable of self-repair and the long-term outcomes of meniscectomy are osteoarthritis and disability. A tissue engineered knee meniscus, recapitulating the extracellular matrix (ECM) and mechanical function of the native tissue, ...

Since its inception, the concept of network coordinates has been successfully applied to solve a wide variety of problems such as overlay optimization, network routing, network localization, and network modeling. Despite these successes, several practical problems limit the benefits of network coordinates today. First, the Triangle Inequality ...

Decorin, a small leucine rich proteoglycan, has been reported to control collagen fibrillogenesis, thereby influencing the tensile properties of collagenous tissues. In this research work, decorin deficient cells (Dcn -/- ) were combined with tissue-engineered collagen gels to study the contribution of decorin to cell proliferation, collagen ...

Growing databases of protein sequences in the post-genomic era call for computational methods to extract structure and function from a protein sequence. In flexible molecules like proteins, function cannot be reliably extracted from a few structures. The amino-acid chain assumes various spatial arrangements (conformations) to modulate biological ...

The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) may be permanently damaged by disease or trauma; thus, TMJ cartilage is a prime target for tissue engineers. The damaged TMJ disc may become obstructive to normal jaw function, leading to severe tissue degradation and rendering the tissue useless in subsequent surgeries. Thus, post-operative TMJ patients may experience ...

This thesis presents a kinodynamic motion planner, Kinodynamic Motion Planning by Interior-Exterior Cell Exploration ( KPIECE ), specifically designed for systems with complex dynamics, where physics-based simulation is necessary. A multiple-level grid-based discretization is used to estimate the coverage of the state space. The coverage estimates ...

Single-event upsets (SEUs) induced by high-energy neutrons and alpha particles have emerged as a key reliability threat to advanced commercial electronic components and systems. This dissertation describes gate-level radiation hardening techniques to improve the reliability of combinational circuits to SEUs. Such techniques have several advantages ...