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Cooperative dual-crane lifting is an important but challenging process involved in heavy and critical lifting tasks. This paper considers the path planning for the cooperative dual-crane lifting. It aims to automatically generate optimal dual-crane lifting paths under multiple constraints, i.e., collision avoidance, coordination between the two cranes, and balance of the lifting target. Previous works often used oversimplified models for the dual-crane lifting system, the lifting environment, and the motion of the lifting target. They were thus limited to simple lifting cases and might even lead to unsafe paths in some cases. We develop a novel path planner for dual-crane lifting that can quickly produce optimized paths in complex 3-D environments. The planner has fully considered the kinematic structure of the lifting system. Therefore, it is able to robustly handle the nonlinear movement of the suspended target during lifting. The effectiveness and efficiency of the planner are enabled by three novel aspects: 1) a comprehensive and computationally efficient mathematical modeling of the lifting system; 2) a new multiobjective parallel genetic algorithm designed to solve the path planning problem; and 3) a new efficient approach to perform continuous collision detection for the dual-crane lifting target. The planner has been tested in complex industrial environments. The results show that the planner can generate dual-crane lifting paths that are easy for conductions and optimized in terms of costs for complex environments. Comparisons with two previous methods demonstrate the advantages of the planner, including safer paths, higher success rates, and the ability to handle general lifting cases.

This paper presents a novel scheme for constructing bivariate spline surfaces over triangular meshes which are topologically equivalent to a disk. The core part of the scheme is a set of knot selection rules that define local configurations of a triangulation called the directed-one-ring-cycle (D1RC) configurations and bivariate splines defined over a D1RC configuration that are new non-tensor-product splines and possess many nice properties of a univariate B-spline. Using D1RC splines, we take an input triangular mesh as a control mesh and define a bivariate spline surface from the control mesh, which mimics the standard NURBS modeling. Moreover, we can introduce sharp features into the overall smooth spline surface by simply setting special D1RC configurations. As a result, the proposed scheme can define spline surfaces in a way similar to that of NURBS, but has less restriction on the connectivity of the input control mesh.

It is known that the maximum diameter for the rupture-risk assessment of the abdominal aortic aneurysm is a generally good method, but not sufficient. Alternative features obtained with computational modeling may provide additional useful criteria. Though computational approaches are noninvasive, they are often time-consuming because of the high computational complexity. In this paper, we present a highly parallel algorithm for the numerical simulation of unsteady blood flows in the patient-specific abdominal aorta. We model the blood flow with the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and solve the discretized system with a highly scalable domain decomposition method. With this approach, the complete flow field can be obtained in less than an hour, instead of days with older methods. We show experimentally that the proposed method offers accurate solutions of the pressure, the velocity and the wall shear stress, and the parallel efficiency is higher than 70% on a parallel computer with more than 1,000 processor cores.

Given an open book decomposition (Σ,τ) of a three manifold Y , Thurston and Winkelnkemper [TW] construct a specific contact form a on Y . Given a spin-c Dirac operator D on Y , the contact form naturally associates a one parameter family of Dirac operators Dr = D− ir 2 cl(a) for r ≥ 0. When r >> 1, we prove that the spectrum of Dr = D0 − ir 2 cl(a) within [−1 2r 1 2 , 1 2r 1 2 ] are almost uniformly distributed. With the result in Part I [Ts1], it implies that the subleading order term of the spectral flow from D0 to Dr is of order r(logr) 9 2 . Besides the interests of the spectral flow, the method of this paper provide a tool to analyze the Dirac operator on an open book decomposition.