This study analyzes the characteristics of two different kinds of squat exercise through physical experiments and a computer simulation, i.e. one with a free weight and the other with a Smith machine are studied. This study also proposes a new design for the Smith machine, which has both the advantages of each type based on the results of the analysis. The muscle force and level of stimulation of the lower extremities during squatting were calculated by running an inverse dynamics analysis program on a musculoskeletal model together with the measured motion data. The calculated results were verified by comparing with the measured EMG data. The analysis showed that squatting using free weight is more effective than squatting using the Smith machine. Meanwhile, in order to design an improved Smith machine, which is the final goal of this study, the trajectory of the barbell of the subjects during free weight squatting was measured on the sagittal plane. The measurement showed that the average slope of the trajectory of the barbell is tilted backward by $10.7^{\circ}$. Based on this measurement, this study proposes a tilted design for an improved Smith machine.

Generation of optimum planar B-spline curve in terms of minimum deviation and required fairness to approximate a target shape defined by a strip-shaped unorganized 2D point cloud is studied. It is proposed to use the location of control points as variables within the geometric optimization framework of point distance minimization. An adaptive simulated annealing heuristic optimization algorithm is developed to iteratively update an initial approximate curve towards the target shape. The new implementation comprises an adaptive cooling procedure in which the temperature change is adaptively dependent on the objective function evolution. It is shown that the proposed method results in an improved convergence speed when compared to the standard simulated annealing method. A couple of examples are included to show the applicability of the proposed method in the surface model reconstruction directly from point cloud data.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is often used to identify local stress/strain concentrations where a component is likely to fail. In order to reduce the degree of strain concentration, component thickness can be increased in those regions, or a stronger material can be used. In short fiber reinforced composite materials, strength and stiffness can be increased through proper fiber alignment. The field-aided microtailoring (FAiMTa) process is one promising method for doing this. FAiMTa uses principles of dielectrophoresis to preferentially align particles or fibers within a matrix. To achieve the preferred fiber orientation, an interdigitated electrode network must be integrated into the mold halves which can be fabricated by additive manufacturing (AM) processes. However, the process of determining the preferred fiber arrangements and electrode locations can be very challenging. This paper presents algorithms to semi-automate the interdigitated electrode design process. The algorithm has been implemented in the Solidworks CAD system and is demonstrated in this paper.

A new algorithm has been developed to construct surface from the contours having branches and the final smooth surface is obtained by the reversible Catmull-Clark subdivision. In branching, a particular layer has more than one contour that correspond with at least one contour at the adjacent layer. In the next step, three-dimensional composite curve is constructed from contours of a layer having correspondence with at least one contour at the adjacent layer by inserting points between them and joining the contours. The points are inserted in such a way that the geometric center of the contours should merge at the center of the contours at the adjacent layer. This process is repeated for all layers having branching problems. Polyhedra are constructed in the next step with the help of composite curves and the contours at adjacent layer. The required smooth surface is obtained in the proposed work by providing the level of smoothness.

The paper proposes a method for generating a sequence of images with smooth transition of illumination from two input images with different lighting conditions. Our relighting approach is image-based, such as the light field rendering. We store the luminances (pixel RGB values) into "lighting functions" consisting of a couple of parameters related to normal vectors. Images with different light positions are rendered by interpolating the luminances retrieved from the lighting functions. The proposed method is a promising technique for many applications requiring a scene with variety of lighting effects, such as movies, TV games, and so on.