Contact-based Grasp Control and Inverse Kinematics for a Five-fingered Robotic Hand

This paper presents an implementation and analysis of a five-fingered robotic grasping system that combines contact-based control with inverse kinematics solutions. Using the PyBullet simulation environment and the DexHand v2 model, we demonstrate a comprehensive approach to achieving stable grasps through contact point optimization with force closure validation. Our method achieves movement efficiency ratings between 0.966-0.996 for non-thumb fingers and 0.879 for the thumb, while maintaining positional accuracy within 0.0267-0.0283m for non-thumb digits and 0.0519m for the thumb. The system demonstrates rapid position stabilization at 240Hz simulation frequency and maintains stable contact configurations throughout the grasp execution. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, while also identifying areas for future enhancement in thumb opposition movements and horizontal plane control.

Scaling Large Vision-Language Models for Enhanced Multimodal Comprehension In Biomedical Image Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense capabilities in understanding textual data and are increasingly being adopted to help researchers accelerate scientific discovery through knowledge extraction (information retrieval), knowledge distillation (summarizing key findings and methodologies into concise forms), and knowledge synthesis (aggregating information from multiple scientific sources to address complex queries, generate hypothesis and formulate experimental plans). However, scientific data often exists in both visual and textual modalities. Vision language models (VLMs) address this by incorporating a pretrained vision backbone for processing images and a cross-modal projector that adapts image tokens into the LLM dimensional space, thereby providing richer multimodal comprehension. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf VLMs show limited capabilities in handling domain-specific data and are prone to hallucinations. We developed intelligent assistants finetuned from LLaVA models to enhance multimodal understanding in low-dose radiation therapy (LDRT)-a benign approach used in the treatment of cancer-related illnesses. Using multilingual data from 42,673 articles, we devise complex reasoning and detailed description tasks for visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks. Our assistants, trained on 50,882 image-text pairs, demonstrate superior performance over base models as evaluated using LLM-as-a-judge approach, particularly in reducing hallucination and improving domain-specific comprehension.

Accelerating Post-Tornado Disaster Assessment Using Advanced Deep Learning Models

Post-disaster assessments of buildings and infrastructure are crucial for both immediate recovery efforts and long-term resilience planning. This research introduces an innovative approach to automating post-disaster assessments through advanced deep learning models. Our proposed system employs state-of-the-art computer vision techniques (YOLOv11 and ResNet50) to rapidly analyze images and videos from disaster sites, extracting critical information about building characteristics, including damage level of structural components and the extent of damage. Our experimental results show promising performance, with ResNet50 achieving 90.28% accuracy and an inference time of 1529ms per image on multiclass damage classification. This study contributes to the field of disaster management by offering a scalable, efficient, and objective tool for post-disaster analysis, potentially capable of transforming how communities and authorities respond to and learn from catastrophic events.