Many global development agencies self-report their project outcomes, often relying on subjective data that is collected sporadically and communicated months later. These reports often highlight successes and downplay challenges. Instrumented monitoring via distributed data collection platforms may provide crucial evidence to help inform the sector and public on the effectiveness of aid, and the on-going challenges. This paper presents the process of designing and validating an integrated sensor platform with cellular-to-internet reporting purposely targeted at global development programs. The integrated hardware platform has been applied to water, sanitation, energy and infrastructure interventions and validated through laboratory calibration and field observations. Presented here are two examples: a water pump and a household water filter, wherein field observations agreed with the data algorithm with a linear fit slope of between 0.91 and 1, and an r-squared of between 0.36 and 0.39, indicating a wide confidence OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2013, 5 3289 interval but with low overall error (i.e., less than 0.5% in the case of structured field observations of water volume added to a household water filter) and few false negatives or false positives.

Thermoresponsive polymers, such as poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (PNIPAM), have been identified and used as cell culture substrates, taking advantage of the polymer’s lower critical solution temperature (LCST) to mechanically harvest cells. This technology bypasses the use of biochemical enzymes that cleave important cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions. In this study, the process of electrospinning is used to fabricate and characterize aligned PNIPAM nanofiber scaffolds that are biocompatible and thermoresponsive. Nanofiber scaffolds produced by electrospinning possess a 3D architecture that mimics native extracellular matrix, providing physical and chemical cues to drive cell function and phenotype. We present a factorial design of experiments (DOE) approach to systematically determine the effects of different electrospinning process parameters on PNIPAM nanofiber diameter and alignment. Results show that high molecular weight PNIPAM can be successfully electrospun into both random and uniaxially aligned nanofiber mats with similar fiber diameters by simply altering the speed of the rotating mandrel collector from 10,000 to 33,000 RPM. PNIPAM nanofibers were crosslinked with OpePOSS, which was verified using FTIR. The mechanical properties of the scaffolds were characterized using dynamic mechanical analysis, revealing an order of magnitude difference in storage modulus (MPa) between cured and uncured samples. In summary, cross-linked PNIPAM nanofiber scaffolds were determined to be stable in aqueous culture, biocompatible, and thermoresponsive, enabling their use in diverse cell culture applications.

An important class of mobile manipulation problems are "move-to-grasp" problems where a mobile robot must navigate to and pick up an object. One of the distinguishing features of this class of tasks is its coarse-to-fine structure. Near the beginning of the task, the robot can only sense the target object coarsely or indirectly and make gross motion toward the object. However, after the robot has located and approached the object, the robot must finely control its grasping contacts using precise visual and haptic feedback. This paper proposes that move-to-grasp problems are naturally solved by a sequence of controllers that iteratively refines what ultimately becomes the final solution. This paper introduces the notion of a refining sequence of controllers and defines it in terms of controller goal regions and domains of attraction. Refining sequences are shown to be more robust than other types of controller sequences. In addition, a procedure for converting a refining sequence into an equivalent "parallelized" controller is proposed. Executing this parallelized controller confers all the advantages of iteratively executing the controllers sequentially. The approach is demonstrated in a move-to-grasp task where Robonaut, the NASA/JSC dexterous humanoid, is mounted on a mobile base and navigates to and picks up a geological sample box.

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Introduction: Nanoparticle evaluation within the pulmonary airspace has increasingly important implications for human health, with growing interest from drug delivery, environmental, and toxicology fields. While there have been widespread investigations of nanoparticle physiochemical properties following many routes of administration, nanoparticle behavior at the air-liquid interface (ALI) is less well-characterized.Methods: In this work, we fabricate two formulations of poly(ethylene)-glycol diacrylate (PEGDA)-based model nanoparticles to establish an in vitro workflow allowing evaluation of nanoparticle charge effects at the ALI.Results and Discussion: Both cationic and anionic PEGDA formulations were synthesized with similar hydrodynamic diameters around ∼225 nm and low polydispersity, with expected surface charges corresponding with the respective functional co-monomer. We find that both formulations are readily nebulized from an aqueous suspension in a commercial Aeroneb® Lab Nebulizer, but the aqueous delivery solution served to slightly increase the overall hydrodynamic and geometric size of the cationic particle formulation. However, nanoparticle loading at 50 μg/ml of either formulation did not influence the resultant aerosol diameter from the nebulizer. To assess aerosol delivery in vitro, we designed a 3D printed adapter capable of ensuring aerosol delivery to transwell 24-well culture plates. Nanoparticle uptake by macrophages was compared between traditional cell culture techniques and that of air-liquid interface-cultured macrophages following aerosol delivery. Cell viability was unaffected by nanoparticle delivery using either method. However, only traditional cell culture methods demonstrated significant uptake that was dependent on the nanoparticle surface charge. Concurrently, air-liquid interface culture resulted in lower metabolic activity of macrophages than those in traditional cell culture, leading to lower overall nanoparticle uptake at air-liquid interface. Overall, this work demonstrates that base-material similarities between both particle formulations provide an expected consistency in aerosol delivery regardless of the nanoparticle surface charge and provides an important workflow that enables a holistic evaluation of aerosolizable nanoparticles.