A frame support apparatus and coupling device for use with an ambulatory system and method of fabrication thereof. In one embodiment an ambulatory system having a frame support is provided. The ambulatory system includes a first side frame having a front portion and a rear portion, a second side frame having a front portion and a rear portion and a frame support coupled between the first side frame and the second side frame. The frame support includes a first cross-member having a first end and a second end, the first end pivotably coupled to a coupler. The system further includes a second cross-member having a first end and a second end, the first end of the second cross-member coupled to the coupler. Wherein the first end of the second cross-member is maintained in a substantially fixed position relative to the coupler.

The present invention relates to ambulatory systems and, more particular, to a frame support apparatus and coupling device for use with an ambulatory system and method of fabrication thereof.
Because wheelchairs must obviously have a high degree of stability for remaining upright when, for example, their users traverse sloped surfaces or effect rapid turns, traditional wheelchairs with fixed wheelbase dimensions are designed with suitably large wheelbase dimensions. A wheelchair with fixed wheelbase dimensions is an impediment to wheelchair users in many contexts. For example, maneuvering into small washrooms, around cramped office quarters, and through interior doors of most homes often makes access impossible. According to a survey by xe2x80x9cIndependent Livingxe2x80x9d, it costs an average of $8000 to make an average home wheelchair accessible.
Another problem relating to excessive width of a standard wheelchair""s wheelbase dimensions relates to air travel. Wheelchairs of standard dimension will not pass down an airliner aisle. This necessitates the transfer from one""s regular wheelchair to one of the airline""s uncomfortable and humiliating xe2x80x9cpeople dollies.xe2x80x9d
These problems have been recognized, and attempts have been made to address the problem. There are, for example, wheelchairs the wheel base of which can be adjusted in width. However, such chairs as are adjustable in length and/or width are designed for incremental and semi-permanent adjustments, not for ad hoc, easily reversible, on-the-fly adjustments as for temporarily dealing with obstacles which either can only be, or can more easily be traversed by a narrower wheelchair.
There exists a need among wheelchair users (of which inventor, Richard Rogers, is one) for a wheelchair (1) which adjusts in wheelbase dimensions; and (2) is adjustable on-the-fly, by the user alone to a width no greater than the seat. Despite the hundreds of wheelchair designs on the market, or depicted in wheelchair related patents, not one appears to address these objectives in combination.
It is important to note that the design for the base of the wheelchair of the present invention has application beyond the field of wheelchairs. The novel expandable/retractable base design could be incorporated into any number of wheeled vehicles, carts, automobiles or other equipment for which it would be advantageous to provide an adjustable wheelbase, the operation of which need not affect the overlying remainder of the vehicles, etc. One example of an application of the present design which is extremely far afield of the wheelchair art would be that of an industrial crane. An expansive wheelbase is desirable for most cranes. However, the wheelbase dimensions are quite limited for a vehicle-based crane which must travel by roadways. The traditional solution for providing a more stable base is to use outriggers. This, however, impedes ready movement of the crane about a work site once the outriggers are extended. Use of the subject base design would address this problem, as will be apparent following an exposition of the present design and its operation.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a novel and unobvious vehicular chassis the wheelbase dimensions of which are adjustable with respect to width.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel and unobvious wheelchair which provides for the adjustment of wheel base dimensions with respect to width.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel and unobvious wheelchair which permits on-the-fly adjustment of the width of the wheelbase.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel and unobvious wheelchair which permits on-the-fly, adjustment of the width of the wheelbase solely through application of compressive or expansive force to the wheels. It is another object of the present invention to provide a ambulatory system that overcomes some of the deficiencies of current systems which may require such functions as expanding and contracting in increments effected by complex and semi-permanent adjustments between uses of the chairs which may lead to very unstable frame characteristics.
In satisfaction of these and related objectives, the present invention provides a novel design for a vehicular chassis the wheelbase dimensions of which are adjustable. The preferred embodiment of the present invention is as part of a wheelchair which permits its user to contract the wheelbase for traversing narrow passageways or fitting into small spaces.
According to one aspect of the present invention, a frame support apparatus for an ambulatory device is provided. The frame support includes a first cross-member having a first end and a second end wherein the first end coupled to a couple and a second cross-member having a first end and a second end wherein the first end of the second cross-member coupled to the coupler. The first cross-member of the device is maintained substantially coplanar to the second cross-member.
According to another aspect of the present invention a coupling device for a frame support operable to be used in association with an ambulatory system is provided. The coupling device includes an upper plate having at least one pivot location and a lower plate positioned at a distance from the upper plate, wherein the lower plate is substantially parallel to the upper plate. The coupling device further includes the upper plate and the lower plate operable to couple a first member having a first end and a second end wherein the first end positioned between the upper plate and the lower plate and wherein the upper plate and the lower plate are operable to couple a second member having a first end and a second end. The coupling device is further operable to couple the first end of the second member between the upper plate and the lower plate such that the first cross member and the second cross member are maintained substantially co-planar.
According to another aspect of the present invention, an ambulatory system having a frame support is provided. The ambulatory system includes a first side frame having a front portion and a rear portion, a second side frame having a front portion and a rear portion and a frame support coupled between the first side frame and the second side frame. The frame support includes a first cross-member having a first end and a second end wherein the first end pivotably coupled to a coupler and a second cross-member having a first end and a second end wherein the first end of the second cross-member coupled to the coupler. The frame support further includes the first end of the second cross-member maintained in a substantially fixed position relative to the coupler.
According to another aspect of the present invention, a method of manufacturing a frame support for and ambulatory system is provided. The method includes providing a first cross-member having a first end and a second end, coupling the first end of the first cross-member to a coupler, providing a second cross-member having a first end and a second end, coupling the first end of the second cross-member to the coupler. The method further includes maintaining the first cross-member and the second cross-member substantially coplanar.
Additional technical advantages should be readily apparent from the drawings, description, and claims.

Frame support apparatus and coupling device for use with an ambulatory system and method of fabrication thereof


A method of producing a string of multiple cleansing net packages for cleaning and massaging the back of a person taking a bath includes the steps of mounting looped net packages of even or odd numbers onto a U-shaped bracket; and tying a pull loop to the middle of the front portions of the top and the bottom looped net packages; turning the top or/and the bottom looped net packages half turn around clockwisely, depending on the net packages being of an even or odd number; and then binding the middles of the front portions of every two consecutive looped net packages together exclusively and so on so forth, starting from the top or the second looped net packages; and then binding the middles of the rear portions of every two consecutive looped net packages exclusively together and so on so forth, starting from the top or the second looped net package, depending on the looped net packages being of an even or odd number; and then turning clockwisely all the looped net packages on the bracket 1/4 turn around; afterwards, the front and rear portions of each looped net packages on the bracket are bound together; at last, the looped net packages on the bracket are removed therefrom to obtain a string of multiple cleansing net packages.

The present invention relates to a method of producing a string of multiple cleansing net packages wherein looped net packages of even or odd number are mounted onto a U-shaped bracket one on top of the other in a serial relationship and a pull loop is attached to the top and bottom looped net packages at the riddle of the front portions of both the looped net packages. Then both the top and bottom net packages are turned in a clockwise direction in a half turn around the bracket if the net packages are of an even number, and only the bottom net package is turned in a half turn around if the net packages are odd numbered. Next, the middle of the front portions of every two consecutive looped net packages and the middle of the rear portions of every two neighboring looped net packages, counting down on from the second looped package disposed just under the top net package, on the bracket are bound together exclusively by threads if they are even numbered; and the top net package is left free and every two of those net packages therebelow are bound together at their front portions, and the middle of the rear portions of every two net packages on the bracket are bound together by threads if they are of an odd number. Afterwards, all the looped net packages on the bracket are turned 1/4 turn around; and the middle of the front and rear portions of each looped net package are tied together. At the last stage, the looped net packages are taken off the bracket to form a string of multiple cleansing net packages.
The method of producing strings of multiple cleansing net packages of the present invention uses a U-shaped bracket onto which are vertically mounted a number of looped net packages in serial so as to effectively reduce the necessary working space in one aspect; and the looped net packages are turned into a string of multiple tiny net packages in pairs so that they can be extended by pulling two pull loops at the ends thereof into wavy shapes, better fitting the shape of the back of a person taking a bath in another aspect.

Method of producing a string of multiple cleansing net packages


The present invention is a cargo inspection system, employing a radiation source, capable of scanning vehicles and/or cargo in a wide range of sizes, including conventional imaging areas as well as taller and bulkier enclosures at sufficiently optimal efficacy and overall throughput. In one embodiment, the present invention is a multiple pass inspection method for inspecting vehicles and their cargo, comprising a first pass scan, wherein said first pass scan includes moving a radiation source at a suitable scanning distance, rotating a radiation source at a suitable scanning angle, and moving said radiation source along an object under inspection.

Trade fraud, smuggling, and terrorism have increased the need for non-intrusive inspection systems such as X-ray, gamma ray and linear accelerator (LINAC)-based systems for inspecting cargo, trucks, passenger vehicles, and other transportation systems, which efficiently provide for the movement of commodities across borders. In addition, they provide opportunities for the inclusion of contraband items such as weapons, explosives, illicit drugs and precious metals. In particular, non-intrusive inspection systems are used in applications ranging from curbside inspection of parked vehicles to scanning in congested or high traffic ports. The term port, while generally accepted as referring to a seaport, also applies to a land border crossing or any port of entry.
The size of the cargo or vehicle under inspection generally determines the size of the imaging system and thus, in general the bigger the object under inspection, the bigger the inspection system.
With an increase in global commerce, port authorities require additional sea berths and associated container storage space. Additional space requirements are typically met by the introduction of higher container stacks, an expansion of ports along the coastline, or by moving inland. However, these scenarios are not typically feasible. Space is generally in substantial demand and short supply. Existing ports operate under a routine that is not easily modified without causing disruption to the entire infrastructure of the port. The introduction of new procedures or technologies often requires a substantial change in existing port operating procedures in order to contribute to the port's throughput, efficiency, and operability.
With limited space available and a need to expand for increased inspection performance, finding suitable space to accommodate additional inspection facilities along the normal process route remains difficult. Moreover, systems incorporating the high energy X-ray sources, or linear accelerators (LINAC), require either a major investment in shielding material (generally in the form of concrete formations or buildings) or the use of exclusion zones (dead space) around the building itself. In either case, the building footprint is significant depending upon the size of cargo containers to be inspected. Thus, the continual conflict is between making the system as small as possible while capable of inspecting a varying range of objects, including large objects.
A typical size range for objects under inspection includes vehicles as small as compact automobiles (or even smaller) to large containers carrying trucks. Thus, the object under inspection typically ranges from a compact automobile as small as 1.2 meters wide by 1.2 meters high to a large truck that is up to 3 meters wide and 4.6 meters high.
Therefore, there is a need for a relatively compact inspection system that produces at least one image of objects of varying sizes. What is also needed is a relatively compact inspection system that is capable of producing an image of an object in a single, first-pass image scan with no corner cut-off for smaller vehicles.
What is also needed is a relatively compact inspection system that is capable of producing an image of a large object in a multiple pass image scan in situations where a first pass image scan does not produce an image of a large object under inspection without corner cut off.
What is also needed is a relatively compact multiple pass inspection system that maintains overall inspection throughput.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.


A fault condition monitoring apparatus for use with a fuse cutout includes a housing operable to be supported by the fuse cutout. The housing has first and second contacts operable to make electrical contact with fuse contacts on the fuse cutout when the housing is supported by the fuse cutout. A current sensor is mounted inside the housing and is connected to the first and second contacts. A signaling device is coupled to the current sensor and is operable to cause a signal to be produced when current sensed by the current sensor meets a criterion.

1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to high voltage power distribution systems and more particularly to apparatus and methods for monitoring for a fault condition in such systems
2. Description of Related Art
Power distribution transformers in a high voltage power distribution system are susceptible to internal and external faults. Internal faults may occur due to gradual degradation and/or sudden breakdown of insulating properties of internal structures of the transformer resulting from thermal, electrical and mechanical stresses. The loss of insulating properties of internal structures can lead to a short circuit within the transformer, creating an internal arcing fault. Such fault may occur in a winding of the transformer, for example. A short circuit of this type usually causes burning of the winding, ultimately resulting in an open circuit in the primary winding, whether the fault was initiated in the primary or secondary winding. When such a fault occurs, a fuse, normally installed in series between the high voltage line and the transformer, blows, interrupting current flow to the transformer. Attempts to re-energize the transformer by replacing the fuse can result in further arcing within the transformer and this can rapidly increase the pressure inside the transformer to the point of explosion where burning oil and shards of th transformer casing may be rapidly expelled at the risk of injuring persons and property nearby.
External faults may occur due to insulation failures in a secondary circuit connected to the secondary winding of the transformer. External faults are normally detectable by inspection of the secondary circuit. Re-energizing a transformer having a fault in the secondary circuit do s not normally cause an increase in pressure inside the transformer sufficient to create an explosive threat. Internal faults are thus normally more dangerous than external faults.
Various mechanical devices have been devised to detect internal faults, most of which rely on pressure build-up caused by arcing to activate a mechanism. Such devices are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,078,078, 5,623,891, and 6,429,662, for example. Each of these devices employs an efficient but relatively elaborate mechanism to operate a signal device in response to a pressure surge in a transformer caused by an internal fault.


A structure for attaching a stereoscopic camera to a vehicle, by which a plurality of cameras are attached to a body frame of the vehicle in order to stereoscopically capture images surrounding the vehicle; and the same structure includes a lateral stay for coupling the plurality of cameras with each other; and brackets for fixing the lateral stay or the plurality of cameras on the body frame, which are provided at a plurality of points, spaced from each other, of the lateral stay, or at the plurality of cameras fixed on the lateral stay; wherein the rigidity of at least a part of the brackets is lower than the bending rigidity of the lateral stay.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structure for mounting a camera to a vehicle, and in particular it relates to a structure for attaching a stereoscopic camera system for a vehicle by which a plurality of cameras are attached to a body frame of the vehicle in order to stereoscopically capture images of the area surrounding the vehicle.
2. Description of Related Art
A technology has been developed, which captures the images of an area surrounding a vehicle while the vehicle is running and when it stops, and the technology utilizes the image information for traveling Support, etc. As one of the representative technologies, a stereoscopic camera technology is known which stereoscopically recognizes the surrounding images on the basis of images captured by two cameras and grasps the positional relationship in front of and behind an object.
In such a structure for attaching a stereoscopic camera system, two cameras are attached to a vehicle body. One camera is attached on each end of a horizontally long lateral stay in order to prevent die optical axes of both cameras from deviating due to a distortion of a body of the vehicle, and only the middle part of the lateral stay is fixed in the body (For example, refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. 2001-88623). That is, since the optical axes of the respective cameras are maintained so as to be constant by the lateral stay, and both the end portions of the lateral stay are not fixed on the vehicle, no bending stress is applied onto the lateral stay, resulting from distortion, etc., of the vehicle body.
However, since, with the above-described attaching structure, two cameras, which are heavy devices, are supported on the vehicle only at the middle part of the lateral stay, it is difficult to suppress looseness and shaking of the cameras.
In particular, when there is no way other than disposing both the cameras with a spacing secured therebetween in order to secure focal distances of the cameras (in this case, it is necessary to lengthen the lateral stay) and when cameras are installed at the front side of a vehicle subjected to large vibrations, there is a concern that looseness and shaking of the cameras are further increased.

Structure for attaching stereoscopic camera in vehicle


An ink tank capable of optically detecting ink remaining in an ink accommodation chamber with high precision is provided. A printing apparatus, a method of manufacturing the ink tank, and a method of detecting ink remaining in the ink tank are also provided. Radiated light (11) projected into an ink accommodation chamber (5A) excites an illuminant material (10) contained in ink in the ink accommodation chamber (5A) to illuminate. Based on light (12) produced by the illuminant material (10), the amount of ink remaining in the ink accommodation chamber (5A) is detected.

Among printing systems to print images including characters on a print medium such as paper and thin plastic sheets (e.g., OHP), there is a liquid printing system that performs contact or noncontact printing on a print surface of the print medium by applying a liquid ink to the print medium.
An ink jet printing system in particular has many advantages, such as a high speed printing, an ease with which a color printing can be made, a capability to print on print mediums such as paper and cloth, small noise, and a capability to produce high quality printed images.
As an ink supply source for a variety of printing apparatus including the ink jet printing apparatus, a cartridge type ink tank is employed. Most of the ink cartridges employed are detachable from the printing apparatus.
The printing apparatus has a mechanism to detect ink remaining in the cartridge to prevent an inadvertent interruption of the printing operation that would otherwise occur when the cartridge runs out of ink. The mechanisms for detecting the presence of the ink remaining in the cartridge include one using a means of detecting a conduction state between electrodes in the cartridge and one using a means for optically detecting ink.
Particularly, the means for optically detecting the presence or absence of ink is simple in construction and does not require a large device and therefore has found many applications.
As an example of such a mechanism for optically detecting a remaining ink, a mechanism using a prism is proposed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,616,929 and 6,361,136. The remaining ink detection mechanism using a prism has a light emitting portion and a light receiving portion on the printing apparatus side and, on the ink cartridge side, a prism reflection surface made of a light transmitting material such as polypropylene. When the ink in the cartridge runs out and an interface of the prism changes from ink to air, light from the light emitting portion on the printing apparatus side is totally reflected by the prism reflection surface and detected by the light receiving portion on the printing apparatus side. Based on a change in optical reflection intensity, whether or not there is an ink in the cartridge is determined.
The mechanism that detects the presence or absence of ink in the ink cartridge according to a change in optical reflection intensity, however, has a possibility of the following problem.
When an output of the light emitting portion is increased to improve an accuracy of detecting the remaining ink, unwanted, irregularly reflected rays and scattered rays are produced from the light emitted by the light emitting portion in addition to the reflected light that needs to be detected. These unwanted rays may reach the light receiving portion at a relatively large intensity, making the precise ink detection difficult. Setting high an output threshold for detecting the presence or absence of ink to cope with these irregularly reflected rays and scattered rays of relatively large intensity, however, may pose another problem of a degraded precision of the remaining ink detection and a detection delay.

Ink tank for liquid printing apparatus, method of manufacturing same, liquid printing apparatus with same, and method of detecting remaining ink


A mixture of epoxy resins such as a semi-solid triglycidyl ether of tris (hydroxyphenyl) methane and a low viscosity bisphenol A glycidyl ether and a cationic photoinitiator such as a diaryliodonium salt is cured by irradiating with a dosage of electron beams from about 50 to about 150 kGy, forming a cross-linked epoxy resin polymer.

For the most part the polymerization or curing of monomers to high molecular weight or highly crosslinked polymers by means of high energy electron beam radiation has been limited to a few general types of monomers. Monomers and oligomers containing acrylate and methacrylate groups have been extensively used as electron beam curable coatings and adhesives. Monomers and oligomers containing carbon-carbon double bonds, such as vinyls, allenes, and dienes, are also known to be electron beam curable. These monomers and oligomers react by means of free radical mechanisms and under high energy ionizing radiation such as electron beam require no free radical initiators. However, these resins tend to be toxic and expensive. Of greater concern is the fact that the polymers produced by crosslinking these materials are of limited value for many applications. Such drawbacks include low glass transition temperature (or low service temperature), low mechanical properties such as strength and modulus, and high shrinkage when cured.
What is desired is a means by which higher performance resins can be processed at any temperature, cured by means of electron beam radiation, and still achieve the same thermal and mechanical properties as when thermally cured. A recent patent by Aerospatiale (Eur. Pat. Appl EP 499,542) described a process by which bismaleimides can be cured at ambient temperature by electron beam radiation to yield materials with good mechanical properties and glass transition temperatures in excess of 300.degree. C. Coreactive diluents were added to the bismaleimides to make them processable at lower temperatures.
Epoxy resins are much more widely used than bismaleimides although their thermal properties are not quite as high. Epoxies are produced in hundreds of millions of pounds annually and are widely used in a variety of applications (L. V. McAdams and J. A. Gannon, "Epoxy Resins", Encyclopedia of Polymer Science and Technology, John Wiley & Sons). A method of curing epoxy resins by means of electron beam radiation would therefore be of considerable value. Visible-ultraviolet curing of thin films of cycloaliphatic epoxies using a cationic photoinitiator is well known (J. V. Crivello, Advances in Polymer Science, Vol. 61, p. 1, 1984).
However, these processes are limited to thin coatings due to the low penetration of visible-ultraviolet radiation. Thermal and mechanical properties of these materials are low and curing is incomplete. There has been little reported success with the electron beam curing of epoxies. Crivello (J. V. Crivello, M. Fan, and D. Bi:, Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Vol. 44, p.9, 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 5,260,349) has recently disclosed a series of highly reactive cycloaliphatic silicone epoxies which are electron beam curable in the presence of certain cationic photoinitiators (diaryliodonium and triarylsulfonium salts). Crivello further reported that cycloaliphatic epoxies and conventional bisphenol A based epoxies cured poorly under the same conditions. Massive doses of electron beam radiation were required. Others (R. S Davidson and S. A. Wilkinson, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobioiogy A:Chemistry, Vol. 58, p.123, 1991) have also reported that examples of these same types of photoinitiators do not lead to complete electron beam curing of certain cycloaliphatic epoxies. It would appear that in some cases cationic photoinitiators react upon exposure to high energy electron beam radiation to produce cationic species which are capable of propagating cationic polymerization. However, degree of curing varies considerably.

High energy electron beam curing of epoxy resin systems incorporating cationic photoinitiators


A sheet finishing apparatus for finishing a sheet, on which an image has been formed, conveyed from an image forming apparatus, the sheet finishing apparatus includes: a sheet ejecting member for ejecting the sheet after finishing; and an exit tray for receiving the sheet ejected by the sheet ejecting member after finishing is conducted. The exit tray includes a movable exit tray member on which the sheet is stacked, and a stationary exit tray member for supporting the movable exit tray member. The movable exit tray member has a sheet stacking surface on which the sheet is stacked, and a stopper portion provided adjacent to the sheet ejecting member to bring an edge of the sheet into contact with the stopper portion. The movable exit tray member is pivotally supported around a supporting shaft provided on a leading edge portion of the stationary exit tray member. An edge portion of the movable exit tray member, which is adjacent to the sheet ejecting means, can be moved upward or downward according to the number of sheets stacked on the movable exit tray.

The present invention relates to a sheet finishing apparatus in which sheets, on which images are formed by an image forming apparatus such as an electrophotographic copier, a printer, a printing machine, or the like, are received, and finishing processings such as stapling by a stapler, shifting processing, and similar processing, are conducted, and then, the sheets are ejected onto an exit tray by a sheet ejecting means.
A sheet finishing apparatus, which is called a finisher, is used as an apparatus in which a plurality of sheets, on which images have been recorded and which are delivered from the image forming apparatus, are aligned for each copy volume and stapled by a stapler.
This finisher is connected to an image forming apparatus main body such as a copier, a printer, or a similar apparatus, in its function, and is driven corresponding to sequence operations of a copying, or printing process.
Accordingly, for an image forming apparatus by which a large number of sheets with images are processed at a high speed, a finisher is necessary which can follow the processing speed of the apparatus for achieving its functions, and by which a large number of sheets can be processed at a high a-rs speed.
Proposals for this type finisher in which high speed processing can be conducted, are disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection Nos. 142359/1985, 158463/1985, 239169/1987, 288002/1987, 267667/1988, 276691/1990, and Japanese Patent Publication No. 41991/1993.
Sheets, on which images have been recorded, conveyed from the image forming apparatus main body, are sequentially stacked, being aligned, in an intermediate stacker. After sheets have been stacked for each one set of sheets, sheet finishing such as stapling, or the like, is conducted. The stapled set of sheets is put on a delivery belt provided in the bottom portion of the intermediate stacker and conveyed, held by a pair of upper and lower sheet delivery rollers, and delivered onto an exit tray.
A sheet finishing apparatus, described in Japanese Patent Application No. 42728/1996, (which matured into Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 235069/1977), is provided with a stapler and an exit tray corresponding the stapler. A sheet finishing apparatus, described in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 76190/1995, is provided with 2 staplers and 2 exit trays corresponding to the staplers.
In a conventional sheet finishing apparatus, sheets, on which images are formed, conveyed from the image forming apparatus, are finishing processed by a sheet finishing processing means (staplers, shift means, bookbinding means, punching means, etc.), and after that, delivered onto an exit tray by a sheet ejecting means, slide down along an exit tray surface arranged being inclined, and trailing edge portions of the sheets come into contact with a stopper and stop. In this connection, a sheet, for which finishing is not necessary, is directly delivered onto fixed exit tray, slides down along the exit tray surface arranged being inclined, and the trailing edge portion of the sheet comes into contact with the stopper surface and stops.
Problems in the conventional sheet finishing apparatus will be listed below.
(1) As the number of sheets delivered and stacked on the exit tray means, on which sheets finishing processed by the sheet finishing apparatus are stacked, are increased, the height of the stacked sheets is increased. Accordingly, a sheet height detecting means is provided so that sheets do not interfere with a delivery path, and the exit tray means is controlled to be lowered so that the height of sheet stacking surface is constant. Accordingly, a control system and mechanism become complicated.
(2) When finishing processed sheets are delivered by the sheet ejecting means, and stacked on the sheet stacking surface of the exit tray means having an inclined surface in which the leading edge portion is higher, the leading edge portion of the large sized sheet projects and hangs down from the leading edge portion of the exit tray means, and further, is sliding-contacted with a succeeding delivery sheet and pushed out, resulting in possibility of sheet falling down from the sheet stacking surface of the exit tray means. When the sheet stacking surface is enlarged for preventing the sheet falling down, the size of the sheet finishing apparatus is increased, resulting in a problem in which the mounting space is increased.
(3) Also when no-finishing processed sheet is stacked on the stacking surface of the exit tray means (non-sort tray) of the sheet finishing apparatus, there is a problem of sheet falling down caused by hanging down of the leading edge portion of the sheet, and a problem in which the leading edge portion of the hanged down sheet contacts an elevating exit tray provided below it.
A sheet finishing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 276691/1990, is structured in such a manner that 2 fur-brushes are rotatably provided and the leading edge portion of the fur-brush is in contact with a guide plate. A sheet finishing apparatus disclosed in the sheet accommodating apparatus in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 214565/1989, is structured in such a manner that a paddle wheel, on which a plurality of blade members are radially provided, is rotated for aligning the sheet. A sheet finishing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 116168/1988, is structured in such a manner that a portion of a belt, whose lower end portion is in contact with an intermediate tray, is wound around a lower roller of a delivery roller pair, the belt is rotated with the lower roller, and causes the sheet conveyed on the intermediate tray to contact with a stopper.
A sheet finishing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 127556/1989, has a first and a second sheet conveyance paths which convey sheets sent from the image forming means to the sheet finishing means, a conveyance direction switching means for switching the first and the second sheet conveyance paths, and a control means for controlling the conveyance direction switching means so that the sheet is sent to the second conveyance path corresponding to the operation of the sheet finishing apparatus.
The conventional sheet finishing apparatus has one exit tray which can go up and down, for one sheet finishing processing means (a stapler, a shift means, a bookbinding means, punching means, etc.). The exit tray has a fixed bottom surface on which sheets are stacked, and the overall exit tray is driven upward and downward by a driving source corresponding to the number of sheets stacked on the fixed bottom surface of the exit tray. Accordingly, the maximum number of sheets accommodated on one exit tray is limited.
Further, when sheets outputted in different image forming modes, (for example, sheets outputted in a copy mode, and sheets outputted in a printer mode), are successively delivered onto the exit tray after respectively finishing processed, sheets in both modes are mixed on the exit tray, and a problem occurs in which sheet sorting is difficult.
Furthermore, when sheets processed in different finishing processing modes, (for example, stapling processed sheets, and shifting processed sheets ), are successively delivered on the exit tray, sheets in both modes are mixed on the exit tray, resulting in a problem of difficult sheet sorting.


An image forming apparatus has a structure in which a toner image formed in an electrophotographic process is transferred from an intermediate transfer belt to a member to be transferred. The apparatus includes a secondary transfer roller that becomes a pressure contact state with respect to the intermediate transfer belt to make it perform a transfer process and can move between the pressure contact state and a separated state, and a press and separation driving device for driving the secondary transfer roller to become the pressure contact state and the separated state. The pressure contact state or the separated state of the secondary transfer roller is detected in accordance with a variation of an output of an IDC sensor for detecting a state of a bare surface of the intermediate transfer belt.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as a copying machine, a printer, an MFP, a facsimile machine, or a multifunction device thereof, and a method for detecting a pressure contact or separated state of a transfer unit in the image forming apparatus. For example, the present invention can be utilized for detecting a pressure contact or separated state of a secondary transfer roller with respect to an intermediate transfer belt.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventionally, a copying machine of an electrophotographic method, a printer, a facsimile machine, or an image forming apparatus such as a multifunction device called an MFP (Multi Function Peripherals) forms images by developing an electrostatic latent image formed on a photosensitive drum so as to form a toner image, which is transferred to an intermediate transfer belt as a primary transfer and further transferred to a paper sheet as a secondary transfer, which is fixed. In order to perform the secondary transfer of the toner image from the intermediate transfer belt to the paper sheet, there is provided a secondary transfer roller that becomes a pressure contact state with respect to the intermediate transfer belt that is an image carrier.
In this image forming apparatus, the secondary transfer roller can move with respect to the intermediate transfer belt between the pressure contact state and the separated state. Although the secondary transfer roller is in the pressure contact state in a normal image forming (printing) state, it is usually in the separated state while the image forming process is not performed.
In another conventional structure, a test toner patch (an image stabilizer pattern) is formed on the intermediate transfer belt or the photosensitive drum, and a state of the toner patch is detected by an IDC sensor that is a density detector so that conditions for forming an image are adjusted. In this case too, the secondary transfer roller is usually set to be in the separated state so that the secondary transfer roller or the like does not become dirty with the toner.
Furthermore, a press and separation driving device is provided for moving the secondary transfer roller, and an optical sensor such as a photointerrupter is used for detecting whether or not the secondary transfer roller is switched securely to the separated state or the pressure contact state by the press and separation driving device.
However, if the photointerrupter is used for detecting the pressure contact state and the separated state, the number of components increases, which causes increase of cost. On the other hand, Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 2004-264455 discloses a device that does not include a special-purpose photointerrupter, but a photointerrupter for detecting a paper jam is also used for the above-mentioned purpose.
However, a single photointerrupter is shared for detecting timings of paper arrival and pass and for detecting the pressed or separated state of the secondary transfer roller in the above-mentioned conventional device. Therefore, it is necessary to use a special pre-transfer sensor flag for detecting arrival and pass timings of a paper sheet, so an operation of detecting a paper jam or the like may be subject to some constraints.

Image forming apparatus and method for detecting separated state of transfer unit

Konica Minolta Business Technologies, Inc.


A computer-implemented method of machine-learning is described that includes obtaining a dataset of virtual scenes. The dataset of virtual scenes belongs to a first domain. The method further includes obtaining a test dataset of real scenes. The test dataset belongs to a second domain. The method further includes determining a third domain. The third domain is closer to the second domain than the first domain in terms of data distributions. The method further includes learning a domain-adaptive neural network based on the third domain. The domain-adaptive neural network is a neural network configured for inference of spatially reconfigurable objects in a real scene. Such a method constitutes an improved method of machine learning with a dataset of scenes including spatially reconfigurable objects.

A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PIM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise. The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systèmes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
In this context and other contexts, machine-learning is gaining wide importance.
The following papers relate to this field and are referred to hereunder:    [1] A. Gaidon, Q. Wang, Y. Cabon, and E. Vig, "Virtual worlds as proxy for multi-object tracking analysis," in CVPR, 2016.    [2] S. R. Richter, V. Vineet, S. Roth, and V. Koltun, "Playing for data: Ground truth from computer games," in ECCV, 2016.    [3] M. Johnson-Roberson, C. Barto, R. Mehta, S. N. Sridhar, K. Rosaen, and R. Vasudevan, "Driving in the matrix: Can virtual worlds replace human-generated annotations for real world tasks?" in ICRA, 2017.    [4] S. R. Richter, Z. Hayder, and V. Koltun, "Playing for benchmarks," in ICCV, 2017.    [5] S. Hinterstoisser, V. Lepetit, P. Wohlhart, and K. Konolige, "On pretrained image features and synthetic images for deep learning," in arXiv:1710.10710, 2017.    [6] D. Dwibedi, I. Misra, and M. Hebert, "Cut, paste and learn: Surprisingly easy synthesis for instance detection," in ICCV, 2017.    [7] J. Tobin, R. Fong, A. Ray, J. Schneider, W. Zaremba, and P. Abbeel, "Domain randomization for transferring deep neural networks from simulation to the real world," in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017.    [8] J. Tremblay, A. Prakash, D. Acuna, M. Brophy, V. Jampani, C. Anil, T. To, E. Cameracci, S. Boochoon, and S. Birchfield, "Training deep networks with synthetic data: Bridging the reality gap by domain randomization," in CVPR Workshop on Autonomous Driving (WAD), 2018.    [9] K. He, G. Gkioxari, P. Dollar, and R. Girshick. "Mask r-cnn". arXiv:1703.06870, 2017.    [10] J. Deng, A. Berg, S. Satheesh, H. Su, A. Khosla, and L. Fei-Fei. ILSVRC-2017, 2017. URL http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2017/.    [11] Y. Chen, W. Li, and L. Van Gool. ROAD: Reality oriented adaptation for semantic segmentation of urban scenes. In CVPR, 2018.    [12] Y. Chen, W. Li, C. Sakaridis, D. Dai, and L. Van Gool. Domain adaptive Faster R-CNN for object detection in the wild. In CVPR, 2018.    [13] Y. Zou, Z. Yu, B. Vijaya Kumar, and J. Wang. Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation via class-balanced self-training. In ECCV, September 2018.    [14] A. Geiger, P. Lenz, and R. Urtasun, "Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite," in CVPR, 2012.    [15] A. Prakash, S. Boochoon, M. Brophy, D. Acuna, E. Cameracci, G. State, O. Shapira, and S. Birchfield. Structured domain randomization: Bridging the reality gap by contextaware synthetic data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10093, 2018.    [16] J. Deng, W. Dong, R. Socher, L.-J. Li, K. Li, and L. Fei-Fei. ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database. In CVPR09, 2009.    [17] T.-Y. Lin, M. Maire, S. Belongie, J. Hays, P. Perona, D. Ramanan, P. Dollar, and C. L. Zitnick. Microsoft COCO: Common objects in ′ context. In ECCV. 2014.    [18] Shaoqing Ren, Kaiming He, Ross B. Girshick, and Jian Sun. Faster R-CNN: towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. CoRR, abs/1506.01497, 2015.    [19] D. E. Rumelhart, G. E. Hinton, R. J. Williams, Learning internal representations by error propagation, Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986.    [20] Jun-Van Zhu, Taesung Park, Phillip Isola, and Alexei A. Efros. Unpaired image-to-image translation using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. CoRR, abs/1703.10593, 2017.    [21] M. Heusel, H. Ramsauer, T. Unterthiner, B. Nessler, and S. Hochreiter. Gans trained by a two time-scale update rule converge to a local nash equilibrium. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2017.    [22] C. Szegedy, W. Liu, Y. Jia, P. Sermanet, S. Reed, D. Anguelov, D. Erhan, V. Vanhoucke, and A. Rabinovich. Going deeper with convolutions. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 1-9, 2015.
Deep learning techniques have shown outstanding performances in several fields such as 2D/3D object recognition and detection, semantic segmentation, pose estimation, or motion capture (see [9, 10]). However, such techniques usually (1) require huge amounts of training data to perform at their full potential, and (2) often require expensive manual labeling (also known as annotation):
(1) Collecting hundreds of thousands of labeled data could, indeed, be very hard in several areas, such as the domain of manufacturing, health or indoor motion captures, because of data scarcity or confidentiality reasons. Publicly available datasets usually include objects of everyday life, which were labeled manually via crowdsourcing platforms (see [16, 17]).
(2) In addition to the data collection issue, labelization is very time-consuming. The annotation of the well-known ImageNet dataset (see [16]), in which, each image is labeled by "only" single label, lasted years. A pixel-wise labelling requires in average more than one hour per image. Also, manual annotation, could present several error and lack of accuracy. Some annotations require domain-specific know-how (e.g. manufacturing equipment labeling).
For all these reasons, exploiting virtual data to learn deep models has attracted increasing attention in recent years (see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15]). Virtual (also known as synthetic) data are computer-generated data that are created using a CAD or 3D modeling software rather than being generated by actual events. In fact, virtual data can be generated to meet very specific needs or conditions that are not available in existing (real) data. This can be useful when either privacy needs limit the availability or usage of the data or when the data needed for a test environment simply does not exist. Note that with virtual data, labeling comes cost-free and error-free.
However, the intrinsic domain difference between virtual and real data (also known as reality gap) could prevent the learned model to be competent for real world scenarios. This is mainly due to the overfitting problem, leading the network to learn details only present in virtual data and failing to generalize well and extract informative representation for real data.
One way that becomes recently prevalent, especially for recognition problems related to autonomous cars, is to collect photo-realistic virtual data which can be automatically annotated at a low cost, such as video game data.
For example, Richter et al. (see [2]) constructed a large scale synthetic urban scene dataset for semantic segmentation from the GTAV game. GTA-based data (see [2, 3, 4]) use a large number of assets to generate various realistic driving environments which can be automatically labeled at the pixel-level (˜25 K images). Such photo-realistic virtual data often do not exist for domains other than driving and urban context. For instance, existing virtual manufacturing environments are non-photo-realistic CAD-based environments (no video games exist for the manufacturing domain), Photo realism is not required by manufacturing specifications. Furthermore, it may be confusing to have shading and lightening in such virtual environments. Therefore, all efforts are concentrated to make semantically and geometrically accurate CAD models instead of photorealistic ones. Moreover, creating photo-realistic manufacturing environments for training purposes is not pertinent due to the high variability between the different plants and factories' layouts. Unlike, urban context, in which the urban scene has strong idiosyncrasies (e.g., the size and spatial relations of buildings, streets, cars, etc.), there is no "intrinsic" spatial structure for manufacturing scenes. Note, also, that some previous work, such as VKITTI (see [1]) creates a replica of the real-world driving scenes and thus were highly correlated with those original real data and lacked variability.
Moreover, even with a high-level of realism, it was not obvious how to effectively use photo-realistic data to train neural networks to operate on real data. Often, cross-domain adaptation components (see [11, 12, 13]) are used during training the neural network, to reduce the gap between virtual and real representation.
To sum up, photo-realistic virtual datasets require either carefully designed simulation environments or the existence of annotated real data as a starting point which is not feasible in many fields such as manufacturing.
To alleviate such difficulties, Tobin et al (see [7]) introduced the concept of Domain Randomization (DR), in which realistic rendering is avoided in favor of random variation. Their approach randomly varies the texture and color of the foreground object, the background image, the number of lights in the scene, the pose of the lights, the camera position, and the foreground objects. The goal is to close the reality gap by generating virtual data with sufficient variation that the network views real-world data as just another variation. Using DR, they trained a neural network to estimate the 3D world position of various shape-based objects with respect to a robotic arm fixed to a table. Recent work (see [8]) demonstrated the ability of DR to achieve state-of-the-art in 2D bounding box detection of cars in the real-world KITTI dataset (see [14]). However, DR requires a very large amount of data to train (˜100 K per object class) given the amount of variation, often the network finds it hard to learn the correct features, and the lack of context prevents DR from detecting small or occluded objects. In fact, the results of that work were limited to (1) larger cars which are (2) fully visible (KITTI Easy dataset). When used for complex inference tasks such as object detection, this approach requires sufficient pixels within the bounding box for the learned model to make a decision without the surrounding context. All these drawbacks were quantitatively confirmed in (see [15]).
To handle more challenging criteria (e.g. smaller cars, partial occlusion), the authors of [15] propose a variant of DR, in which, they leverage urban context information and the urban structure scene by placing objects randomly according to probability distributions that arise from the specific problem at hand (i.e. car detections in urban context) instead of a uniform probability distribution that was used in previous DR-based work.
Also, DR-based methods (see [5, 6, 7, 15]), mainly, focus on "easy" object classes, which have little intra-class variability (e.g. "car" class). Important intra-class variability could cause a significant performance drop of these approaches since the amount of variation to be taken into account, during data creation, could exponentially increase. This is the case of spatially reconfigurable objects, e.g. articulated objects.
Spatially reconfigurable objects or articulated objects are those that have components attached via joints and can move with respect to one another which could give each object type an infinity range of possible status.
The same problem could arise while dealing with multiple object classes (inter-class & intra-class variability).
Within this context, there is still a need for improved methods of machine learning with a dataset of scenes including spatially reconfigurable objects.


Hard errors in the memory array can be detected and corrected in real-time using reusable entries in an error status buffer. Data may be rewritten to a portion of a memory array and a register in response to a first error in data read from the portion of the memory array. The rewritten data may then be written from the register to an entry of an error status buffer in response to the rewritten data read from the register differing from the rewritten data read from the portion of the memory array.

1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to integrated circuits and, more particularly, to memory arrays in integrated circuits.
2. Description of the Related Art
In most static random access memory (SRAM) architectures, all of the SRAM cells corresponding to a selected row are written or read out together. Some specific SRAM implementations may selectively write to and read from a subset of the cells in the selected row. Errors occur when values of bits read from one or more of the SRAM cells do not correspond to the values that were intended to be stored in the SRAM cells. For example, an error occurs when a value of "1" is written to an SRAM cell, but a value of "0" is returned when the SRAM cell is subsequently read. This type of error is referred to as a "stuck-at-0" error if the error persists for an extended period. For another example, an error occurs when a value of "0" is written to an SRAM cell, but a value of "1" is returned when the SRAM cell is read. This type of error is referred to as a "stuck-at-1" error if the error persists for an extended period of time.
The errors may be characterized as soft errors or hard errors. Soft errors are intermittent errors that can be corrected by re-writing the faulty SRAM cell. Hard errors persist even after the faulty SRAM cell has been re-written. Hard errors therefore also are referred to as persistent errors or permanent errors. SRAM arrays are susceptible to hard errors that are produced during manufacturing or arise during the life cycle of the product. Some of the hard errors produced during manufacturing may be detected during a memory built-in self-test (MBIST) but other manufacturing errors, as well as errors that arise during the lifecycle of the product, may only be manifested at run time. To illustrate, if an SRAM implemented on a system-on-a-chip (SOC) is operated below its minimum voltage for reliable operation, or if random or environmental conditions affect the state of the SRAM cell, some of the cells in the SRAM may stop functioning correctly and may therefore produce errors even after the faulty SRAM cells have been re-written. The error may persist for an extended period of time. Hard errors of this sort can only be detected at runtime because they depend on the particular environmental conditions present when the SRAM array is being read or written.
Hard or soft errors can be detected using parity bits or error correction code (ECCs) that are stored when information such as a word (e.g., four bytes of data) or a group of bits is written to the SRAM array. For example, a parity bit may be stored along with the data bits in the SRAM array or stored somewhere outside the array in association with the SRAM array. The value of the parity bit may be compared to a parity value computed using a word read from a corresponding SRAM array. The same type of parity (either odd or even parity) is used for both the storage and parity generation logic based on the read out data bits. An error is detected when the stored parity value read out from the array does not match the parity value computed based on the read out data bits from the SRAM cells. Other techniques for detecting errors in the SRAM array include scrubbing and duplicating the SRAM array for comparison to the original SRAM array on each access.
Data may be re-written to the faulty SRAM cells in response to detecting an error, which may correct soft errors. However, hard errors cannot be corrected by re-writing the faulty SRAM cells. Instead, conventional techniques for detecting and correcting soft errors in SRAM cells may cause the processing device to continuously re-write the faulty SRAM cells without ever correcting the hard error and may even deleteriously affect the functionality of the processing device. To recover from a hard error, the processing device using the SRAM must be flushed and restarted after the faulty SRAM cells have been replaced. For example, if a memory built-in self-test (MBIST) detects a hard error in an SRAM, the row or column that includes the faulty SRAM cell may be replaced using redundant rows or columns. For another example, sub-blocks of SRAM cells that include the faulty SRAM cells may be replaced by mapping the indices of the faulty sub-blocks to spare sub-blocks in the SRAM.
Conventional approaches to error detection and correction in SRAM arrays have a number of drawbacks, particularly when implemented in high-performance computing systems that may need to run continuously for long periods of time without interruption. For example, scientific computing projects such as DNA sequencing or climate studies may require continuously operating a processing device for months at a time or even longer. Flushing the state of the processing device to physically replace or repair the SRAM in response to detecting a hard error may cause a significant amount of work to be lost, potentially costing the user a significant amount of time and money. One alternative is to add redundant rows or columns to correct hard errors, but this approach may consume a large amount of area on the processing device. Another alternative is to replace a faulty sub-block by mapping it to another sub-block in the SRAM. However, setting aside portions of the SRAM to replace faulty sub-blocks may degrade the performance of the SRAM, e.g., by reducing the amount of memory available in the SRAM.
Furthermore, conventional approaches do not distinguish between activated and deactivated errors. An activated error is an error that can have a functional, power, or performance impact on the processing device. If an activated error is not detected, it can cause functional damage to the processes being performed by the processing device. A de-activated error is an error that may not have a significant functional, power, or performance impact on the processing device. For example, errors in predictor structures may be classified as de-activated errors because the undetected single bit errors may decrease the accuracy of the prediction but are unlikely to cause a functional impact on the corresponding process. Conventional replacement techniques assume that all detected errors are permanent activated errors and consequently do not allow for reuse or de-allocation of the resources reserved for replacement of faulty portions of the SRAM. For example, a faulty row or column is typically replaced with a redundant row or column by blowing an appropriate set of fuses so that the replacement cannot be undone.

Detecting and correcting hard errors in a memory array


An illuminated ear protector, comprising a pair of ear covers, each ear cover comprising a translucent rigid shell having an open end and a closed end, a circuit board attached within the rigid shell comprising at least one battery connector thereon, at least one and preferably two light emitting diode lights electrically connected to the circuit board, a switch connected to the circuit board controlling the at least one light emitting diode light, a first reflector located at the open end and oriented such that substantially all light from the at least one light emitting diode light is directed towards the closed end, a plate attached to the open end which supports the reflector, a peripheral sealing ring for contacting one of the ears and cushioning the ear cover there against which is attached to an opposite side of the plate from the reflector, and a headband attached to each of the ear covers which extends over the head of the user and secures each of the ear covers over one of the ears of the user.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to ear protectors, particularly internally illuminated ear protectors which make the wearer visible to others in the dark and which provide protection to the ears in noisy environments. The illumination can also provide an internal heating source.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Ear protectors, also known as ear muffs, are known for several purposes, including insulation from cold and insulation from loud noises. The ears are particularly sensitive to both cold temperatures and noisy environments.
Typically, earmuffs for cold insulation comprise a pair of earmuff elements each in the form of a large, thick, insulated disk sized to cover the ear. These earmuff elements are rather stiff constructs, and they are usually interconnected by an arcuate strip of metal or plastic that is stiff yet resilient enough so that the earmuff elements may be positioned over the ears or held in position with the spring-like action of the band member which arches over and is supported by the top of the wearer's head. Earmuffs work by attempting to insulate the ears and prevent them from losing heat. However, in extreme cold and when spending extended period of time outdoors, conventional earmuffs may be insufficient to keep the ears warm.
The ears are also vulnerable to damage in noisy environments. Specifically designed ear guards are often employed to protect the hearing those engaged in certain occupations that subject them to dangerously high noise levels for extended periods of time. In particular, airport crew and construction workers often wear noise attenuating ear guards to lower the sound levels they are subjected to. Typically, however, these ear guards do not provide any significant protection from cold temperatures.
It should be noted that many of these same professions that subject workers to prolonged exposure to cold and/or noise also subject the worker to the hazard of vehicles and heavy objects colliding with the worker. Accordingly, in many of these professions, improving the visibility of the worker greatly increases safety and helps prevent accidents.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,511,202 to Henry, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, discloses a high-low light-emitting diode glow-in-the-dark flashlight. The flashlight includes an end cap assembly that snaps onto the top of a 9-volt battery. The battery functions as both a power source and a handle. The flashlight is very light and compact.
Accordingly, there is a need for an ear protector that reliably protects the ears of a wearer from loud noises in the environment, while increasing the visibility of the wearer to enhance the safety thereof.
There is also a need for an ear protector that reliably protects the ears of a wearer from loud noises in the environment, while increasing the visibility of the wearer to enhance the safety thereof and additionally providing an internal heat source.


The present invention relates to improved catalyst compositions, as well as methods of making and using such compositions. Preferred embodiments of the present invention comprise catalyst compositions having high melting point metallic alloys, and methods of preparing and using the catalysts. In particular, the metallic alloys are preferably rhodium alloys. Accordingly, the present invention also encompasses an improved method for converting a hydrocarbon containing gas and an atomic oxygen-containing gas to a gas mixture comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide, i.e., syngas, using the catalyst compositions in accordance with the present invention. In addition, the present invention contemplates an improved method for converting hydrocarbon gas to liquid hydrocarbons using the novel syngas catalyst compositions described herein.

Catalysis is the basis for many industrial/commercial processes in the world today. The most important aspect of a catalyst is that it can increase the productivity, efficiency and profitability of the overall process by enhancing the speed, activity and/or selectivity of a given reaction. Many industrial/commercial processes involve reactions that are simply too slow and/or efficient to be economical without a catalyst present. For example, the process of converting natural gas or methane to liquid hydrocarbons (an extremely desirable process) necessarily involves several catalytic reactions.
The conversion of methane to hydrocarbons is typically carried out in two steps. In the first step, methane is catalytically reformed with water to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen (i.e., "synthesis gas" or "syngas"). In a second step, the syngas intermediate is catalytically converted to higher hydrocarbon products by processes such as the Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis. For example, fuels with boiling points in the middle distillate range, such as kerosene and diesel fuel, and hydrocarbon waxes may be produced from the synthesis gas. reforming. Steam reforming currently is the major process used commercially for the conversion of methane to synthesis gas, the reaction proceeding according to Equation 1.CH4+H2OCO+3H2  (1)
The catalytic partial oxidation ("CPOX") of hydrocarbons, e.g., methane or natural gas, to syngas has also been described in the literature. In catalytic partial oxidation, natural gas is mixed with air, oxygen-enriched air, or oxygen, and introduced to a catalyst at elevated temperature and pressure. The partial or direct oxidation of methane yields a syngas mixture with a more preferable H2:CO ratio of 2:1, as shown in Equation 2:CH4+½O2CO+2H2  (2)
The H2:CO ratio for this reaction is more useful for the downstream conversion of syngas to chemicals such as methanol or other fuels than is the H2:CO ratio from steam reforming. However, both reactions continue to be the focus of research in the world today.
For successful operation at commercial scale, the catalytic partial oxidation process must be able to achieve a high conversion of the methane feedstock at high gas hourly space velocities, and a high selectivity for carbon monoxide and hydrogen. In addition, the catalyst compositions should be stable under the severe reaction conditions of the syngas reaction.
Hence, there is still a great need to identify new partial oxidation catalysts, particularly partial oxidation catalysts that are able to maintain high methane conversion values as well as high carbon monoxide and hydrogen selectivity values while still resisting deactivation phenomena during the extreme syngas operating conditions.

Syngas catalysts and their method of use


To accomplish this, an image processing apparatus, in response to a start-up request for an application, reads a class file of a class of the application, adds, at the beginning of a method included in the read class file, code for recording application information indicating the application to a thread, and loads the class. Furthermore, the image processing apparatus, during execution of the method included in the read class file, allocates memory or a file size to be used for an object to be generated and records application information recorded in the thread to the allocated memory or file size, together with generating the object and managing application information of the generated object, in association with memory size or disk usage.

Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus that operates a plurality of applications, a control method thereof, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
An increasing number of current multifunction peripherals (MFPs) have a function of executing applications, apart from functions incorporated in MFPs, such as copying, scanning and printing of documents. Many MFPs have a Java execution environment as an application execution environment, and are able to execute applications written in Java (registered trademark). Exemplary application execution environments include MEAP (registered trademark) developed by Canon (registered trademark).
Whereas applications are executed with one process per application in the case of Java applications on a PC, many MFPs execute a plurality of applications with one Java process using an OSGi framework or the like because of CPU or memory restrictions. Thus, when a bug in one of the applications being executed on an MFP results in a memory leak, an OutOfMemoryError could occur, causing all the applications to stop. Also, an OutOfMemoryError occurs in the case where there is no memory to allocate when an application requests memory, and thus may occur during execution of an application that is running smoothly. Thus, it is difficult to specify the application that is causing the memory leak.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-269439 proposes a technology for measuring memory every thread. However, in a case such as where one thread executes the codes of a plurality of applications as shown in FIG. 13 discussed later, the used memory for each application cannot be measured.
At present, the following two methods are conceivable in order to find a memory leak. One method involves using a tool called a profiler to monitor the state of objects generated by applications. The other method involves dumping the contents of heap memory that is used by a Java VM (hereinafter, "heap dumping") and analyzing objects generated by applications.
Of these methods, since monitoring the state of objects using a profiler greatly reduces the execution speed of applications, application to an MFP in which the CPU or memory is very restricted is problematic. Thus, the technique of executing heap dumping and analyzing objects generated by applications has been used. Similarly, disk capacity available for use as the application execution environment is predetermined in some cases. In the case of Disk Full, the situation is not automatically restored even when the MFP is restarted, unlike a memory leak. Thus, a technology in which applications declare usage in advance and installation restrictions are implemented so as to not exceed this usage is disclosed in "iR-ADV Manuals" (Canon, "Installing an Application" page, "Using an Application" page (viewed on May 17, 2013), Internet <URL: http://cweb.canon.jp/manual/ir-adv/>.
However, the following problems exist with the above conventional technologies. With conventional heap dumping, acquired heap dumping information is taken from the device and analyzed to locate the application causing the memory leak, and the amount of memory that is used by applications is aggregated. Thus, the memory usage of individual applications cannot be known in real-time. On the other hand, with the profiler, since the execution speed of the applications drops off greatly, realistically it is difficult to measure the memory amount that is used by each application in real-time.
Even in the case where the applications declare disk usage in advance and installation restrictions are implemented so as to not exceed this usage, one of the applications being executed on the MFP could have a bug and the entire application execution environment could be placed in a disk full state. In this case, a write error occurs even in the bug-free applications, and normal operations may no longer be possible.

Image processing apparatus, control method thereof and storage medium


A shaft retainer device that comprises three major components: a barrel shaped housing, a leverable gripping assembly which is located inside the housing along its central axis, and a key lock in one end of the housing. When the device is locked, the gripping assembly radially grips any grooved shaft that has been inserted in the housing preventing shaft withdrawal. When unlocked by a key, the gripping assembly is spread apart, releasing its radial grip on the groove of any grooved shaft that has been previously inserted in the device. The shaft retainer will work equally well with any shaft that has a raised ridge or a stepped edge around its circumference, and can accommodate a range of shaft diameters. The device is small, light weight and economical to produce.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to locks, and more particularly to locks used for retaining and securing objects by means of cables, bolts or other shaft projections.
2. Background
Locks serving as shaft retainers have been available for a long time. A common practice for a shaft having an end with a transverse bored hole, is to connect a padlock through the hole in the shaft end. This is practical for applications where the shaft diameter is relatively large and can easily accommodate a padlock arm, but impractical for a small diameter shaft.
Cable shaft locking and retaining devices have also been used as far back as the mid 19th century period. Among the more recent cable retaining devices are those described by Smith in U.S. Pat. No. 5,517,835, Lyon et al in U.S. Pat. No. 3,987,653 and Joo in U.S. Pat. No. 4,099,394. Smith describes a device for use with a cable formed into two or more loops. A ferruled end of the cable is inserted in the device and one or more loops of the cable are also inserted in the device and pulled through. Turning a key lock in the device causes two or more wedge-shaped elements to grip the cable along its length inside the device, retaining the cable.
Lyon et al describe a device for locking a looped cable, One end of the cable is inserted and anchored to the device by a ring. The other end of the cable is passed through the device. The cable is clamped and partially deformed by turning a key lock that rotates a threaded shaft, activating a clamp around the cable. Joo describes storage reel for a cable which is hinged to a bicycle frame. In use, the cable is drawn around a post or other immovable object, and fastened to a projection on the bicycle, utilizing a padlock to lock it in place.
A recent example of a shaft projection retainer lock is that described by Stillwagon et al in U.S. Pat. No. 6,197,314. Stillwagon et al describe a device that includes the shaft projection and a key-turned lock that causes a sleeve or collar to grip the shaft projection. In this invention embodiment, the shaft projection may be fixed in a door or cabinet, or instead in the key-turned device with a collar-gripping portion fixed in a door to receive the projection. A later device by Stillwagon, U.S. Pat. No. 5,467,619 expands further on the above described second Stillwagon embodiment by incorporating a long, threaded shaft into the key-turned portion of the device. In the above described Stillwagon devices, the shaft projection must be particularly sized in length, stepped and/or threaded to fit its mating lock portion. This is because it is described as being part of the locking device. While useful for their described applications, the Stillwagon devices are not useful for retaining other shaft projections such as bolts, cable ends and the like.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a simple, universal locking device that can be applied to retain single shaft projections of various configurations.


A shotshell wad for use in a shotgun shell is provided. Three discs are disposed within a generally cylindrical tubular wail, and define a gas seal section, a middle section, a shot cup extension section, and a shot cup section. The third disc, which separates the shot cup extension section and the shot cup section, is detachably connected to the tubular wall such that when the shotshell is fired, the third disc breaks away and travels rearward relative to the rest of the shotshell wad to a position adjacent to the second disc. A plurality of fingers are defined by a plurality of lateral cuts through the tubular wall in the shot cup section extending from a point in the shot cup section to the forward end of the tubular wall. The tubular wall also includes a plurality of circumferential cuts passing therethrough substantially at the point where the plurality of lateral cuts terminate. The plurality of circumferential cuts extending through a section of each of the plurality of fingers. A plurality of lateral ridges extend inwardly from the tubular wall from substantially the point where the plurality of lateral cuts terminate to substantially the forward end of the tubular wall and are positioned at substantially the center of each of the plurality of fingers.

Modern shotgun shells (frequently referred to as shotshells) are made up of five basic components: a case (the overall packaging), a primer, powder, a wad (or wad column) and shot. The case is made up of brass (otherwise referred to as the "head" of the shotshell), a base wad, and a tube or wall. The primer is seated in the primer pocket. Powder is poured into the tube on top of the base wad and a plastic wad is pressed down on top of the powder within the tube. The shot charge is then poured into the wad cup. Finally, the top of the shell tube is creased and crimped down tightly on top of the shot charge by the machinery loading the shot shells.
To fire the shotgun, a loaded shotshell is placed in the chamber. The trigger is pulled and the firing pin strikes the primer in the shotshell. The primer detonates, igniting the powder charge. The rapidly expanding gases generated by the explosion of the powder charge strike the wad with its load of shot in the shot cup with a blow equal to approximately 12,000 pounds per square inch. The wad, being lighter than the shot, is driven forward into the column of shot nestled in the shot cup.
At this point, undesirable things happen when known wads are being used. The shot charge is, in effect, driven into the floor and the immediately adjacent sides of the shot cup with tremendous force. When the shell is loaded with lead shot, the whole band of shot at the back of the shot column becomes deformed either by contact with other shot or with the steel sides of the chamber of the shotgun barrel. Upon eventually exiting the barrel, these deformed shot fly off (hence the name "flyers") at strange angles, none of which is in the direction of the target. With steel shot, the deformation of pellets is greatly reduced, but still occurs. Perhaps more important is the fact that the steel pellets at the back of the shot column, in effect, beat on the walls of the chamber of the barrel like dozens of ballpeen hammers, a situation that could cause a flawed barrel, or one that has simply been worn out by repeated blows. A further problem is that when the shot cup is driven into the shot column, the recoil force is transferred to the shoulder of the shooter. Because, in known wad designs, the shot cup floor hits the shot column with a tremendous force, the recoil felt by the shooter is a sudden, sharp blow.
The shot exits the chamber into what is known as the forcing cone. This is a section of barrel that tapers from the diameter of the chamber down to the effective diameter of the barrel for most of its length. At this point, more undesirable things happen when known wads are being used. The shot charge stretches out and some of the shot escapes from the wad cup. As this occurs, much of the escaped shot can come in direct contact with the inside of the barrel, causing wear on the barrel with both types of shot, and coating the interior of the barrel with lead when lead shot is used. Another problem with the shot directly contacting the inside of the barrel is that friction is generated between the shot and the barrel, which in turn causes the shot to lose velocity. The same sequence of events occur as the wad and shot charge approach the muzzle of the barrel where they are again constricted, this time by the choke at the muzzle, which is intended to regulate the size of the pattern the shot achieves upon leaving the barrel.
Now the wad and the shot charge exit the barrel. At this point it is important to rapidly separate the shot charge from the wad, so that the wad cannot interfere with the shot pattern. Not only must the wad be quickly slowed, but it must be done so in a manner such that the wad does not spin out of control, interfering with shot proximate to, or even still contained within, the wad. Known designs do not adequately achieve this. The wad often travels up to forty yards downrange, which is approximately two-thirds of the expected range of the shot. Moreover, known wads can deliver only approximately two-thirds of the shot charge on target in a useful pattern.
What is desired, therefore, is a shotshell wad which results in few flyers, which reduces damage to the chamber of the barrel upon firing, which reduces the recoil felt by the shooter upon firing, which inhibits the shot from escaping the shot cup and directly contacting the inside of the barrel, which is quickly separated from the shot upon exiting the barrel, and which delivers the shot charge on target in a useful pattern.

Integrated one-piece plastic shotshell wad


A concentric circle adjusting apparatus for a multiple image capturing device is disclosed, where a first and second correction angles for correcting a first and second image capturing devices are respectively calculated by a control device according to a link length of a standard link, a first angle, a second angle, a first distance, and a second distance, respectively, so that a first and second platforms are controlled according to the first and second control commands to rotate the first and second image capturing device by the first and second correction angles, respectively, whereby the efficacy of an increased visible range and a rapid calibration may be achieved.

Technical Field
The present invention relates to an adjusting apparatus, and particularly to a concentric circle adjusting apparatus for a multiple image capturing device.
Related Art
Displacement measurement is an important task in structure monitoring, and also one of references for safety evaluation. How to rapidly and conveniently measure a deformity of a structure body is a goal in the engineering field. In terms of the measure mechanism, the displacement measurement may include two types: contact and non-contact types. For the contact type, a displacement gauge has to find a stationary point in a displacement direction of the structure and the measurement instrument is disposed at the stationary point. Thereafter, the measurement instrument is directly fixed onto a measure point of the structure by using a probe, or a steel wire. Then, a relative movement between the structure and the stationary point is calculated by using a position variation of the probe, or other conversion parameters. How to find a proper stationary point in situ for disposing the measure instrument is a to-be-solved issue in the contact type. In addition, the measure instrument has to be in a contact connection with the measure point, imposing an additional limitation on this measurement policy.
The non-contact type measurement is usually conducted by the optical principle. Generally, an optical signal source, such as a laser, a LED, a camera, or other particular optical equipment, is disposed on the measure point. Then, an optical source detection or a signal reception manner is employed to measure a position of a marking point, by which a relative displacement is calculated. The detector employed in the non-contact measurement is similar to that used in the contact type, it has to be disposed on a stationary point. However, the instrument has not to be connected to the measure point, largely reducing a limitation on the disposition position and a requirement of labor force and time for the employment. Furthermore, this type may be applied onto a remote displacement measurement and has a higher freedom in use, and is thus more appreciable in the engineering field.
Further, since cameras have been rapidly developed in their technical level and thus have the greatly increased resolution, and thus may be applied onto the measurement field for up to a certain extent. Along with the use of image analysis software, the non-contact and remote displacement measurement may become possible. In essence, the digital photographing measurement positions particular marking points of the measured position in the image, and the marking points at different time are compared, by which the displacement of the measured point may be deduced. Although the laser detection-based measurement method is equipped with the advantage of the remote measurement, the laser light diverges or presents an in-situ instable light source, which may possibly present an inestimable error and adversely affect the measurement precision. For the camera measurement, as long as the marking point is clear enough in the image, a good measurement result may be anticipated. This image analysis manner not only has the advantage of the non-contact measurement method, the in-situ environment effect on the measurement may be very limited. For this reason, this camera measurement is applied onto a rapid measurement technology for structure deformity in this patent application.
In 3D visual applications, two images taken from different positions are generally adopted, and a relative depth of the whole field scene may be reconstructed from a 2D image. Presently, products for measuring the structure deformity by using the non-contact image manner based on the image applications may be found such as the VIC 3D product released by Correlated Solutions. Now referring to FIG. 1, a prior art image measurement device is schematically shown therein. This image measurement device is composed by a frame 91 and two image capturing device 92, which constitute jointly a measure body with a 3D visual presentation, which may measure a surface deformity of a whole domain of an article. In this technology, the object's surface feature is taken as an object for determining and comparing the surface displacement. Further, the camera image capturing and the image relation algorithm are combined, so that the measurement for the 3D surface deformity may be completed in the shortest time, and the optimal resolution may be obtained. Any minute surface deformity may be presented on the data and image, and the displacement and deformity of a single dot or the surface may be realized.
However, this product requires two image capturing devices 92 for the measurement. When the measured range goes beyond what the two image capturing devices 92 may reach, only a local image may be observed and some shaded areas of the article may not be measured. Further, the camera's posture has to be adjusted with respect to different articles, and the image capturing device has to be calibrated again.
To solve the above problem, TW patent 1442167 has set forth a moving device, which moves along a measure link having a semi-arc shape. A position control device is used to control the moving device to move and position along the measure link. Then, the control device is rotated to control an image capturing angle of a second image capturing device fixed on a rotation device. In this manner, the first and second image capturing devices may present in a concrete circle arrangement. Further, a central optical axis of the first and second image capturing devices crosses at a concrete circle center. As such, a visible range of the image capturing device may be increased. In addition, according to the moved position positioning and the image capturing angle positioning, the image capturing device may rapidly calibrated. Therefore, the limited visible range and the incessant calibration issues of the image capturing devices may be effectively solved. Based on the above patent, this patent application is set forth to make an improvement, so that the visible range of the image capturing devices may be promoted to a more satisfactory extent.
In view of the above, it may be known that there has long been the issues of the limited range and incessant calibration of the image capturing devices. Therefore, there is quite a need to set forth an improvement means to settle down this problem.

Concentric circle adjusting apparatus for multiple image capturing device


A system for removing deposits from an underwater structure comprises a series of interconnected dog members which can be formed into a ring and adjusted angularly relative to one another to conform to the underwater structure. The series of dog members is supported by floats, which allow a preassembled line of dog members to be moved into position and wrapped around an underwater structure. The free ends of the line of dog members are connected together by a pin having a latching spring which can be operated easily underwater. Multiple rings can be used, one above another. An annular net, secured to concentric rings and suspended underneath one or more deposit removal rings, catches dropped deposits. The inner one of the concentric rings can also be used as a deposit removal ring. The dogs can also be disposed in a vertical ring for removal of deposits from a horizontal underwater structure, and a suspended basket is used to catch dropped deposits. For removal of deposits from the hull of a ship, an arrangement consisting of two longitudinal deposit removal structures extending alongside the ship, and multiple parallel transverse deposit removal structures extending underneath the hull, is used.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a floating deposit removal system for removing deposits from an underwater structure. Typical underwater structures to which the invention is applicable include vertical, perpendicular and angular piles made of steel, concrete or other materials, including H-shaped piles, steel pipes, horizontal rods, legs of piers or of other structures, piles of offshore structures such as sea berths, artificial islands or the like, banks and bottoms of ships.
2. Description of Related Art
In the maintenance of such underwater structures, deposits such as shells, seaweed, rust, or sludge have been removed from the surfaces of the structures by human power with a chaplet rod or wire brush.
However, there are hundreds to thousands of such structures for which deposit removal is performed at sea. The time available for deposit removal is limited because of tides and weather conditions. Moreover, numerous workers and divers are required. Thus, the need for deposit removal from fixed underwater structures is an important factor contributing to high construction costs, instability in construction scheduling, and serious safety concerns. The need for underwater deposit removal gives rise to similar cost, scheduling and safety problems in the building and maintenance of ships.
Various efforts are made to prevent deposits, particularly marine organisms such as shells and seaweed, from easily attaching themselves to an underwater structure or the bottom of a ship. For example, special paints are frequently applied. However, it is impossible to prevent the attachment of deposits completely. Therefore, it is necessary to remove the deposits from time to time.
Devices for solving these problems are described in Japanese Utility Model Publication No. 60-15786 and Japanese laid-open Utility Model Application No. 56-138932).
The first of the above-mentioned Japanese publications discloses a device comprising a divisible cylindrical floating body and an annular frame secured to a support extending downward from the floating body. An edged portion is provided on the inner periphery of the floating body and/or on the frame so that, when the floating body and frame are installed on a steel-pipe pile, the tide and waves cause the floating body to travel vertically, and the edged portions slide on the pile to scrape away deposits from its surface.
The second of the above-mentioned Japanese publications discloses a device comprising an annular body installed onto a pile or the like of an offshore structure and having an internal space and an opening at the bottom of the body communicating with the internal space. A wing is provided on the outer periphery of the annular body, and a grinding and cleaning material is provided on the inside of the annular body. A gas spouting hole at the bottom of the pile releases gas, which fills the internal space, causing the body to rise on the pile due to increased buoyancy. The internal space within the body then fills with water, the body falls under its own weight while the wing supplies rotating torque. As this action occurs, the grinding and cleaning material cleans the surface of the pile.
The prior art devices disclosed in these two publications are able to remove deposits from a vertical pile. However, their effectiveness is limited because the movement of removal member (the edged portion of the first device or the grinding and cleaning material of the second) is dependent upon tides, waves, or the weight and buoyancy of a floating body. Moreover, such devices are not suitable for use in connection with slanted piles.