The impulse travels to muscles and causes short, sustained muscle contractions. The taser has two modes: the first, pulse mode, causes neuromuscular incapacitation as the neural signals that control muscles become uncoordinated, and muscles contract at random. The second mode, drive-stun, uses pain to get compliance. The current -- either direct, DC, or alternating, AC -- is the rate at which electrons going down a wire travel per second. Alternating current is what is typically used in wall sockets and it's more dangerous, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, causing more extreme muscle contraction.

An ampere, or amp, is the unit used to measure current. A small current -- microamps —- applied directly to the heart can cause a fatal rhythm called ventricular fibrillation.

Humans have protective mechanisms: The skin, which provides high resistance to electricity, and soft tissue, which surrounds muscles and organs like the heart, also reduce the current. For example, a current applied to the arm will be reduced to. TASERs have a 2 milliamp current and it takes at least 1, milliamps -- 1 amp -- to injure muscles, nerves and the heart. Earlier this month, Milwaukee Police officers were criticized for the violent arrest of Demetrious Lowe, 25 who ignored their orders and punched them repeatedly.

Police later said he appeared to be experiencing a mental health episode. Witness video circulated widely on social media showing a swarm of officers punching and kicking Lowe once he was on the ground.

At one point, police appeared to use a Taser on him. The man later was charged with three felony battery counts. In , a supervisor at the House of Correction was suspended after delivering a drive stun with a Taser to the left wrist of a mentally ill year-old woman, who was alone inside a segregation cell at the time. We followed four Wisconsin dairy farms for a year as they struggled with an industry-wide crisis, one didn't make it. Wisconsin lawmaker proposes resolution honoring white people, among others, during Black History Month.

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Read More. Cite This! Examples include using remote technology to collaborate with employees and customers and employing automation to improve customer experiences. Now, as the world tries to determine the new normal, many companies are expanding the use of digital transformation as a tool for growth.

A recent McKinsey survey on digital transformation during the COVID pandemic shows that organizations sped up the digitization of their customer and supply chain operations after more consumers shifted to online ordering. Companies that lost revenue in the past few years tended to be behind in using digital technology, the survey found.

How can you ensure your organization is prepared for a digital society? Understanding Key Concepts. Technical professionals can come away with an understanding of how digital transformation changes organizations and reshapes market niches while learning about the concept of technological ecosystems. Drivers of Digital Transformation. Learn about communications artificial intelligence, big data, and digital twins.

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Institutions interested in the program can contact an IEEE account specialist to learn more. To learn more about how digital transformation can impact your company, register for The Benefits of Digital Transformation for Organizations , a free virtual event to be held on 16 November at noon New York time.

The session will be available on demand two hours after the live event concludes. It turns out that you don't need a lot of hardware to make a flying robot. Flying robots are usually way, way, way over-engineered, with ridiculously over the top components like two whole wings or an obviously ludicrous four separate motors. Maybe that kind of stuff works for people with more funding than they know what to do with, but for anyone trying to keep to a reasonable budget, all it actually takes to make a flying robot is one single airfoil plus an attached fixed-pitch propeller.

And if you make that airfoil flexible, you can even fold the entire thing up into a sort of flying robotic swiss roll. This type of drone is called a monocopter, and the design is very generally based on samara seeds, which are those single-wing seed pods that spin down from maple trees.

The ability to spin slows the seeds' descent to the ground, allowing them to spread farther from the tree. It's an inherently stable design, meaning that it'll spin all by itself and do so in a stable and predictable way, which is a nice feature for a drone to have—if everything completely dies, it'll just spin itself gently down to a landing by default. F-SAM stands for Foldable Single Actuator Monocopter, and as you might expect, it's a monocopter that can fold up and uses just one single actuator for control.

There may not be a lot going on here hardware-wise, but that's part of the charm of this design. The one actuator gives complete directional control: increasing the throttle increases the RPM of the aircraft, causing it to gain altitude, which is pretty straightforward. Directional control is trickier, but not much trickier, requiring repetitive pulsing of the motor at a point during the aircraft's spin when it's pointed in the direction you want it to go.

F-SAM is operating in a motion-capture environment in the video to explore its potential for precision autonomy, but it's not restricted to that environment, and doesn't require external sensing for control. While F-SAM's control board was custom designed and the wing requires some fabrication, the rest of the parts are cheap and off the shelf. If you look closely, you'll also see a teeny little carbon fiber leg of sorts that keeps the prop up above the ground, enabling the ground takeoff behavior without contacting the ground.

You can find the entire F-SAM paper open access here , but we also asked the authors a couple of extra questions. IEEE Spectrum: It looks like you explored different materials and combinations of materials for the flexible wing structure. Why did you end up with this mix of balsa wood and plastic? Shane Kyi Hla Win: The wing structure of a monocopter requires rigidity in order to be controllable in flight.

Although it is possible for the monocopter to fly with more flexible materials we tested, such as flexible plastic or polymide flex, they allow the wing to twist freely mid-flight making cyclic control effort from the motor less effective.

The balsa laminated with plastic provides enough rigidity for an effective control, while allowing folding in a pre-determined triangular fold. Can F-SAM fly outdoors? What is required to fly it outside of a motion capture environment? Yes it can fly outdoors. It is passively stable so it does not require a closed-loop control for its flight.

The motion capture environment provides its absolute position for station-holding and waypoint flights when indoors. For outdoor flight, an electronic compass provides the relative heading for the basic cyclic control.

We are working on a prototype with an integrated GPS for outdoor autonomous flights. A camera can be added we have done this before , but due to its spinning nature, images captured can come out blurry.

A conventional LiDAR system requires a dedicated actuator to create a spinning motion. Your paper says that "in the future, we may look into possible launching of F-SAM directly from the container, without the need for human intervention.

Currently, F-SAM can be folded into a compact form and stored inside a container. However, it still requires a human to unfold it and either hand-launch it or put it on the floor to fly off. In the future, we envision that F-SAM is put inside a container which has the mechanism such as pressured gas to catapult the folded unit into the air, which can begin unfolding immediately due to elastic materials used.

The motor can initiate the spin which allows the wing to straighten out due to centrifugal forces. F-SAM could be a good toy but it may not be a good alternative to quadcopters if the objective is conventional aerial photography or videography.

However, it can be a good contender for single-use GPS-guided reconnaissance missions. As it uses only one actuator for its flight, it can be made relatively cheaply. It is also very silent during its flight and easily camouflaged once landed. Various lightweight sensors can be integrated onto the platform for different types of missions, such as climate monitoring.

F-SAM units can be deployed from the air, as they can also autorotate on their way down, while also flying at certain periods for extended meteorological data collection in the air. We have a few exciting projects on hand, most of which focus on 'do more with less' theme. This means our projects aim to achieve multiple missions and flight modes while using as few actuators as possible.

This platform, published earlier this year in IEEE Transactions on Robotics , is able to achieve two flight modes autorotation and diving with just one actuator.