In this paper we present the design of a compact active cardiac stabilizer based onplanar compliant mechanisms and piezoelectric actuators. Considering an assembly of planarmanufactured structures helps to simplify the manufacturing process and may increase thecompactness. Parallel architectures constitute interesting solutions for their intrinsicstiffness properties, but in a planar configuration parallel manipulators often exhibitkinematic singularities. Two design approaches for planar parallel compliant mechanismsare presented in this paper. One design approach consists in designing a passive compliantmechanism in a configuration close to the singularity by introducing some asymmetriesduring the manufacturing process. The second design approach consists in taking advantageof the singularities of parallel manipulators to obtain non-trivial solutions. The newproposed active stabilizer, composed of planar compliant mechanisms, is introduced and itsperformances are discussed.

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is “interpretive.” The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity.

This paper presents a design methodology for parallel robots having tosatisfy a set of performance constraints. Some of these constraints are used tocompute a closed region in the parameters space (in which a point define anunique robot geometry) which define all the robot geometries fulfilling theseconstraints. Then a grid is created over this region and for each node of thisgrid the requirements, expressed in a high level language, are evaluated. Thenode leading to the robot best fulfilling the constraints is the designsolution.