Abstract: Apparatus for multiple person vehicle seats, specialized car seats, modular car seat systems, dual person car seats, and overlapping car seats, for use in a land, sea or air vehicle, mounted onto the vehicle's built-in seat and used for securing a car seat user, such as a small child, within a vehicle's regular seating positions. Car seat systems include components enabling addition or removal of seating positions for a desired number of car seat users as needed, limited only by available width space of the vehicle seat onto which it is mounted. Car seat systems and/or multiple person car seats generally provide more and/or specialized seating positions for persons in car seats than provided for regular passengers in the vehicle width space taken up by the car seat systems or the multiple person car seat.

Abstract: A method is described for automatic detection of a large class of industrial parts, whch is faster and more reliable than current methods. Many industrial parts have visible outlines which are either circular or elliptical or contain segments of these. Circles are seen as ellipses unless viewed head-on. Thus the ability to detect ellipses in an image of an industrial part, quickly and reliably, can be of great help in identification of this part by a robotic assembly process. In our method one first scans the image electronically by a video camera. When a scan line goes through an image of some object one can detect the edges of this image by detecting changes in the light intensity at these edges. For an object of the shape of a conic section (e.g. an ellipse), generally two edges will appear on each scan line and the midpoints between them will all lie on one straight line. This straight line can be detected with Hough's method.

Abstract: An improved process for producing near-alpha and alpha+beta titanium alloy axisymmetric components with high fatigue resistance which comprises the steps of:(a) providing a beta processed near-alpha or alpha+beta titanium alloy component;(b) torque deforming the component; and(c) alpha+beta recrystallization annealing the resulting torque-deformed component.

Abstract: A method for revealing the microstructure of metal alloys which comprises the steps of polishing the sample, chemically etching the polished metal surface, thermally etching the chemically etched surface and quenching the thermally etched sample. This method allows observation of deformed and recrystallized grains on the same polished surface and provides the opportunity to correlate recrystallized grains to their nucleation sites.