Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal planning and control for hazard avoidance of front-wheel steered ground vehicles

Hazard avoidance is an important capability for safe operation of robotic vehicles at high speed. It is also an important consideration for passenger vehicle safety, as thousands are killed each year in passenger vehicle accidents caused by driver error. Even when hazard locations are known, high-speed hazard avoidance presents challenges in real-time motion planning and control of nonlinear and potentially unstable vehicle dynamics. This thesis presents methods for planning and control of optimal hazard avoidance maneuvers for a bicycle model with front-wheel steering and wheel slip. The planning problem is posed as an optimization problem in which constrained dynamic quantities, such as friction circle utilization, are minimized, while ensuring a minimum clearance from hazards. These optimal trajectories can be computed numerically, though real-time computation requires simple models and constraints. To simplify the computation of optimal avoidance trajectories, analytical solutions to the optimal planning problem are presented for a point mass subject to an acceleration magnitude constraint, which is analogous to a tire friction circle constraint. The optimal point mass solutions are extended to a nonlinear bicycle model by defining a flatnessbased trajectory tracking controller using tire force control. This controller decouples the bicycle dynamics into a point mass at the front center of oscillation with an additional degree of freedom related to the vehicle yaw dynamics. Structure is identified in the yaw dynamics and is exploited to characterize stability limits. Simulation results verify the stability properties of the yaw dynamics. These results were applied to a semi-autonomous driver assistance system and demonstrated experimentally on a full-sized passenger vehicle. Efficient computation of point mass avoidance maneuvers was used as a cost-to-go for real-time numerical optimization of trajectories for a bicycle model. The experimental system switches control authority between the driver and an automatic avoidance controller so that the driver retains control authority in benign situations, and the automatic controller avoids hazards automatically in hazardous situations. Thesis Supervisor: Karl Iagnemma, Principal Research Scientist
THE EVOLUTION OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING CURRICULA: MECHATRONICS

This paper discusses one area in the ongoing evolution of Mechanical Engineering curricula, Mechatronics. Mechatronic devices are widespread – CD players, cars, autowashers, robots, disc drives, photocopiers etc. – mechanical devices which involve a microprocessor, electronics and control. The evolution of the classical Mechanical Engineering degree into a separate degree in Mechatronics is fully in keeping with the desire for a hightech, knowledge-based economy. The philosophy and the rise of Mechatronics-related teaching is briefly reviewed and the possible diversity of courses indicated. Two case studies are presented. The first describes the experiences of two of the authors in developing a Mechatronics undergraduate degree programme when they were at the University of Auckland, the motivation behind the decision and the structure of the course. The second case study is a proposal for a multi-media based course in mechatronics which could be utilised for a European-wide degree.
Compact MIMO antenna with optimized mutual coupling reduction using DGS

A design of low mutual coupling between two microstrip patch antennas for multi input multi output antenna is presented. The two antenna elements operate at 5.8 GHz for wireless applications. The reduction of mutual coupling between the antenna elements is achieved by using a defected ground structure (DGS). The DGS is inserted between the microstrip patch antenna elements to limit the surface waves between them. The separation between the edges of the two elements has been achieved to be only 0. 058λ0. The analysis of the correlation coefficient, diversity gain and total active reflection coefficient is presented to validate the performance of the multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) antenna. The isolation of the proposed MIMO antenna is 28 dB at 5.8 GHz and the envelope correlation equals 0.003. Owing to these good performances each antenna can operate almost independently. A good agreement is achieved between the simulated and the measured results.
Test Methods for Determining the Impact of Motor Condition on Motor Efficiency and Reliability

This article discusses the financial impact of motor condition on electric motor efficiency and reliability by reviewing a combination of Motor Circuit Analysis (MCA) and vibration techniques. Cost impacts on energy, production and maintenance will be outlined. The topic will surround a utility study and US Department of Energy market transformation success during 2000 and 2001. The primary areas of concern are phase balance, rotor bars, cleanliness and bearing issues.
Numerical Simulation and Optimization Design of the Annular Mechanical Foam Breaker

The annular foam breaker is one which uses the vacuum and shear force generated by the Coanda effect to break foam. The pressure distribution directly affects its performance. So an investigation on the flow characteristics inside the annular foam breaker is important to optimize its structure. In this paper, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT, is employed to simulate the flow phenomena. The effect of various geometric parameters on the pressure distribution inside the annular foam breaker has been evaluated, including the width of the annular slot, the Coanda surface radius and the diffuser dimensions, etc. The numerical results show that the optimum value of the annular slot d = 0.5mm, the Coanda surface radius r = 20mm, the diffuser angle θ=6°, and the ratio of the diffuser length to radius is more than 14. Based on these analyses, an optimum structure of the annular foam breaker was designed and tested in the well bore flow simulation loop laboratory equipment. Compared with the old ones, the foam-breaking efficiency of the optimized annular foam breaker is improved from 71.16% to 86.58%, which increases by some 22.61%.
Switching Pattern Improvement for One-Cycle Zero-Integral-Error Current Controller

The one-cycle current control is a non-linear technique based on the cycle-by-cycle calculation of the ON time of the power converter switches. Its application is not common in tracking fast-changing reference currents, due to the necessity of fast and accurate measurements, and high-speed computing. In a previous study, a one-cycle digital current controller based on the minimization of the integral error of the current was developed and applied to the control of a three-phase shunt active power filter. In the present work, the one-cycle controller has been improved by proposing a new switching pattern. It allows an easy implementation that reduces the critical computational cost and avoids the main drawbacks of the previous implementation. The controller has been applied in a three-leg four-wire shunt active power filter, including a stability analysis considering the proposed switching pattern. Simulated and experimental results are presented to validate the proposed controller.
Design and Implementation of the Communications Subsystem for the Cal Poly CP2 Cubesat Project

A primary mission requirement of any satellite is the ability to exchange information with a ground based command station. In this paper, the hardware and software design of the communications subsystem of the Cal Poly CP2 Cubesat is demonstrated. Hardware devices chosen for this design include two redundant Chipcon CC1000 ultra-low power FM radio transceivers, two RF power amplifiers, and two redundant PIC microcontrollers. The software written for the PIC processor is responsible for encoding telemetry and payload information into standard AX.25 format data packets as well as decoding commands transmitted from the ground station. The software can also detect different failure modes such as transceiver failure, main system bus failure and main processor failure and can recover gracefully from these situations. The design and implementation of the hardware and software to meet the stated mission requirements is discussed and problems, solutions and remaining issues are presented in detail.
Influence of the Interaction Between Depressive Symptoms and Sleep Disorders on Cardiovascular Diseases Occurrence

Purpose Depressive symptoms and sleep disorders were independent risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). However, few studies have examined the combined effects of depressive symptoms and sleep disorders on CVD. We aimed to evaluate the association between depressive symptoms, sleep disorders and CVD occurrence. Methods Data on 30,398 participants were extracted from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) database (2005–2018). Univariate and multivariate analyses were used for assessing the association of depressive symptoms, sleep disorders, and CVD occurrence. Three indexes, including the relative excess risk of interaction (RERI), attributable proportion of interaction (API), and synergy index (SI), were used to analyze the interaction. Results Of 30,398 participants, 11,544 (37.98%) participants had CVD and 18,854 (62.02%) did not. Except for gender, the differences were significant between CVD and non-CVD participants in all variables (all P<0.001). Depressive symptoms [odds ratio (OR)=1.73; 95% confidence intervals (CI):1.57–1.91] and sleep disorders (OR=1.76; 95% CI:1.65–1.88) were associated with an increased risk of CVD after adjusting all confounders. Patients with both depressive symptoms and sleep disorders (OR=2.64; 95% CI:2.32–3.00) had a higher risk of CVD than those without. There may be a synergistic interaction between depression and sleep disorders on the CVD occurrence (SI=1.763; 95% CI:1.299–2.394), and the proportion of CVD caused by this interaction was 26.9% (API=0.269; 95% CI:0.148–0.389). In addition, only moderate depressive symptoms may interact with sleep disorders in the occurrence of CVD. Conclusion There may be a synergistic interaction between depressive symptoms and sleep disorders, and the synergistic interaction may increase the occurrence of CVD.
Optimal control of state-of-charge of superconducting magnetic energy storage for wind power system

The optimal control of state-of-charge (SOC) for superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), which is used to smooth power fluctuations from wind turbine, is essential to improve its technical and economical performance. Without an efficient control strategy, the SMES may go to the state of over-charge or deep-discharge, which will pose a significant effect on its service life and its technical performance. In this study, combined with wind forecasting technology and real-time monitoring of SOC for the SMES, a double fuzzy logic control strategy is proposed that is applied to regulate SOC of SMES with the purpose of not only effectively smoothing the power fluctuations of wind turbine, but also preventing the SMES from occurring of the state of over-charge/deep-discharge and adjusting it to the appropriate SOC. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by the simulation results.
Advanced Applications of Industrial Robotics: New Trends and Possibilities

This review is dedicated to the advanced applications of robotic technologies in the industrial field. Robotic solutions in areas with non-intensive applications are presented, and their implementations are analysed. We also provide an overview of survey publications and technical reports, classified by application criteria, and the development of the structure of existing solutions, and identify recent research gaps. The analysis results reveal the background to the existing obstacles and problems. These issues relate to the areas of psychology, human nature, special artificial intelligence (AI) implementation, and the robot-oriented object design paradigm. Analysis of robot applications shows that the existing emerging applications in robotics face technical and psychological obstacles. The results of this review revealed four directions of required advancement in robotics: development of intelligent companions; improved implementation of AI-based solutions; robot-oriented design of objects; and psychological solutions for robot–human collaboration.
Integrated Theoretical Frameworks: Understanding College-Going Culture

College-going culture has been studied using a variety of theoretical frameworks including social capital, funds of knowledge, community cultural wealth and social capital career theories. This article explores the effectiveness of an integrated framework approach in the research of college-going culture for first-generation college students. The research question explored was: “How did first-generation students attending an HSI experience the phenomenon of college-going culture in their high schools and communities? ” The authors demonstrate that a synthesized framework provides a more holistic structure for understanding the outcomes of a case study than any single theory could provide.
Algorithms for Optimal Energy Management in the Smart Grid

Smart grid (SG) is regarded as the next generation power grid, which implements an innovative idea for a highly automated and integrated power system. The two-way energy and information flows in the SG, together with the smart devices, bring new perspectives to energy management and demand response. Meanwhile, innovative grid components, such as microgrid (MG) and electric vehicle, are emerging as new applications which bring many benefits as well as more chanllegens in SG. Therefore, we explore possible solutions to these chanllegening but interesting problems. In this dissertation, we first present an introduction of the SG, and the research involved in different areas of SG. We then investigate an online algorithm for energy distribution in a SG environment. The proposed online algorithm are quite general, suitable for a wide range of utility, cost and pricing functions. And it is asymptotically optimal without any future information. Following this, we then propose a distributed online algorithm. Comparing to the previous one, it solves the online problem in a distributed manner and mitigates the user privacy issue by not sharing user utility functions. Both algorithms are evaluated with trace-driven simulations and shown to outperform a benchmark scheme. We then propose a hierarchical power scheduling approach to optimally manage power trading, storage and distribution in a smart power grid with a Macrogrid and cooperative MGs. We develop online algorithms both for cooperative MGs and the Macrogrid. The proposed hierarchical power scheduling algorithms are evaluated with trace-driven simulations and are shown to outperform several existing schemes with considerable gains. Also, we also introduce the simultaneous inference for power generation forecasting from renewable energy resources. We then apply it for solar intensity prediction using a real trace of weather data, where the performance is demonstrated over existing approaches.
Regularity-Based Virtualization Under the ARINC 653 Standard for Embedded Systems

In embedded real-time virtualized systems (ERTVS), the ARINC 653 standard specifies a cyclic scheduling policy to guarantee the real-time performance of tasks in multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) residing on shared hardware. Based on this policy, the Regularity-based Resource Partitioning (RRP) model defines an efficient interface specification to hierarchically partition and assign resource slices among VMs. Although this model has received plenty of attention recently, three major pieces remain missing for applying this model in ERTVS. (1) Embedded systems are more sensitive to resource utilization efficiency since this may drastically affect their deployment cost for including additional cores. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimal and an approximate RRP resource scheduler for multi-core platforms. (2) A resource reconfiguration is required when an embedded system has to switch between operating modes, resulting in the current cyclic schedule being replaced by another pre-configured and verified cyclic schedule. This paper formalizes a new One-Hop Reconfiguration (OHR) problem tailored for mode-switch-capable embedded systems and introduces a corresponding optimal solution. (3) No RRP-based toolset is currently available for embedded systems. This paper thus presents an optimized RRP toolset tailored for embedded systems. Numerous experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of this toolset.
Tunable bandwidth and parametric bandwidth for periodically poled LiNbO3 based optical parametric amplification

The tunable bandwidth and parametric bandwidth are investigated theoretically and numerically for periodically poled LiNbO3 based optical parametric amplification. For two different optical parametric amplification geometries, which we called as geometry I and geometry II respectively according to different positions of the wave vector ks and km with respect to wave vector kp, both the grating period of PPLN and the noncollinear angle θ have optimal values when signal beam can be amplified in a maximum tunable range. With the increase of temperature, the optimal grating period nearlinearly decreased while the optimal noncollinear angle θ almost unchanged. An equation is derived to achieve the optimal grating period for different temperatures. Under the same conditions, the tunable bandwidth we achieved by employing geometry I is closed to that of geometry II. Considering the stability of tunable bandwidth, geometry II should be chose for the actual optical parametric amplification geometry because the tunable bandwidth is insensitive to the small deviation of θ when employing it. The parametric bandwidth varied with grating period and noncollinear angle θ. Compared with the change of θ, parametric bandwidth is sensitive to the variation of grating period. When achieving maximum and flat parametric bandwidth, the optimal grating period and optimal noncollinear angle θ are equal to those at which we obtained the maximum tunable bandwidth.
Recent Development of Flexible Tactile Sensors and Their Applications

With the rapid development of society in recent decades, the wearable sensor has attracted attention for motion-based health care and artificial applications. However, there are still many limitations to applying them in real life, particularly the inconvenience that comes from their large size and non-flexible systems. To solve these problems, flexible small-sized sensors that use body motion as a stimulus are studied to directly collect more accurate and diverse signals. In particular, tactile sensors are applied directly on the skin and provide input signals of motion change for the flexible reading device. This review provides information about different types of tactile sensors and their working mechanisms that are piezoresistive, piezocapacitive, piezoelectric, and triboelectric. Moreover, this review presents not only the applications of the tactile sensor in motion sensing and health care monitoring, but also their contributions in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years. Other applications, such as human behavior studies, are also suggested.
A novel approach for minimizing high-frequency transformer copper losses

A graphical and numerical method of calculating and minimizing losses in windings, that generalizes previous findings, has been introduced. Using electromagnetic theory and MMF diagrams in both space and time a method is proposed that provides insight into the mechanism of skin and proximity effect losses and that also yields quantitative results. Using this method, several winding geometries for various topologies are covered. The analysis and optimization process is experimentally verified using an interleaved flyback transformer. The mathematical treatment justifying the use of the field method and which is essential in arriving at any numerical result is presented are more general equations for the calculation of copper losses are derived. The relation between the fields in the transformer and copper losses is emphasized. Also, the tools necessary to derive optimization diagrams are provided. >
Lens Detection System using Optical Augmentation

In camera detection systems, the detection of presence of camera is done but it is required to detect the position of camera where it is fixed to locate them. As these small sizes hidden cameras are used to capture images and videos, not only in trial rooms but also in defense, research laboratories, industries, etc without people's awareness. In order to find them, optical augmentation principle is used as a powerful tool to identify the lo cation which consequently yields lower energy prices with accuracy. In this paper, the problem is formulated as the location of the fixed camera and is solved using optical augmentation. 6 IR LED system has been used to test the feasibility and accuracy of the method. To find and remove cameras from their fixed location to feel safe and secure, the researcher has paid attention in locating the lens of cameras. The results demonstrated that optical augmentation is successfully finding the location of the lens with minimum cost and lower energy.
SUSTAINABLE EXPLOITATION OF FRESHWATER PRAWN DIVERSITY OF INDIA FOR FOOD AND LIVELIHOOD SECURITY WITH EMPHASIS ON PLANNING

In India, the population has been increasing at an alarming rate for the last five decades. This has created a wide gap in the supply and demand of basic commodities, such as food, clothing, shelter, fuel for man and also fodder for their livestock In India, 60–70 per cent of the people are living in rural areas who neither have adequate land holdings nor alternate service opportunities to meet their livelihood. Over 85 per cent of the rural income is from agriculture and allied areas. They spend about 75–80 per cent of their earnings for food. Livestocks an important source of supplementary income. Another area where the rural people are going to depend on is aquatic resources. In the present context, the paper has been compiled and presented here to highlight the importance of freshwater prawn biodiversity as a source of food and livelihood security. The paper provides a complete picture on the diversity of freshwater prawns of India. The species are grouped under six broad categories on the basis of habitat preferences. It is noteworthy to see that only a few species are utilized at present either as capture or culture fisheries. The paper highlights on the other feasible areas of the diversity utilization, namely, introduction of new potential candidate species for aquaculture; ornamental purposes, as forage organisms etc. Anew method of organic farming is also described in the paper. A detailed management planning process is described for proper and sustainable utilization of freshwater prawns. Food security is regarded as the major index of development of a country. Every effort should be oriented towards this goal. Freshwater prawns form an important dollar earning commodity, proper managerial planningis absolutely necessary for sustainable utilization of the resources. The foregoing discussion may help in this line for food and livelihood safety.