Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human inspired humanoid robots control architecture

This PhD Thesis tries to present a different point of view when talking about the development of control architectures for humanoid robots. Specifically, this Thesis is focused on studying the human postural control system as well as on the use of this knowledge to develop a novel architecture for postural control in humanoid robots. The research carried on in this thesis shows that there are two types of components for postural control: a reactive one, and other predictive or anticipatory. This work has focused on the development of the second component through the implementation of a predictive system complementing the reactive one. The anticipative control system has been analysed in the human case and it has been extrapolated to the architecture for controlling the humanoid robot TEO. In this way, its different components have been developed based on how humans work without forgetting the tasks it has been designed for. This control system is based on the composition of sensorial perceptions, the evaluation of stimulus through the use of the psychophysics theory of the surprise, and the creation of events that can be used for activating some reaction strategies (synergies) The control system developed in this Thesis, as well as the human being does, processes information coming from different sensorial sources. It also composes the named perceptions, which depend on the type of task the postural control acts over. The value of those perceptions is obtained using bio-inspired evaluation techniques of sensorial inference. Once the sensorial input has been obtained, it is necessary to process it in order to foresee possible disturbances that may provoke an incorrect performance of a task. The system developed in this Thesis evaluates the sensorial information, previously transformed into perceptions, through the use of the “Surprise Theory”, and it generates some events called “surprises” used for predicting the evolution of a task. Finally, the anticipative system for postural control can compose, if necessary, the proper reactions through the use of predefined movement patterns called synergies. Those reactions can complement or substitute completely the normal performance of a task. The performance of the anticipative system for postural control as well as the performance of each one of its components have been tested through simulations and the application of the results in the humanoid robot TEO from the RoboticsLab research group in the Systems Engineering and Automation Department from the Carlos III University of Madrid. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Low Power Design Techniques for Digital Logic Circuits.

With the rapid increase in the density and the size of chips and systems, area and power dissipation become critical concern in Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit design. Low power design techniques are essential for today's VLSI industry. The history of symbolic logic and some typical techniques for finite state machine (FSM) logic synthesis are reviewed. The state assignment is used to optimize area and power dissipation for FSMs. Two cost functions, targeting area and power, are presented. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to search for a good state assignment to minimize the cost functions. The algorithm has been implemented in C. The program can produce better results than NOVA, which is integrated into SIS by DC Berkeley, and other publications both in area and power tested by MCNC benchmarks. Flip-flops are the core components of FSMs. The reduction of power dissipation from flip-flops can save power for digital systems significantly. Three new kinds of flip-flops, called differential CMOS single edge-triggered flip-flop with clock gating, double edge-triggered and multiple valued flip-flops employing multiple valued clocks, are proposed. All circuits are simulated using PSpice. Most researchers have focused on developing low-power techniques in AND/OR or NAND & NOR based circuits. The low power techniques for AND /XOR based circuits are still in their early stage of development. To implement a complex function involving many inputs, a form of decomposition into smaller subfunctions is required such that the subfunctions fit into the primitive elements to be used in the implementation. Best polarity based XOR gate decomposition technique has been developed, which targets low power using Huffman algorithm. Compared to the published results, the proposed method shows considerable improvement in power dissipation. Further, Boolean functions can be expressed by Fixed Polarity Reed-Muller (FPRM) forms. Based on polarity transformation, an algorithm is developed and implemented in C language which can find the best polarity for power and area optimization. Benchmark examples of up to 21 inputs run on a personal computer are given.
Effective simulation model and new control strategy to improve energy efficiency in hybrid electric land vehicle

The main objectives of this work is to develop an effective modeling method for an easydeployment of a control strategy, to review and study an optimal control strategy for a specific application, and to analyze improvement that can be effected to engine for better efficiency in hybrid vehicle architecture. The scopes of this work include the simulation part of the studied system and its validation with experimental results. Study cases are used to analyze optimization that can be effected to the original system. A well established optimization tool is chosen to optimize the actual control strategy and becomes a benchmark of a new optimal control strategy to be deployed in the system. A predictive method to know energy consumption of the system is developed in order to obtain an optimal control suitable with the vehicle application. Using the developed model, analysis is conducted to identify an optimal control strategy for a specific utilization. As perspectives, the main components of the system can be studied for improvements of its energy efficiency. The Energetic Macroscopic Representation (EMR) is a good method to represent dynamic model and it can be used to model any electromechanical machines and can be envisaged to model other system than a vehicle system, like a renewable energy system, a new electro-mechanical system or a robotic system.
How to Start-and Keep-a Laboratory Notebook: Policy and Practical Guidelines

A laboratory notebook is an important tool that goes well beyond research management and can have important implications for issues ranging from intellectual property management to the prevention of fraud. This chapter dis cusses the key elements of a laboratory notebook, types of notebooks, what should be included in the notebook, ownership issues, archiving, and security. The chapter provides sample notebook pages that illustrate some of the recommended practices.
Speech Understanding and Aging

Abstract : A reveiw of aging and speech understanding reveals that the elderly population experience severe deficits under certain conditions. These deficits appear to be large enough to cause economic and social problems for the middle-aged and elderly adult in his everyday life. Furthermore, in some occupations, for example, aircraft pilots, air traffic controllers, and in noisy occupations in heavy industry, there are safety problems with regard to ability to understand speech. Standard tests of physical health should include tests of ability to hear and understand speech as well as the routine pure-tone audiogram. The speech tests should involve realistic conditions of noise and message redundancy.
Alternative Engineered Soils and Seed Mixes Used for Seepage Troughs

Green Infrastructure measures such as seepage troughs are an integral part of sustainable urban rainwater management. In Austria, seepage troughs are currently almost exclusively produced with a 30 cm thick active soil filter passage made of topsoil. A standard seed mix is used as vegetation, which usually consists of only three different turfgrass species. During a three-year trial, engineered soils with improved properties (increased water storage capacity, infiltration rate and pore volume) were tested for their suitability as seepage troughs compared to topsoil. In addition to the standard turf seed mix, a flowering turf seed mix (34 species) and flowering meadow seed mix (53 species) were applied. The engineered and reference soils were analyzed for infiltration rate, vitality, cover ratio and inflorescence. The results were further assessed with the evaluation chart showing quantitatively the suitability of the tested soils for rainwater management. The investigations showed that engineered soils in combination with flowering meadow seed mix lead to the best results. Therefore, this type of vegetation for seepage troughs is recommended for future applications. The reference alternatives cannot be recommended.
Studies on the Decrease Mechanisms of Typical Complex Networks

Network decrease caused by the removal of nodes is an important evolution process that is paralleled with network growth. However, many complex network models usually lacked a sound decrease mechanism. Thus, they failed to capture how to cope with decreases in real life. The paper proposed decrease mechanisms for three typical types of networks, including the ER networks, the WS small-world networks and the BA scale-free networks. The proposed mechanisms maintained their key features in continuous and independent decrease processes, such as the random connections of ER networks, the long-range connections based on nearest-coupled network of WS networks and the tendency connections and the scale-free feature of BA networks. Experimental results showed that these mechanisms also maintained other topology characteristics including the degree distribution, clustering coefficient, average length of shortest-paths and diameter during decreases. Our studies also showed that it was quite difficult to find an efficient decrease mechanism for BA networks to withstand the continuous attacks at the high-degree nodes, because of the unequal status of nodes.
Magnus the Chess Robot

The goal of this thesis was to create a low-cost chess-playing robot to help progress the field of small-scale robotics and make it more available for personal use. To achieve this, methods for moving pieces on a chessboard has been evaluated, resulting in the design of a four positional degrees-of-freedom elbow manipulator arm. Of-the-shelf servo motors were chosen as the arms actuators, providing closed-loop control contained within each motor. Control of the motors was interfaced through a dedicated servo controller, consisting of both a microcontroller and interfacing software written in C++. An inverse kinematic based open-loop robot controller was made to control the overall movements of the arm and ensure that the arm avoided any potential obstacles in its workspace. To help the robotic arm with perceiving its surroundings, a wide selection of sensory configurations and computer vision algorithms were evaluated. The sensory unit was implemented by capturing images with a Microsoft LifeCam Studio camera and using OpenCV to process the captured images. The chess engine was not implemented as part of this thesis, therefore the work done on this part has mainly been to find a suitable chess engine and incorporating it into the implemented system. Based on the results obtained, a complete chess-playing robot was created. The robot performed with a relatively good accuracy and repeatability, but will require some improvements to increase the stability and smoothness of motion. The computer vision results exhibited a good degree of robustness, allowing the robotic arm to act fully autonomously. Some obstacles were not overcome, specifically the sensory unit did not provide the robot controller with the chessboard coordinates necessary to allow manipulation on chessboards of arbitrary size and orientation. The goal of proving the possibility of making small-scale robotics more available for personal use is believed to be achieved. With some further work on the chess robot, it is also believed that the robot could be useful for educational and entertainment purposes.
Development of a conjugate heat transfer solver

The current research study presents a numerical approach in modelling the conjugate heat transfer system of the gas-turbine rotating discs-cavities. The work was undertaken to understand such phenomena and, more specifically, to numerically investigate the thermal interactions in rotating discs-cavities. The developed solver is capable of dealing with complex heat transfer problems, such as unsteady three-dimensional compressible rotating-flows. The development was based on integrating an inhouse computational fluid dynamics code (SURF) with a heat conduction solver internally. Method of interpolation using mapped area was also introduced for treating non-matching meshes at interface, which plays an effective role in exchanging boundary data. This thesis also documents the development of a numerical finite volume cell-vertex hybrid edgebased heat conduction code by the author using FORTRAN. The heat conduction solver was developed and validated to deal with three dimensional solid-domains using unstructured elements. The validation process was carried out on several test cases for investigating the temperature distribution. The test results were presented to show good agreement with the analytical, experimental and other commercial numerical solutions where they exist.
Hyperspectral Image Classification via a Novel Spectral-Spatial 3D ConvLSTM-CNN

In recent years, deep learning-based models have produced encouraging results for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Specifically, Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) has shown good performance for learning valuable features and modeling long-term dependencies in spectral data. However, it is less effective for learning spatial features, which is an integral part of hyperspectral images. Alternatively, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can learn spatial features, but they possess limitations in handling long-term dependencies due to the local feature extraction in these networks. Considering these factors, this paper proposes an end-to-end Spectral-Spatial 3D ConvLSTM-CNN based Residual Network (SSCRN), which combines 3D ConvLSTM and 3D CNN for handling both spectral and spatial information, respectively. The contribution of the proposed network is twofold. Firstly, it addresses the long-term dependencies of spectral dimension using 3D ConvLSTM to capture the information related to various ground materials effectively. Secondly, it learns the discriminative spatial features using 3D CNN by employing the concept of the residual blocks to accelerate the training process and alleviate the overfitting. In addition, SSCRN uses batch normalization and dropout to regularize the network for smooth learning. The proposed framework is evaluated on three benchmark datasets widely used by the research community. The results confirm that SSCRN outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an overall accuracy of 99.17%, 99.67%, and 99.31% over Indian Pines, Salinas, and Pavia University datasets, respectively. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that these excellent results were achieved with comparatively fewer epochs, which also confirms the fast learning capabilities of the SSCRN.
A Stator With Offset Segments and a Double Stator Design for the Reduction of Torque Ripple of a Switched Reluctance Motor

The torque ripple of a switched reluctance motor (SRM) should be taken into account, as it can have negative effects on a connected gearbox and/or load. In this paper a concept and two realization methods for the reduction of the torque ripple are presented. An optimized alignment of the active elements of the stator leads to a reduction of this torque ripple. The first method proposed here is a four-fold segmented motor, which can reduce the torque ripple by 37.3 %. This can be achieved by segmentation in combination with a clever arrangement of active elements. However, this increases the number of necessary inverters, which increases redundancy and therefore leads to more security. A second method of achieving an equal reduction can be obtained by using a “double stator” motor. In this configuration both stators can be powered together. With this concept, the number of converters is halved compared to the first mentioned solution. This saves electronic components and thus reduces the effort. All results referred to in this article are obtained by simulation, or measured on a prototype.
The influence of BBBEE regulations on entrepreneurs inthe (luxury) food industry in the Western Cape of SouthAfrica

Black Empowerment (BBBEE) is an hot issue on the moment in South Africa. BBBEE is a supportive government regulation to help the black participation in the main stream economy after a long period of the Apartheid era. Many entrepreneurs in Cape Town have heard about BBBEE and deal with it in practice. Soulicious Chocolate is a small entrepreneurial company that may grow to a successful business. This report gives insight in how these macro environmental regulations influence the business of entrepreneurs in the luxury food industry in the West Cape of South Africa. In the theoretical framework the concept entrepreneurship is elaborated on, and the theory of planned behavior. The 2 models are taken together and a new model is proposed to explain how entrepreneurs deal with BBBEE in their business and on personal level. In order to do this, 19 companies in the (luxury) food industry in and around Cape Town are interviewed and questioned about the 7 factors that eventually lead to working with BBBEE and the presence of a score card. A lot of qualitative data was gathered from these companies and the highlights are mentioned in the results. Key words: BBBEE, Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial behavior
UTILIZATION OF INFORMATION SYSTEM IN KESAMBEN DISTRICT KESAMBEN OF JOMBANG

The village has the right to budget as regulated in Law no. 6 year 2014 on the Village, the village is also given the responsibility to report it accountably, cleanly and transparently. Technology, Information and Communication (ICT) along with its supporters are prepared to make the village have a fast, efficient, transparent governance by sticking to local wisdom. This research uses descriptive qualitative method. Taking data through participatory observation, indepth interview and literature study to explore more deeply how the utilization of communication and information technology in Kesamben Village Kesamben District Jombang.Utilization of Technology, Information and Communication (ICT) in its identification appears on several aspects such as human resources, facilities, infrastructure. The limited human resources capable of Technology, Information and Communication become obstacles in the utilization of Village Information System along with the lack of Internet network.
Wireless sensor network for forestry applications: overcoming the uncertainty

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a self-organized wireless network that consists of a number of sensor nodes. The deployment of a number of sensor nodes enables people to monitor and interact with the physical world. Forest is one of those environments where WSNs are applied. Under the circumstances of global climate changes and environmental pollution, WSNs for forestry applications attract increasing attention in recent years. This dissertation research focuses on developing techniques that make the sensor network systems more applicable and efficient for practical forestry applications. I have been working on GreenOrbs, a long-term large-scale WSN system deployed in the forest. In order to overcome the uncertainty emerging from the forestry deployments, I address several key issues, including error-resilient localization for networked sensor nodes against irregular wireless signals, forwarding-quality-aware data collection against unstable link and node behavior, and quantitative canopy closure estimates against error-prone sensor readings. I develop theoretical principles, design practical protocols, and implement my ideas with GreenOrbs. I evaluate those approaches through real-world large-scale experiments and trace-driven simulations. The results validate their effectiveness and efficiency in overcoming the uncertainty. The proposed approaches can be further applied to other fields.
Cryogenic characteristics of IGBTs

Applications are now starting to emerge for superconducting devices in the areas of electrical power conversion and management, for example superconducting windings for marine propulsion motors, superconducting fault current limiters and superconducting magnet energy storage (SMES). Many of these applications also require power electronics, and it is therefore timely to consider the possibility of locating the power electronics in the cryosystem with the superconducting devices. Although significant work has been undertaken on the cryogenic operation of small devices, little has been published on larger devices, particularly the IGBT. This therefore forms the focus of this study. To examine the cryogenic performance of the sample devices, a cryo-system consisting of a cold chamber, a helium-filled compressor and vacuum pumps was built. Static, gate charge and switching tests were carried out on three types of IGBT modules, PT (punch-through), NPT (non-punch-through) and IGBT3 respectively, in the temperature range of 50 to 300 K. The switching tests were undertaken at 600V and up to 110 A. A physically based, compact level-1 model was selected to model the cryogenic performance of the IGBTs. A generic Saber power diode model with reverse recovery was selected to model the diode cryogenic performance. Close correspondence was demonstrated between the models and experimental results over the temperature range of 50- 300 K. Saber simulation was used to examine the cryogenic performance of a DC-DC step-down converter and a pulse-width modulated inverter leg, in which the temperature-dependent power device models developed in the modelling work were used. The simulation results showed that standard power electronic circuits using standard devices could work much more efficiently at low temperatures, for example, the efficiency of the DC-DC converter working at 50 kHz being increased from 90.0% at room temperature to 97.0% at 50 K.