Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensing and Control of a Multi-Joint Soft Wearable Robot for Upper-Limb Assistance and Rehabilitation

In the field of wearable robotics, there has been increased interest in the creation of soft wearable robots to provide assistance and rehabilitation for those with physical impairments. Compared to traditional robots, these devices have the potential to be fully portable and lightweight, a flexibility that may allow for increased utilization time as well as enable use outside of a clinical environment. In this letter, we present a textile-based multi-joint soft wearable robot to assist the upper limb, in particular shoulder elevation and elbow extension. Before developing a portable fluidic supply system, we leverage an off-board actuation system for power and control, with the worn components weighting less than half kilogram. We showed that this robot can be mechanically transparent when powered off, not restricting users from performing movements associated with activities of daily living. Three IMUs were placed on the torso, upper arm and forearm to measure the shoulder and elbow kinematics. We found an average RMSE of $\sim\! 5$ degrees when compared to an optical motion capture system. We implemented dynamic Gravity Compensation (GC) and Joint Trajectory Tracking (JTT) controllers that actively modulated actuator pressure in response to IMU readings. The controller performances were evaluated in a study with eight healthy individuals. Using the GC controller, subject shoulder muscle activity decreased with increasing magnitude of assistance and for the JTT controller, we obtained low tracking errors (mean $\sim\! 6$ degrees RMSE). Future work will evaluate the potential of the robot to assist with activities in post-stroke rehabilitation.
Miniaturized Broadband Circularly Polarized Slotted Ground Antenna with L-shaped Parasitic Strips

This communication projects the antenna that offers circular polarization (CP) radiation over a broad range of frequency. The CP at lower frequency is obtained through the coupling of three L-shaped parasitic strips. The geometrical defect in the ground plane improves the impedance matching performance and excites the CP radiation at the upper- frequency range of the resulting frequency band. The 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth (ARBW) and impedance bandwidth (IBW) of the antenna is greatly improved by adding a short stub to the feed line. The size of the proposed antenna is 30×30 mm2. This antenna features a wide 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth of 94.55% (3-8.38 GHz) within -10 dB IBW of 118.95% (2.795-11 GHz).
LEVELS OF CHLORINE AND CHLORINE DIOXIDE OF EQUIVALENT BACTERICIDAL EFFECT IN POULTRY PROCESSING WATER

Equivalent levels of chlorine and chlorine dioxide (generated on-site) were established on the basis of bactericidal action in bird chiller water. When introduced directly into the chiller water after processed birds had begun to enter the chiller, 5 ppm CIO2 and 34 ppm CI2 were equally bactericidal. When introduced into the chiller with the fresh-water input, 20 ppm CI2 and 3 ppm CIO2 were equally effective. The use of about 1/7 as much CIO2 as CI2 would be less corrosive to processing equipment and provide the poultry industry with an alternative bactericide to chlorine.
Origami Pump Actuator Based Pneumatic Quadruped Robot (OPARO)

In this study, we proposed an origami pump actuator based pneumatic quadruped robot (OPARO). The robot was constructed with a four-leg system controlled by only two motors. Specifically, the forelegs and hindlegs are pneumatically coupled to operate simultaneously with a tendon-driven system. The forelegs simultaneously performs pumping and actuating to supply air to the hindlegs, and the hindlegs are passively actuated by the air supply from the forelegs. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the mobility performance of OPARO. We measured the posture of each leg and analyzed the movement to determine the operating mechanism in locomotion. The motion, gait, and repeatability of OPARO were analyzed from the experimental results. Additionally, we conducted a parametric study to determine the tendencies at different gait frequencies and motor inputs. The OPARO moves at a maximum velocity of 0.11 body length per second (10.29 mm/s). Furthermore, we evaluated the gait velocity with various gait patterns according to different duty ratios and floor surfaces. Moreover, the steering performance of OPARO was demonstrated. We found that the tendon-driven pneumatic origami pump actuator system is adequate for a quadruped robot without an external air supply system.
Indian Premier League Player Selection Model Based on Indian Domestic League Performance

For squad selection in any sports events or tournaments, performance analysis of players at the international level and the domestic level is necessary. In cricket, the Indian Premier League (IPL) is one of the prestigious tournaments in the world. Its teams constitute a diaspora of Indian and foreign players. Hence, it is of utmost importance that only the better performing players get selected. A player's performance can be broadly divided into two major categories in cricket, i.e. batting performance and bowling performance. Our study proposes a unique approach to mark an Indian player possibly suitable for the IPL, based on his performance in Indian domestic tournaments.
Boosting WiFi Sensing Performance via CSI Ratio

The past few years have witnessed the great potential of exploiting channel state information (CSI) retrieved from commodity WiFi devices for contactless human sensing. However, a severe problem hindering practical WiFi sensing applications is that the obtained CSI data contains a large amount of noise, leading to short sensing range and low sensing accuracy. Aiming at solving the critical problem, in this article, we propose to employ a new base signal called CSI ratio to boost the WiFi sensing performance.
Ultrasond-Induced Haptic Sensations Via PMUTS

This work presents the sense of touch via non-contact ultrasonic waves by a dual-electrode bimorph piezoelectric micromachined transducer (pMUT) array. The prototype device has 12×12 elements with circular diaphragms of 415μm in radius made of 2 μm-thick AlN. They are fabricated by a CMOS compatible micromachining process resulting a resonant frequency at 109.4 kHz. Experimentally, a best haptic sensation on human fingers is found when emitting high frequency ultrasonic waves to emulate 100 Hz signals by means of pulse width modulation with a 50% duty cycle. Strong haptic sensations are reported by volunteers under an AC peak-to-peak amplitude of 12 V up to 10 cm away from the transducers. Applications as the human-machine interfaces in biomedical, gaming, and AR/VR are a few of the MEMS uses; we present results by transmitting a series of Morse codes remotely to the skins of volunteers.
Nucleation and Crystallization of Titania Nanoparticles in Silica Titania Planar Waveguides: a Study by Low Frequency Raman Scattering

SiO2 (1-x) TiO2 (x) waveguides, with the mole fraction x in the range 0.07 0.20 and thickness of about 0.4 μm, were deposited on silica substrates by a dip-coating technique. The thermal treatments at 700-900°C, used to fully densify the xerogels, produce nucleation of TiO2 nanocrystals even for the lowest TiO2 content. The nucleation of TiO2 nanocrystals and their growth by thermal annealing up to 1300°C were studied by waveguide Raman spectroscopy, for the SiO2 (0.8) TiO2 (0.2) composition. By increasing the annealing temperature, the Raman spectrum evolves from that typical of the silica-titania glass to that of anatase, but brookite phase is dominant at intermediate temperatures. In the low frequency region (5-50 cm) of the Raman spectra, acoustic vibrations of the nanocrystals are observed. From the measured line shapes, we can deduce the size distribution of the particles. The results are compared with those obtained from the line widths in the X-ray diffraction patterns. Nanocrystals with a mean size in the range 4-20 nm are obtained, by thermal annealing in a corresponding range of 800-1300°C.
Parameter Identification of Fractional Order Systems Using a Hybrid of Bernoulli Polynomials and Block Pulse Functions

Block pulse functions (BPFs) are piecewise constant and not sufficiently smooth. Therefore, their accuracy is limited when it comes to identifying the parameters of fractional order systems (FOSs). This in turn means that BPFs are incapable of offering highly accurate parameter identification results. However, using a great number of BPFs would significantly increase the dimension of the operational matrix and thereby adds to the computational complexity and burden. To overcome this problem, we present here a hybrid function method for identifying FOSs. The method utilizes a hybrid of Bernoulli polynomials and block pulse functions (HBPBPFs) as the base functions to approximate input and output signals. The fractional integral operational matrix of HBPBPFs is derived and used to convert an FOS to an algebraic system. The parameters of the FOS are successfully identified by minimizing the mean square error between the output of the true system and that of the algebraic representation of the FOS. The simulation experiment verifies that our proposed HBPBPFs method is effective and can generate more accurate identification results than existing BPFs methods.
EEG Signal Analysis for Seizure Detection Using Recurrence Plots and Tchebichef Moments

This paper deals with seizure detection by processing EEG signals. In this context a methodology for transforming 1D EEG signals to 2D images thus the detection task can be accomplished by the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is proposed. The introduced method utilizing the high compactness of the Tchebichef moments along with the highly informative Recurrence Plots (RPs) that permits the application of pre-trained CNN models to detect the seizure cases. The proposed scheme provides improved detection accuracy up to 98% for the case of the Resnet18 model, while it shows outstanding robustness to additive (97%) as well as multiplicative (90%) noisy conditions. In this sense, the method outperforms the conventional approach of using the RPs to describe the raw EEG signals, by a factor of 1 %-5%. These results are very promising and justify the efficiency of the introduced method, towards establishing a concrete and robust EEG signals analysis approach.
A Human Cornea-On-A-Chip

This paper describes a microfluidic platform to reconstitute human cornea and the complexity of its interface to external environment. To recapitulate the structural complexity and biological phenotype of the cornea, we embedded a collagen-coated porous membrane in a double-layer microfluidic chip for three-dimensional (3D) culture of cells derived from the human cornea. Moreover, a pressure-driven flow was used for long-term cultivation, which not only forms a bionic human cornea, but also simulates the microenvironment of the human ocular surface. We demonstrated a novel micro-engineered device that would improve the interaction between the in vitro model and the external environment, providing a potential solution to obtain predictive results to in vivo observations.
Graph Coloring based Scheduling Algorithm to automatically generate College Course Timetable

Time table scheduling has been a topic of research in the past decades, yet, not a single optimal robust algorithm has been developed which can dynamically solve this problem considering all hard as well as some soft constraints. The manual way of doing it is very time-consuming, and even after generating a timetable, no one can guarantee that it is the best schedule. The automated timetable scheduling belongs to the NP-Complete class of problem, and hence it is not easy to solve. As academic institutes are growing in number and complexity, their resources and events are becoming harder to schedule, therefore to overcome all these problems, this paper proposes to make an algorithm which will consider all required constraints from both the students and teachers’ point of view. The main aim of the proposed algorithm is to provide a conflict-free and practically feasible schedule with optimized use of every resource available.
ECG Heartbeat Classification Using CNN

Electrocardiogram(ECG) is a valuable clinical signal, which is widely used to identify the cardiovascular diseases. However, it remains a cumbersome process to manually evaluate the ECG signals because of smaller variations in its physiological features in normal and abnormal cases that too when there are a huge number of cardiac patients to examine. In such a scenario, automatic classification of ECG signals can provide an ease to the doctors to make a correct diagnosis of a particular disease. This work proposes a classification model to classify the ECG in five different classes based on their morphological features. Instead of using manually designed features as most of the existing ECG classification works do, we have extracted data-driven non-linear features using convolutional neural network. The 1D-CNN model architecture is based on three convolutional, max pooling and dense layers which automatically extracts distinguishable nonlinear features from the ECG signals and automatically classify them into five different classes: Non-ectopic beats (Normal Beat), Supraventricular ectopic beats, Ventricular ectopic beats, Fusion Beats and Unknown Beats. The proposed algorithm was assessed using open-source database of MIT-BIH, which is based on 47 subjects. After 5-fold cross-validation, the presented algorithm achieves an accuracy of 97.36% and f1 score of 99.83%. It is a simple yet fast performing model that is implementable on e-healthcare-based devices for remote heart diagnosis of patients.
Overview of SOGI-Based Single-Phase Phase-Locked Loops for Grid Synchronization Under Complex Grid Conditions

Synchronization is the key part to ensure the high performance of grid-connected systems. Phase-locked loop (PLL) is one of the most popular synchronizations due to its simple implementation and robustness under certain grid variations. Particularly, in single-phase applications, PLL based on second-order generalized integrator (SOGI-PLL) is widely used because of its simple structure, certain filtering ability and frequency adaptability. The sensitivity of SOGI-PLL to the dc offset and low-order harmonics has been studied a lot in the literature and many solutions have been proposed. However, as more and more power electronic devices are integrated into the power grid recently, the grid condition becomes more complex. As a result, the nonlinear loop coupling phenomenon of SOGI-PLL is more severe and obvious and thus the performance of SOGI-PLL is degraded a lot, especially under the conditions of grid frequency variations and weak grid. A popular method is to use the frequency-fixed SOGI-PLL (FFSOGI-PLL) while how to eliminate the estimation error under frequency variations remain an important task. Though some scattered methods have been proposed, a simple yet effective strategy is still missing. Besides, it has been shown that the system stability margin will be reduced due to the negative-resistance behavior of PLL. However, the models derived in the current documents cannot accurately reveal the instabilities caused by the standard SOGI-PLL for missing the dynamics of the frequency feedback loop. Moreover, the PLL parameters are usually designed according to the PLL bandwidth to guarantee system stability under a weak grid. How to optimize the parameters is still unclear. In view of this, this article further summarizes and reviews the existing achievements of single-phase SOGI-PLL, and points out the problems to be solved and the development direction to improve the SOGI-PLL under more complex and non-ideal grid conditions.
A Chaotic Encryption Scheme in DMT for IM/DD Intra-Datacenter Interconnects

In this letter, a novel physical layer encryption method based on digital chaos is proposed for the security in high-speed intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) discrete multi-tone (DMT) transmission system. In the proposed encryption scheme, a random interleaving method is used, which further enhances the ability to encrypt the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation and improves the transmission performance. In addition, probabilistic shaping (PS) technique is also cascaded into the encrypted transmission system for the first time. Adopting the proposed algorithm, we experimentally demonstrated the transmission of 100-Gbit/s encrypted 64QAM and PS-64QAM DMT signals over 2-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF).
3D-Printed Micrograters for Sampling of the Blood Vessel Wall

Endothelial cells lining blood vessels have phenotypic variations that indicate the health/disease status for a variety of conditions, including atherosclerosis and hypertension. Current sampling strategies lead to a high variation in the sampled amount, and we are not aware of sampling tools specifically targeting endothelial cells. Here, we present a new type of endovascular catheter for sampling of the blood vessel wall. The catheter is a 380 μm nitinol tube over which 3D printed graters are threaded. The catheter is designed to be non-invasive during the axial motion and to interact with the blood vessel wall when rotated. Initial results indicate successful in-vivo sampling - with minimal blood contamination - of the wall of blood vessels less than 0.5 mm in diameter.
Liquid Metal as Electrical Interface Material with Temporal Stability and Stretch Tolerance

Electrical interface material (EIM) is an important component to develop stretchable electronics. Currently available EIMs suffer from the trade-off between low value and stretch tolerance of contact resistance. To overcome this challenge, we demonstrated the use of liquid metal (LM) as an EIM between solid metal (SM) pads for stretchable electronic devices. With LM, we achieved low contact resistance with temporal stability and stretch tolerance. Our study suggested that the contact resistance between an LM and an SM decreases over time due to alloying, and the contact resistance was reduced to 18.6% in 103 days by ensuring the electrical connection under vacuum during the fabrication. Furthermore, the use of the LM as an EIM enabled maintaining the change in contact resistance below 9% during 100% stretching deformation repeated 100 times. These results suggest that LM can be used as an EIM with temporal stability and stretch tolerance.
3D Trajectory and Transmit Power Optimization for UAV-Enabled Multi-Link Relaying Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the advantages of high mobility, remarkable versatility, and on-demand deployment, which lead to their wide applications in various industries. In disasters or other emergency events, UAV-enabled relaying can provide a temporary wireless connection for the affected area. Thus, a UAV-enabled multi-link relaying system is considered in this article, where multiple sources communicate with their destinations via multiple UAV relays at the same time sharing the same spectrum. Considering the interference between any two source-UAV relay-destination links, we propose to maximize the minimum throughput of all links by jointly optimizing the UAV relays’ three-dimension (3D) trajectories and the sources and UAV relays’ transmit power levels. As the considered problem is non-convex, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve it by applying the block coordinate ascent technique, which optimizes the UAV trajectories and the transmit power alternately until reaching convergence. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the benchmark algorithms in terms of all links’ minimum throughput, and demonstrate the necessity of jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectories and transmit power for interference mitigation in a UAV-enabled multi-link relaying system.
Analysis of Geometry and Field Quality Along the Series Production of the 11 T Dipole for the High Luminosity LHC

The first series production of Nb3Sn Accelerator Magnets is approaching its end. The LHC dipole upgrade within the scope of the High Luminosity project consists of collared assemblies of 5.6 m-long coils targeted for a nominal field of 11 T at 11.85 kA and 60 mm aperture. As part of the quality control of the production, geometrical and magnetic measurements are performed at different steps. The experience gathered during manufacturing of 28 coils and 11 collared coils is summarized here. Using the available data, we analyzed the distributions of coil geometry, collared coil size, main field, and low order field errors in warm conditions. In some cases, the trends were traced back to displacements of the conductor with respect to the nominal layout. Three magneto-static conductor deformation models aim to explain the variability of field harmonics, confronted with measured data.
Unobtrusive, Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring Using a Soft Polymer Sensor Array With Flexible Hybrid Electronics

The state-of-the-art systems for blood pressure (BP) monitoring often use cuffed-based rigid sensory systems, bulky electronics, multiple measurement sites, and intermittent measurement. Here, we introduce a new type of epidermal electronics that were specifically designed for cuffless BP-monitoring system, named multiPANI. The proposed fully integrated wearable device is equipped with a wireless-flexible hybrid electronics, a personalized flexible sensor array, and encapsulated with a thin biocompatible elastomer layer for soft-conformal contact with the complex skin surface structure. In addition, a unique capability of multiPANI to monitor multiple local pulse wave velocity (PWV) enabling us to develop a novel hybrid BP estimation algorithm that combine a selective-local PWV and high-signal-to-noise-ratio-based pulse wave analysis (PWA) for robust-cuffless BP-monitoring system. Experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid selective PWV-PWA BP model outperform the typical single-PWV BP model by ~30%, with an acceptable root-mean-square-error performance of 3.94 ± 0.5 and 1.88 ± 0.9 mmHg, for systolic BP and diastolic BP respectively. Collectively, this study demonstrated a unique solution of fully integrated epidermal electronics and hybrid BP estimation algorithm for a robust, cuffless, and long-term BP monitoring.
Highly Deformable and Transparent Triboelectric Physiological Sensor Based on Anti-Freezing and Antidrying Ionic Conductive Hydrogel

This paper reports a novel high-deformable and transparent triboelectric hydrogel sensor (THS) with anti-freezing and anti-drying properties for physiology sensing and motion monitoring. It is the first time to fabricate the micro-pyramidal structure on hydrogel's surface for a highly sensitive self-powered sensor. Excellent mechanical and electrical performances can be obtained due to deformable and conductive ionic hydrogel with anti-freezing and anti-drying properties. It shows no significant variations of output signals after being stored at −20°С for seven days and 60°С for 1-day compared with placed at room temperature. Besides, combined with the same processing method of the triboelectric PDMS layer, THS shows an instant response to physiological movement, including breathing with a mask, finger bending and sitting/squatting down. This work provides an insightful method for hydrogel in the application of the physiological sensors field.