Estimation delay compensation in high-gain observer-based parameter identification
In this paper, the properties of the disturbance estimation in a high gain observer are analyzed, and a time delay calculation method is proposed to improve the performance of parameter identification. This paper shows that the estimation delay depends on the observer gain, but has nothing to do with the parameter variation. Then, a novel algorithm is proposed to calculate the delay according to the phase response of disturbance estimation transfer function. Hence, in terms of system identification, this delay is compensated by lagging the state estimate by the same amount of delay. This technique, on one side, improves the performance of parameter identification accuracy, and, on the other side, gives a new insight into the high-gain observer design.

title: Advances in stochastic distribution control
abstract: Stochastic distribution control systems aims at the controller design so as to realize a shape control of the distributions of certain random variables in the process. Once the probability density functions (PDFs) of these variables are used to describe their distributions, the control task is to obtain control signals so that the output PFDs of the system are made to follow their target PDFs. In this paper, a survey of the recent developments on the research of stochastic distribution control systems will be made.

title: An Intelligent Mill Load Switching Control of the Pulverizing System for an Alumina Sintering Process
abstract: This paper proposes an intelligent switching control strategy for the pulverizing system for an alumina sintering process. The control strategy consists of a coordinating controller, a proportional-integral (PI) controller, a rule-based reasoning controller and a switching mechanism. The practical application to a pulverizing system in an alumina sintering process has shown that when the hot air temperature is low and varies frequently, this control strategy ensures that the mill load and the temperature of the mill outlet are both within their required ranges, and also controls the mill load at the level corresponding to the maximum mill output. Moreover, it has been observed that the proposed control strategy can avoid the fault operating condition and effectively reduce the unit energy consumption.

title: Robust minimum entropy tracking control with guaranteed stability for nonlinear stochastic systems under modeling errors
abstract: In this paper, robust minimum entropy tracking control problem is considered for nonlinear stochastic systems. The controlled systems are described by nonlinear non-Gaussian difference equations with the un-modeled uncertainty and modeling error, as well as time delays. Entropy is adopted to characterize the uncertainty of the tracking error. The nonlinear multi-step-ahead predictive cost function is used and the relationship between the probability density functions of the input and the tracking error via the uncertain mapping is established. With these formulations, the cost function can be bounded as a nonlinear functional of the control input and the known bounds of the errors. Explicit design algorithms are presented for the robust suboptimal controller and further for the stabilization controllers. The Renyi's entropy has also been used to simplify the cost function. Simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.

title: Novel Parameter Identification by Using a High-Gain Observer With Application to a Gas Turbine Engine
abstract: In this study, a novel identification technique, that is high-gain observer-based identification approach, is proposed for systems with bounded process and measurement noises. For system parameters with abnormal changes, an adaptive change detection and parameter identification algorithm is next presented. The presented technique and algorithm are finally applied to the parameter identification of the gas turbine engine by using the recorded input data from the engine test-bed. The identified parameters and the response curves are desirable. The simulations have proved the effectiveness of the proposed procedure compared with the previous identification approach.

title: Minimum entropy control of nonlinear ARMA systems over a communication network
abstract: In this paper, the entropy concept has been utilized to characterize the uncertainty of the tracking error for nonlinear ARMA stochastic systems over a communication network, where time delays in the communication channels are of random nature. A recursive optimization solution has been developed. In addition, an alternative algorithm is also proposed based on the probability density function of the tracking error, which is estimated by a neural network. Finally, a simulation example is given to illustrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed approach.

title: Real-time pose estimation for outdoor mobile robots using range data
abstract: Pose estimation is a key issue in mobile robots and important to moving object tracking. In this paper, we present a tangent based hybrid pose estimation algorithm with real-time performance using range data from laser radar, which consists of Iterative Tangent weighted Closest Point (ITCP) and Hough transform based Tangent Angle Histogram (HTAH) algorithms to overcome problems with past methods, such as local minimum, aperture-like, and high computation problems. The algorithm has been tested on both synthetic and real range data in outdoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate its high accuracy, low computation, wide applicability and high robustness to aperture-like problems, occlusion and noise.

title: Pangaea: A tightly-coupled IA32 heterogeneous chip multiprocessor
abstract: Moore's Law and the drive towards performance efficiency have led to the on-chip integration of general-purpose cores with special-purpose accelerators. Pangaea is a heterogeneous CMP design for non-rendering workloads that integrates IA32 CPU cores with non-IA32 GPU-class multi-cores, extending the current state-of-the-art CPU-GPU integration that physically “fuses” existing CPU and GPU designs. Pangaea introduces (1) a resource repartitioning of the GPU, where the hardware budget dedicated for 3D-specific graphics processing is used to build more general-purpose GPU cores, and (2) a 3-instruction extension to the IA32 ISA that supports tighter architectural integration and fine-grain shared memory collaborative multithreading between the IA32 CPU cores and the non-IA32 GPU cores. We implement Pangaea and the current CPU-GPU designs in fully-functional synthesizable RTL based on the production quality RTL of an IA32 CPU and an Intel GMA X4500 GPU. On a 65 nm ASIC process technology, the legacy graphics-specific fixed-function hardware has the area of 9 GPU cores and total power consumption of 5 GPU cores. With the ISA extensions, the latency from the time an IA32 core spawns a GPU thread to the time the thread begins execution is reduced from thousands of cycles to fewer than 30 cycles. Pangaea is synthesized on a FPGA-based prototype and runs off-the-shelf IA32 OSes. A set of general-purpose non-graphics workloads demonstrate speedups of up to 8.8×.

title: A Composite Method to Extract Eye Contour
abstract: An eye contour extraction method which combines a simplied version of Active Shape Model(ASM) with a gradient method is proposed. Considering the large amount of calculations required by ASM, it is only used to extract eyelids. As iris is considered to have some more regular shape, the detection of iris is done by the simple but fast gradient method, which is improved by introducing gradient value to the weight matrix. Our detection method has been implemented in the C programming language and experimental results shows good accuracy and efficiency.

title: Directed Bipartite Graphs Containing Every Possible Pair of Directed Cycles

title: A dependable Peer-to-Peer computing platform
abstract: This paper discusses a dependable and widely applicable Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing platform. As the existing P2P computing platforms are limited due to the lack of support for various computational models, this paper proposes a workflow management mechanism to support task dependency in parallel programs while increasing computing efficiency. In general, task dependency leads to a serious performance degradation for failed task re-execution because of volatile peers. Therefore, it results in low dependability. Here, dependability is defined as a comparison of the actual performance with task failures to the theoretical one without failure on a P2P computing platform. Redundant task dispatch and a runtime optimization method are proposed to guarantee high dependability even with highly volatile peers. Large-scale simulation results indicate that the computing platform efficiently solves the problem of P2P computing due to volatile peers.