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Decreasing profit margins and increasing concerns about animal welfare are boosting the interest for the development of monitoring and analysis technologies specifically targeting the poultry meat production process. In this context, this paper addresses one of the most critical steps of such process, the transportation of newborn animals from birth places to breeding farms. Specifically, an intelligent...
Education in industrial electronics-related subjects is very challenging because of the many different technological topics and application domains to be addressed. Mobile robotics is a very interesting area in this context, because it requires a wide coverage of many diverse topics and, at the same time, it is typically very appealing for engineering students. Therefore, mobile robot systems are...
Decreasing profit margins and increasing concerns about animal welfare are boosting the interest for the development of monitoring and analysis technologies specifically targeting the poultry meat production process. In this context, this paper addresses monitoring of poultry activity in breeding farms. Specifically, it analyzes the suitability of different vision systems and image processing algorithms...
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause or morbimortality in developed countries. Its early detection may allow this problem to be dramatically mitigated. In this context, wearable devices based on photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors could play a fundamental role for the analysis of heart rhythms at a massive population scale. This paper presents a wearable unit for the acquisition of PPG signals,...
Atrial fibrillation is the most common type of arrhythmia in the world. Therefore, the development of suitable techniques for detection of atrial fibrillation is of paramount importance, particularly for ambulatory screening of potential patients. On the other hand, the current availability of wearable devices capable of monitoring biometric signals opens the door for such ambulatory screening to...
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a widely used algorithm to solve complex optimization problems with non-linear objective functions. PSO usually requires powerful and expensive computers to achieve reasonable execution times. Sometimes the price or size of the computing system is unacceptable, forcing designers to simplify the objective function or to discard PSO. To overcome this limitation,...
The Field-Programmable System-on-Chip concept, integrating processors and configurable logic into the same chip, leads to digital design platforms more powerful than processors and FPGAs alone. Efficient communication between the processor and the FPGA fabric is a key factor to achieve maximum performance in these devices. Architectures for processor-FPGA communications include functional blocks like...
Noise removal is a fundamental requirement for many image processing applications. Its goal is filtering noise from images while preserving integrity of fine details and edges. In order to assess the quality of image denoising algorithms, it is of paramount importance to use suitable metrics. In other words, the use of an appropriate Image Quality Assessment (IQA) procedure is a key factor for selecting...
FPGAs have evolved from hardware accelerators to very powerful System-on-Chip platforms, mainly thanks to the availability of increasingly powerful embedded processors. The efficient integration of embedded processors with the FPGA fabric requires fast exchange of information between both sides, not to compromise the performance improvement these architectures should provide. Therefore, detailed performance...
Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) is a promising technique for fabrication of large metallic parts directly from 3D CAD models. However, the complexity of the process makes it challenging to prevent geometrical distortions and defects to affect the fabricated parts. On-line monitoring and control are fundamental issues to mitigate these problems, but they are not efficiently enough provided by current...
Stroke accidents affect a significant number of people per year all over the world. Sequels of these accidents usually affect the ability of the patients to perform daily life tasks. Rehabilitation plays a fundamental role in assisting those people to recover (to the extent possible). Nowadays, robotic systems are being increasingly used in this area. FISIOROB is one such solution being developed...
On-line estimation of battery parameters is a strong requirement for many current applications where energy storage plays a critical role, e.g. electric vehicles and smart grids. In the last few years, different models have been proposed to represent the behavior of the battery with enough accuracy for precise estimation of state of charge. Using these models to estimate battery parameters in real-time...
This paper analyzes the issues associated to the virtualization of instruments based on Field-Programmable System-on-Chip hardware platforms, with emphasis on communication issues. The main steps for virtualization are described through a real application example, intending to provide designers with guidance through the tasks involved in the process. This avoids the need for them to directly dealing...
Currently, frequency is the physical variable that can be measured with the best accuracy. Therefore, sensors based on frequency measurements are used in many industrial applications. QCM sensors are a kind of resonator-based sensors that allow mass variations in the nanogram-picogram range to be detected. This paper presents a high-accuracy frequency meter system for QCM sensors based on a Field-Programmable...
Current industrial electronic control systems have been integrating innovative reconfigurable technologies, as those available through Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and embedded systems, supporting development of different types of solutions, ranging from system-on-chip (SoC) solutions to networked and highly distributed and heterogeneous solutions. This paper brings an updated view on usage...
Laser cladding is a material processing technique widely used in industry for part reconstruction, coating or rapid prototyping, among other fields. When optical systems are used as sensing elements to measure the cladding area, malfunctions can occur because of interferences of suspended powder or damages to the cameras caused by laser beams. It is therefore important to provide means to detect problems...
Fireproof professional garments must protect to the extent possible firefighters from damages, either direct (caused by fire) or indirect (caused by excessive heat). In some cases, risks are not associated to an immediate cause, but to a long exposure to heat sources causing excessive thermal stress to the human body. Firefight equipment currently available does not include any means to detect thermal...
Laser cladding is a material processing technique widely used in industry for part reconstruction, coating or rapid prototyping, among other fields. Although it is sometimes applied as an open-loop technique, closed-loop control is mandatory in applications where homogeneous results are required, because the type, size, and geometry of the part being treated influence the process. The inherent non-repetitiveness...
The laser cladding technique has been used for several years for applying different treatments to materials (e.g., coating, part reconstruction) or in rapid prototyping. However, practical applications suffer from problems related to the limited accuracy of the online measurements required to control the power applied through the laser beam. These problems are caused by inherent non-repetitiveness...
In the design of network-based control systems, network delays and bandwidth variations must be carefully taken into account. In order for the performance of these systems to be optimized, it is necessary to minimize loop delay, and to make it as predictable as possible. In this work, an FPGA implementation is proposed to improve predictability, while at the same time reducing loop delay, in a control...
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