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Teleoperation can allow an operator to control a robot remotely in inaccessible and hostile places. To achieve more dexterous control of a tele-operated robot some researchers are developing user interfaces equipped with vision and tactile feedback. 3D visual perception and tactile feedback can also assist the operator to feel immersed in the robot's environment and embodied within the robot to some...
SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) for underwater vehicles is a challenging research topic due to the limitations of underwater localization sensors and error accumulation over long-term operations. Furthermore, acoustic sensors for mapping often provide noisy and distorted images or low-resolution ranging, while video images provide highly detailed images but are often limited due to turbidity...
As robotic technology advances, robots become increasingly ubiquitous in the lives of humans. To facilitate this ubiquity, systems must be created that allow robots to interact easily with human beings. These systems must provide for communication between an arbitrary number of agents; for example, a home automation system with half a dozen environment sensors or a city-wide fire prevention system...
Temperature measurement in magnetic fields is indispensable for Magnetic Resonance safety studies and for temperature calibrations during Magnetic Resonance applications. A selection of these procedures is subject to the application of MR-compatible robotic systems. The existing problem for the software version NI LabVIEW 2013 is the lack of an instrument to automatically process data from a fiber-optical...
Fires cause billions of dollars in damage and thousands of deaths each year. Firefighting robots are being deployed around the world to reduce the loss of human life and the amount of property damage. High-rise buildings are used for both business and family homes. Buildings with dozens of floors present a great challenge to firefighters. Firefighter ladders cannot reach high enough to fight fires...
Wind turbine generators represent a valid and sustainable alternative for a significant energy provision, which is increasingly demanded by the planet, and a number of generator models have been proposed for supporting their design. However, equatorial regions have very special conditions for their gravity and wind behavior. Therefore, we present here a new wind turbine-generator model suitable for...
Recent trends are to build tall buildings in big cities as a way out of the current housing overpopulation problem. These new structures unveil problems that if not addressed in time could cause catastrophes of unimaginable impact. One of those problems is the incidence of a fire threat happening upstairs in one of those buildings. Research solutions include implementation of multi-agent fire safety...
This paper details the design and development of a biofeedback platform. The platform is customizable; it has a load cell slider allowing the user to change the location of the load cells. A 24-bit sigma-delta ADC is used to interface with the load cells, these values are then transmitted to a computer via a microcontroller. The load cell values are extracted and scaled in real-time. The individual...
This paper demonstrates a simple method for sensorless position estimation and control of a linear voice-coil actuator. Such actuators are currently used in needle-free jet injector prototypes. The sensorless method makes use of the position dependent impedance of the voice-coil at high frequencies to produce an estimate of coil position. This is achieved through the addition of a high frequency signal...
Growing population and shortage of land in urban areas led to development of tall buildings. Tall buildings have advantages and at the same time disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that they are not fully safe in fire situations, because fire trucks cannot reach them. Fire danger can be prevented and eliminated if it is detected early. Implementing WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) and Big Data...
The development of an on board vision-based path following system for a fixed-wing UAV is presented. The application is railway following and three path-following controllers have been investigated for their suitability for this task. The system is novel in that it includes all system components on board a lightweight and low-cost UAV. A vision system has been developed to characterise railway lines...
The paper at hand is part of the autonomous excavator project Thor (Terraforming Heavy Outdoor Robot) who's goal is the development of a construction machine which performs landscaping on a construction site without an operator. So far the project mainly focused on the local excavation on one position. Due to the high digging forces the machine permanently changes its position during excavation. Furthermore,...
Among techniques used in condition monitoring, those for prognostics are the most challenging. This paper presents a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based approach for prognostics in TCM. A HMM model usually employs a typical working condition for establishing and verifying the model. However, in tool condition monitoring (TCM), the cutting tool encounters a range of cutting conditions. It is not economical...
Accurate robot mapping, localisation and navigation remains an unsolved problem for challenging real-life indoor environments. Many approaches to Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) have been proposed but few attempts have been made to improve performance by using appropriate prior maps. Information such as floor plans or architectural drawings is available and there is a rich literature...
Robot audition systems are expected to support a variety of civilian and rescue applications in hazardous situations. Sensed data can only be interpreted meaningfully when referenced to the location of the sensor, making localization an important area of research. In this paper, we have developed sound source localization system for our Fire Bird VI robot. Localization algorithms like cross correlation...
We analyze GPS position recordings, and show that they have long term autocorrelation functions. The traditional approach of assuming Gaussian uncertainties is therefore potentially problematic. We suggest some alternative noise models such as the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process or autoregressive process, that can be used for state estimation.
In this study, a fuzzy logic controller with parameters tuned by Q-learning is proposed for the assisted power management of a pedelec. The pedelec is a human-electric hybrid vehicle driven by mainly the rider's pedal force with the assisted power from the electric motor. The proposed assisted power management (APM) method adaptively provides an appropriate assisted power (action) according to the...
Model Predictive Control (MPC) includes a mathematical plant model. Based on that model, optimal actuating variables for future timesteps are determined in every sampling step. Thus the MPC exhibits a better reference response compared to conventional control. The problem with MPC is the high computational cost and the associated long control cycle time. Thus MPC is unattractive for processes with...
Force distribution is one of the advantage of a redundant parallel manipulator configuration, making the utilization of less powerful actuators feasible. In this contribution, a force trajectory for a redundant actuator in a seven-cylinder pneumatically-actuated Stewart platform is derived analytically using the inverse dynamic model to maximize the benefit of the additional actuator. A feed-forward...
This paper proposes a decentralized formation control scheme for a group of quadcopters using feedback linearization. Unlike most of the existing works that involve a complex design of nonlinear formation control laws, this work simplifies the design to yield an almost linear control law for under-actuated nonlinear quadcopters. In fact, a singularity-free dynamic inversion scheme is utilized such...
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