Engineering Commons^™

System Of Terrain Analysis, Energy Estimation And Path Planning For Planetary Exploration By Robot Teams, David C. Michel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

NASA’s long term plans involve a return to manned moon missions, and eventually sending humans to mars. The focus of this project is the use of autonomous mobile robotics to enhance these endeavors. This research details the creation of a system of terrain classification, energy of traversal estimation and low cost path planning for teams of inexpensive and potentially expendable robots.

The first stage of this project was the creation of a model which estimates the energy requirements of the traversal of varying terrain types for a six wheel rocker-bogie rover. The wheel/soil interaction model uses Shibly’s modified Bekker equations …

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

Security Aspects Of Smart Grid Communication, Pubudu E. Weerathunga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the grid becomes highly interconnected, power protection, control, and monitoring in transmission and distribution substations are increasingly relying on digital controls and digital communication. Rapid penetrations of communication into power grid, and growing concerns about cyber security have attracted significant attention towards smart grid cyber security. Cyber security in the smart grid must be carefully designed to meet power system operation’s functional and reliability requirements.

This thesis discusses issues related to the security of power system communication and their counter measures. It focuses on development of security mechanisms for secure substation communication, and analyzes the impact of security overhead …

Analyzing The Non-Functional Requirements In The Desharnais Dataset For Software Effort Estimation, Ali Bou Nassif, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Studying the quality requirements (aka Non-Functional Requirements (NFR)) of a system is crucial in Requirements Engineering. Many software projects fail because of neglecting or failing to incorporate the NFR during the software life development cycle. This paper focuses on analyzing the importance of the quality requirements attributes in software effort estimation models based on the Desharnais dataset. The Desharnais dataset is a collection of eighty one software projects of twelve attributes developed by a Canadian software house. The analysis includes studying the influence of each of the quality requirements attributes, as well as the influence of all quality requirements attributes …

Concurrent Multipath Transfer: Scheduling, Modelling, And Congestion Window Management, Thomas Daniel Wallace

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Known as smartphones, multihomed devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry can simultaneously connect to Wi-Fi and 4G LTE networks. Unfortunately, due to the architectural constraints of standard transport layer protocols like the transmission control protocol (TCP), an Internet application (e.g., a file transfer) can use only one access network at a time. Due to recent developments, however, concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) using the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) can enable multihomed devices to exploit additional network resources for transport layer communications.

In this thesis we explore a variety of techniques aimed at CMT and multihomed devices, such as: packet …

Privacy Protection Framework With Defined Policies For Service-Oriented Architecture, David S. Allison, Miriam Am Capretz, Hany F. Elyamany, Shuying Wang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a computer systems design concept which aims to achieve reusability and integration in a distributed environment through the use of autonomous, loosely coupled, interoperable abstractions known as services. In order to interoperate, communication between services is very important due to their autonomous nature. This communication provides services with their functional strengths, but also creates the opportunity for the loss of privacy. In this paper, a Privacy Protection Framework for Service-Oriented Architecture (PPFSOA) is described. In this framework, a Privacy Service (PS) is used in combination with privacy policies to create privacy contracts that outline what can …