Engineering Commons^™

Application Of Advanced Algorithms And Statistical Techniques For Weed-Plant Discrimination, Saman Akbar Zadeh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Precision agriculture requires automated systems for weed detection as weeds compete with the crop for water, nutrients, and light. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of machine learning methods to classify weeds/crops in agriculture. Statistical methods, support vector machines, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are introduced, investigated and optimized as classifiers to provide high accuracy at high vehicular speed for weed detection.

Initially, Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms are developed for weed-crop discrimination and their accuracies are compared with a conventional data-aggregation method based on the evaluation of discrete Normalised Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVIs) at two different …

Investigation On The Mobile Robot Navigation In An Unknown Environment, Ahmed S. Khusheef

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Mobile robots could be used to search, find, and relocate objects in many types of manufacturing operations and environments. In this scenario, the target objects might reside with equal probability at any location in the environment and, therefore, the robot must navigate and search the whole area autonomously, and be equipped with specific sensors to detect objects. Novel challenges exist in developing a control system, which helps a mobile robot achieve such tasks, including constructing enhanced systems for navigation, and vision-based object recognition. The latter is important for undertaking the exploration task that requires an optimal object recognition technique.

In …

Terminal Sliding Mode Control For Rigid Robotic Manipulators With Uncertain Dynamics, Nicola Ritter

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis presents two new adaptive control laws that use the terminal sliding mode technique for the tracking problem of rigid robotic manipulators with non-linearities, dynamic couplings and uncertain parameters. The first law provides a robust scheme which uses several properties of rigid robotic mauipulators and adaptively adjusts seven uncertain parameter bounds. The law ensures finite time error convergence to the system origin and is simple to implement The second law treats the manipulator as a partially known system. The known dynamics are used to build a nominal control law and the effects of unknown system dynamics arc compensated for …