Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Toward A Distributed Actuation And Cognition Means For A Miniature Soft Robot, Xiaoting Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents components of an on-going research project aimed towards developing a miniature soft robot for urban search and rescue (USAR). The three significant contributions of the thesis are verifying the water hammer actuation previous work, developing an estimator of water hammer impulse direction from hose shape, and creating the infrastructure for distributed cognitive networks. There are many technical issues in designing soft robots, in terms of perception, actuation, cognition, power, physical structure and so on. We are focusing on actuation and cognition issues in this thesis. We investigated water hammer actuation as an alternative system which provides a …

Facility Power Usage Modeling And Short Term Prediction With Artificial Neural Networks, Sunny Wan, Xiao-Hua Yu

Electrical Engineering

Residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 68% of the total U.S. electricity consumption in 2002. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings can save energy, reduce cost, and protect the global environment. In this research, artificial neural network is employed to model and predict the facility power usage of campus buildings. The prediction is based on the building power usage history and weather conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. Different neural network configurations are discussed; satisfactory computer simulation results are obtained and presented.

Multi-Node Toa-Doa Cooperative Los-Nlos Localization : Enabling High Accuracy And Reliability, Zhonghai Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This dissertation investigates high performance cooperative localization in wireless environments based on multi-node time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimations in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios. Here, two categories of nodes are assumed: base nodes (BNs) and target nodes (TNs). BNs are equipped with antenna arrays and capable of estimating TOA (range) and DOA (angle). TNs are equipped with Omni-directional antennas and communicate with BNs to allow BNs to localize TNs; thus, the proposed localization is maintained by BNs and TNs cooperation.

First, a LOS localization method is proposed, which is based on semi-distributed multi-node TOA-DOA fusion. The proposed technique …

2009/10 Research, Development, And Activities, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

Electrical and Computer Engineering Newsletter

• Design of iPhone Game Applications for the Eyes on the Earth Initiative
• Printed Electronics Research and Sensor Development
• Dual-Use Ground Vehicle Condition-Based Maintenance
• TS-Type Fuzzy Automaton for Software Agents
• NEW DEAN – College of Engineering & Applied Sciences
• Nonlinear Circuits and Systems Laboratory
• ECE supporting Sunseeker Solar Rayce Team
• DOE Strategic Training and Education in Power Systems (STEPS) Funding

Ab Initio Simulations Of Hydrogen And Lithium Adsorption On Silicene, Tim H. Osborn

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The energies and temperature-dependent dynamics of hydrogen and lithium chemisorption on a silicon nanosheet, called silicene, were studied using density functional theory and molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations. Silicene has a buckled honeycomb structure, and has been fabricated as suspended monolayer sheets and nanoribbons in recent experiments. We calculated the adsorption energies of hydrogen and lithium on silicene for different adsorption ratios between 3.1% and 100%. The studies will clarify the characteristics of these novel and promising nanomaterials, and pave the way for their applications.

For Hydrogen, the adsorption energy had a maximum of 3.01 eV/H for complete hydrogenation, and decreased by …

On Iterative Decoding Of Two-Level Superposition Codes For Cooperative Broadcasting Based On Qpsk And 4-Pam Constellations, Robert H. Morelos-Zaragoza

Faculty Publications

This paper considers iterative decoding of two-level superposition codes used in cooperative broadcasting over wireless networks. The coding scheme consists of two low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes combined using Plotkin's |u|u + v|-construction and provides two levels of error protection. Coding for cooperative broadcasting differs from conventional single-source broadcast coding. Instead of binary addition of subcode codewords performed by a single-source encoder, in superposition coding two modulated subcode sequences, produced by two coordinated and independent sources, are combined at the antenna of the receiver. Expressions are derived for the bit metrics, or log-likelihood ratio values, used by an iterative decoder for …

Analysis And Design Of A Feedback Controlled Adaptive Pneumatic Cast, Susan Renee Mueller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A pneumatic system with PID control for an actively controlled cast is designed. The cast is intended to aid healing of diabetic foot ulcers by relieving pressure from the sole of a patient's foot and distributing it to the calf. This is accomplished by a pneumatic system which maintains set pressure in multiple air bladders. The research began by defining an electrical circuit analogous to a single supply subsystem. Tests are performed to determine the coefficients for each component. These coefficients are used in a mathematical model to better understand the response of the system to pressure input. A controller …

Live Video Database Management Systems, Rui Peng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras and the availability of high-speed wired and wireless networks, networks of distributed cameras are becoming an enabling technology for a broad range of interdisciplinary applications in domains such as public safety and security, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Today’s live video processing systems on networks of distributed cameras, however, are designed for specific classes of applications. To provide a generic query processing platform for applications of distributed camera networks, we designed and implemented a new class of general purpose database management systems, the live video database management system (LVDBMS). We view networked video cameras as …

Fast-Response Liquid Crystal Displays, Meizi Jiao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After about five decades of extensive material research and device development, followed by massive investment in manufacturing technology, thin-film-transistor liquid-crystaldisplay (TFT-LCD) has finally become the dominant flat panel display technology. Nowadays, LCD performances, such as viewing angle, contrast ratio, and resolution, have reached acceptable levels. The remaining major technical challenges are response time, light efficiency, and sunlight readability. Fast response time is desired to reduce motion blur and to enable field sequential color displays using red (R), green (G), and blue (B) LEDs (light emitting diodes) without noticeable color breakup. Sequential RGB colors would eliminate the commonly used spatial color …

Interactive Music Archive Access System, Martin Gallagher, Mikel Gainza, Derry Fitzgerald, Dan Barry, Matt Cranitch, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

The goal of the Interactive Music Archive Access System (IMAAS) project was to develop an interactive music archive access system which was capable of allowing an end-user to easily extract rhythmic, melodic and harmonic musical metadata
descriptors from audio, and allow the user to interact with the archive contents in a manner not typically allowed in archive access systems. To this end, the IMAAS system incorporates a range of real-time interaction tools which allow the user to modify the retrieved audio in a number of ways including the ability to isolate individual instruments in stereo mixes, pitch and timescale modification, …

Sift-Me: A New Feature For Human Activity Recognition, Guosheng Wu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Action representation for robust human activity recognition is still a challenging problem. This thesis proposed a new feature for human activity recognition named SIFT-Motion Estimation (SIFT-ME). SIFT-ME is derived from SIFT correspondences in a sequence of video frames and adds tracking information to describe human body motion. This feature is an extension of SIFT and is used to represent both translation and rotation in plane rotation for the key features. Compare with other features, SIFT-ME is new as it uses rotation of key features to describe action and it robust to the environment changes. Because SIFT-ME is derived from SIFT …

Architectural Support For Improving System Hardware/Software Reliability, Martin Dimitrov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is a great challenge to build reliable computer systems with unreliable hardware and buggy software. On one hand, software bugs account for as much as 40% of system failures and incur high cost, an estimate of $59.5B a year, on the US economy. On the other hand, under the current trends of technology scaling, transient faults (also known as soft errors) in the underlying hardware are predicted to grow at least in proportion to the number of devices being integrated, which further exacerbates the problem of system reliability. We propose several methods to improve system reliability both in terms …

Bit-Rate Aware Reconfigurable Architecture For H.264/Avc Deblocking Filter, Rakan Khraisha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In H.264/AVC, DeBlocking Filter (DBF) achieves bit rate savings and it is used to improve visual quality by reducing the presence of blocking artifacts. However, these advantages come at the expense of increasing computational complexity of the DBF due to highly adaptive mode decision and small 4x4 block size. The DBF easily accounts for one third of the computational complexity of the decoder. The computational complexity required for various target applications from mobile to high definition video applications varies significantly. Therefore, it becomes apparent to design efficient architecture to adapt to different requirements. In this work, we exploit the scalability …

Use Of A Bent Single Sms Fiber Structure For Simultaneous Measurement Of Displacement And Temperature Sensing, Qiang Wu, Agus Hatta, Pengfei Wang, Yuliya Semenova, Gerald Farrell

Articles

We have proposed the use of a single bent single-multiple-single mode (SMS) fiber structure to measure both displacement and temperature simultaneously and independently. Our experimental results show that this sensor has a sensitivity of 5.89 pm/μm for displacement and 11.6 pm/ºC for temperature.

Optimum Design For Maximun Wavelength Resolution For An Edge Filter Based Ratiometric System, Qiang Wu, Ginu Rajan, Pengfei Wang, Yuliya Semenova, Gerald Farrell

Articles

In this letter, we propose a high resolution temperature insensitive interrogation technique for FBG sensors where one FBG acts as an edge filter to interrogate a separate FBG sensor. A high resolution of better than 5 με in strain measurement range from 0 to 1100 με and the best resolution of better than 1 με were verified by experiments. An error of only ±2.2 με is achieved over a temperature range from 15 to 50 °C, indicating that this strain interrogation technique is temperature insensitive. Using an altered system configuration, the temperature was also measured simultaneously with a resolution better …

A Hybrid Fiber Optic Sensing System For Simultaneous Strain And Temperature Measurement And Its Application, Ginu Rajan, Karolina Milenko, Piotr Lesiak, Yuliya Semenova, Anna Boczkowska, Manjusha Ramakrishnan, Kazimierz Jedrzejewski, Andrzej Domanski, Tomasz Wolinski, Gerald Farrell

Articles

A hybrid fiber optic sensor by integrating polarimetric fiber sensors and fiber Bragg grating sensors for simultaneous strain and temperature measurement is presented in this paper. Two types of polarimetric fiber sensors are used; a Panda fiber and a polarization maintaining photonic crystal fiber. The polarimetric strain sensors give the average strain and temperature information, while the fiber Bragg grating sensors give localized strain information. Two applications of the proposed configuration are also demonstrated in this paper. In the composite materials three fiber sensors are used while for other engineering applications a temperature insensitive polarimetric fiber sensor can be used …

Simple Design Technique For A Triangular Fbg Filter Based On A Linearly Chirped Grating, Qiang Wu, Gerald Farrell, Yuliya Semenova

Articles

A novel and simple design technique for triangular spectrum response of fibre Bragg grating (FBG) is pre- 21 sented based on a linear chirped grating. It is shown that this method is fast and can give a straightfor- 22 ward solution to meet a design target. The numerical simulation examples verified the effectiveness of 23 the design method. A general approach to design for multichannel triangular spectral responses for 24 FBG filters is proposed, which provides a solution that achieves a minimum change of refractive index 25 for the fibre.

Humidity Sensor Based On A Photonic Crystal Fiber Interferometer, Jinesh Mathew, Yuliya Semenova, Ginu Rajan, Gerald Farrell

Articles

A photonic crystal fiber interferometer that operates in reflection mode for humidity detection is presented for the first time which has the advantage that it does not require the use of any hygroscopic material. The fabrication of the sensor head is therefore simple since it only involves cleaving and splicing. The all-silica nature of the device has the potential for many applications.

Experimental Demonstration Of A Simple Displacement Sensor Based On A Bent Singlemode-Multimode-Singlemode (Sms) Fiber Structure, Qiang Wu, Yuliya Semenova, Pengfei Wang, Agus Hatta, Gerald Farrell

Articles

A simple displacement sensor based on a bent singlemode-multimode-singlemode (SMS) fiber structure is proposed and experimentally investigated. The sensor offers a wider displacement range, not limited by the risk of fiber breakage, as well as a three-fold increase in displacement sensitivity by comparison with a straight SMS structure sensor. This sensor can be interrogated by either an optical spectral analyzer (OSA) or a ratiometric interrogation system: (1) if interrogated by an OSA assuming a resolution of 1 pm, it has a sensitivity of 28.2 nm for a displacement measurement range from 0 to 280 μm; (2) if interrogated by a …

Strain Sensor Based On A Pair Of Single-Mode-Multimode-Single-Mode Fiber Structures In A Ratiometric Power Measurement Scheme, Agus Hatta, Yuliya Semenova, Qiang Wu, Gerald Farrell

Articles

The strain and temperature dependencies of a step-index single-mode–multimode–single-mode (SMS) fiber structure are investigated numerically and experimentally. For intensity-based strain measurement using a single SMS fiber structure, at a selected wavelength, it is found that there is a high strain dependence, but also a temperature dependence that will induce strain measurement error. To minimize the temperature-induced strain measurement error, two SMS fiber structures are proposed and demonstrated in a ratiometric power measurement scheme; one SMS structure acts as the strain sensor, and the other SMS structure acts as the temperature monitor. The extracted temperature information is used to determine a …