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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Control Of Fully-Actuated Aerial Manipulators And Omni-Directional Multirotors, Riley M. Mccarthy Dec 2023

Control Of Fully-Actuated Aerial Manipulators And Omni-Directional Multirotors, Riley M. Mccarthy

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

This thesis details the system modeling, design, control, simulation, construction, and
testing of both a fully-actuated and omni-directional multirotor aerial system created
for the primary purpose of performing active tasks with their environment. This work
verifies the capabilities of both systems through empirical testing, and demonstrates
how through the use of new control methods and physical designs multirotors can
expand their purpose from passive inspection based tasks to active contact based
tasks. These systems take advantage of newly implemented control allocation features present in the PX4 flight control software, version 1.14. The use of which makes designing controllers for such …


Material Characterization And Comparison Of Sol-Gel Deposited And Rf Magnetron Deposited Lead Zirconate Titanate Thin Films, Katherine Lynne Miles Nov 2022

Material Characterization And Comparison Of Sol-Gel Deposited And Rf Magnetron Deposited Lead Zirconate Titanate Thin Films, Katherine Lynne Miles

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has been a material of interest for sensor, actuator, and transducer applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This is due to their favorable piezoelectric, pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties. While various methods are available to deposit PZT thin films, radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering was selected to provide high quality PZT films with the added capability of batch processing. These sputter deposited PZT films were characterized to determine their internal film stress, Young’s modulus, composition, and structure. After characterization, the sputtered PZT samples were poled using corona poling and direct poling methods. As a means of comparison, commercially …


Airborne Counter-Uncrewed Systems With Runtime Assurance Control, Isaac J. Seslar Jul 2021

Airborne Counter-Uncrewed Systems With Runtime Assurance Control, Isaac J. Seslar

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

This thesis develops a response to the increase in the availability of the commercially available uncrewed aerial systems and is dedicated to the detection, classification, and tracking required to successfully neutralize when determined malicious. A requirement of actively avoiding obstacles using runtime assurance is addressed and designed to keep the hardware safe in potentially dangerous situations. This work will elaborate on the several components the test bed is comprised of, specifically the hardware and software portions that successfully solve the problem. The software encompasses the simulation, the multiple algorithms required for the tracking, and the machine learning required for detection …


Robot Motion Planning In Dynamic Environments, Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang Dec 2019

Robot Motion Planning In Dynamic Environments, Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang

Computer Science ETDs

Robot motion planning in dynamic environments is critical for many robotic applications, such as self-driving cars, UAVs and service robots operating in changing environments. However, motion planning in dynamic environments is very challenging as this problem has been shown to be NP-Hard and in PSPACE, even in the simplest case. As a result, the lack of safe, efficient planning solutions for real-world robots is one of the biggest obstacles for ubiquitous adoption of robots in everyday life. Specifically, there are four main challenges facing motion planning in dynamic environments: obstacle motion uncertainty, obstacle interaction, complex robot dynamics and noise, and …


An Efficient Multiple-Place Foraging Algorithm For Scalable Robot Swarms, Qi Lu Jul 2019

An Efficient Multiple-Place Foraging Algorithm For Scalable Robot Swarms, Qi Lu

Computer Science ETDs

Searching and collecting multiple resources from large unmapped environments is an important challenge. It is particularly difficult given limited time, a large search area and incomplete data about the environment. This search task is an abstraction of many real-world applications such as search and rescue, hazardous material clean-up, and space exploration. The collective foraging behavior of robot swarms is an effective approach for this task. In our work, individual robots have limited sensing and communication range (like ants), but they are organized and work together to complete foraging tasks collectively. An efficient foraging algorithm coordinates robots to search and collect …


Improvement Of The Material’S Mechanical Characteristics Using Intelligent Real Time Control Interfaces In Hfc Hardening Process, Florentin Smarandache, Luige Vladareanu, Mihaiela Iliescu, Victor Vladareanu, Alexandru Gal, Octavian Melinte, Adrian Margean Jan 2019

Improvement Of The Material’S Mechanical Characteristics Using Intelligent Real Time Control Interfaces In Hfc Hardening Process, Florentin Smarandache, Luige Vladareanu, Mihaiela Iliescu, Victor Vladareanu, Alexandru Gal, Octavian Melinte, Adrian Margean

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The paper presents Intelligent Control (IC) Interfaces for real time control of mechatronic systems applied to Hardening Process Control (HPC) in order to improvement of the material’s mechanical characteristics. Implementation of IC laws in the intelligent real time control interfaces depends on the particular circumstances of the models characteristics used and the exact definition of optimization problem. The results led to the development of the IC interfaces in real time through Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and neural networks (NN) using off- line the regression methods.


A Novel Indoor Positioning System For Firefighters In Unprepared Scenarios, Vamsi Karthik Vadlamani Oct 2018

A Novel Indoor Positioning System For Firefighters In Unprepared Scenarios, Vamsi Karthik Vadlamani

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Situational awareness and indoor positioning of firefighters are types of information of paramount importance to the success of search and rescue operations. GPS units are undependable for use in Indoor Positioning Systems due to their associated mar- gins of error in position and their reliance on satellite communication that can be interrupted inside large structures. There are few other techniques like dead reck- oning, Wifi and bluetooth based triangulation, Structure from Motion (SFM) based scene reconstruction for Indoor positioning system. However due to high temper- atures, the rapidly changing environment of fires, and low parallax in the thermal images, the …


Application For Position And Load Reference Generation Of A Simulated Mechatronic Chain, Florentin Smarandache, V. Vladareanu, S.B. Cononovici, M. Migdalovici, H. Wang, Y. Feng Jan 2018

Application For Position And Load Reference Generation Of A Simulated Mechatronic Chain, Florentin Smarandache, V. Vladareanu, S.B. Cononovici, M. Migdalovici, H. Wang, Y. Feng

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The paper presents the position and load reference generation for a motor stand simulating a mechatronic chain, in this case a three degree of freedom robot leg. The task is accomplished using three PLC controlled motors in position as the robot joint actuators coupled with three controlled in torque, simulating the load at each simulation time-step. The paper briefly discusses the mathematical model and presents the visual interface used in the simulation, which is then to be further integrated into a virtual environment robot control application.


Detection Of Pheromone Laying Event In Foraging Data Of Harvester Ants Using Change Point Analysis Method, Safeeul Bashir Safee Apr 2017

Detection Of Pheromone Laying Event In Foraging Data Of Harvester Ants Using Change Point Analysis Method, Safeeul Bashir Safee

Computer Science ETDs

Communication is an important factor in the foraging performance of social insects, such as ants. During foraging, ants keep track of food sources by using memory (site fidelity) or by communicating through pheromones. Previous field experiments showed that the rate of seed collection depends on the distribution of food in the environment. If food is spatially clustered, then it is beneficial for ants recruit nest mates to collect seeds from large clusters. However, we do not know when the recruitment occurs in natural ant population. To explore this question, we used a power law distribution to arrange seeds in piles …


Mesh Addition Based On The Depth Image (Mabdi), Lucas E. Chavez Nov 2016

Mesh Addition Based On The Depth Image (Mabdi), Lucas E. Chavez

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Many robotic applications utilize a detailed map of the world and the algorithm used to produce such a map must take into consideration real-world constraints such as computational and memory costs. Traditional mesh-based environmental mapping algorithms receive data from the sensor, create a mesh surface from the data, and then append the surface to a growing global mesh. These algorithms do not provide a computationally efficient mechanism for reducing redundancies in the global mesh. MABDI is able to leverage the knowledge contained in the global mesh to find the difference between what we expect our sensor to see and what …


Neutrosophic Logic Approaches Applied To ”Rabot” Real Time Control, Alexandru Gal, Luige Vladareanu, Florentin Smarandache, Hongnian Yu, Mincong Deng Jan 2014

Neutrosophic Logic Approaches Applied To ”Rabot” Real Time Control, Alexandru Gal, Luige Vladareanu, Florentin Smarandache, Hongnian Yu, Mincong Deng

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper we present a way of deciding which control law should operate at a time for a mobile walking robot. The proposed deciding method is based on the new research field, called Neutrosophic Logic. The results are presented as a simulated system for which the output is related to the inputs according to the Neutrosophic Logic.


Evidence Supporting Measure Of Similarity For Reducing The Complexity In Information Fusion, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert, Xinde Li, Xinhan Huang Jan 2011

Evidence Supporting Measure Of Similarity For Reducing The Complexity In Information Fusion, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert, Xinde Li, Xinhan Huang

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper presents a new method for reducing the number of sources of evidence to combine in order to reduce the complexity of the fusion processing. Such a complexity reduction is often required in many applications where the real-time constraint and limited computing resources are of prime importance. The basic idea consists in selecting, among all sources available, only a subset of sources of evidence to combine. The selection is based on an evidence supporting measure of similarity (ESMS) criterion which is an efficient generic tool for outlier sources identification and rejection. The ESMS between two sources of evidence can …