Development of an Autonomous Robot for Gas Storage Spheres Inspection

Inspection for corrosion of gas storage spheres at the welding seam lines must be done periodically. Until now this inspection is being done manually and has a high cost associated to it and a high risk of inspection personel injuries. The Brazilian Petroleum Company, Petrobras, is seeking cost reduction and personel safety by the use of autonomous robot technology. This paper presents the development of a robot capable of autonomously follow a welding line and transporting corrosion measurement sensors. The robot uses a pair of sensors each composed of a laser source and a video camera that allows the estimation of the center of the welding line. The mechanical robot uses four magnetic wheels to adhere to the sphere’s surface and was constructed in a way that always three wheels are in contact with the sphere’s metallic surface which guarantees enough magnetic atraction to hold the robot in the sphere’s surface all the time. Additionally, an independently actuated table for attaching the corrosion inspection sensors was included for small position corrections. Tests were conducted at the laboratory and in a real sphere showing the validity of the proposed approach and implementation.     

Robot task plan representation by Petri nets: modelling, identification, analysis and execution

In this paper we introduce a framework to represent robot task plans based on Petri nets. Our approach enables modelling a robot task, analysing its qualitative and quantitative properties and using the Petri net representation for actual plan execution. The overall model is obtained from the composition of simple models, leading to a modular approach. Analysis is applied to a closed loop between the robot controller and the environment Petri net models. We focus here on the quantitative properties, captured by stochastic Petri net models. Furthermore, we introduce a method to identify the environment and action layer parameters of the stochastic Petri net models from real data, improving the significance of the model. The framework building blocks and a single-robot task model are detailed. Results of a case study with simulated soccer robots show the ability of the framework to provide a systematic modelling tool, and of determining, through well-known analysis methods for stochastic Petri nets, relevant properties of the task plan applied to a particular environment.     

Wafer-level fabrication process for fully encapsulated micro-supercapacitors with high specific energy

In this paper a wafer-level process is proposed to fully integrate carbon-based micro-supercapacitor onto silicon substrate. This process relies on the deposition of a paste containing carbon, PVDF and acetone into cavities etched in silicon. After electrolyte deposition in a controlled atmosphere, a wafer-level encapsulation is realized. Cyclic voltammetry performed on non-encapsulated micro-components showed specific energy of 257 mJ cm⁻² for 336 μm deep cavities. The specific encapsulation process developed was tested separately and proved to be efficient in terms of resistance to organic electrolytes and mechanical strength.     

Electrical resistivity in ferromagnetic NiCu alloys near the Curie point

Direct measurements of the temperature derivative of the electrical resistivity d/dT have been made on several ferromagnetic NiCu alloys with high Cu content (20, 30, 40, 50.4 at %). For Ni₈₀Cu₂₀ and Ni₇₀Cu₃₀ the results closely resemble the general pattern found in pure ferromagnets: d/dT - b – a ln ¦¦, for 10^–3 ¦¦ 10^–1, with a and b constants and = (T/T _c )– 1. In Ni₆₀Cu₄₀ the rounding off of the magnetic transition is already so pronounced that a similar analysis is hardly significant. In the Ni_49.6Cu_50.4 sample negative values of d/dT were confirmed above ~165 K. The possible theoretical implications of the results are briefly discussed.Work supported by Instituto de Alta Cultura, Portugal (Project PF1).     

Modelling and optimization of laminated adaptive shells of revolution

In this paper two shell finite element models are presented for the structural analysis of composite laminated piezoelectric shells. One is an axisymmetric conical frustum with two nodal rings and the other is a conic shell panel with eight nodes. Both models are based in a mixed laminated theory that combines a higher order shear deformation theory for the mechanical displacement field with a layerwise representation with linear functions for the electric potential through each piezoelectric layer. In order to obtain the optimal design sensitivities analysis and optimization techniques based in the nonlinear mathematical programming are used. The design objectives can be the minimization of the deformed structure or the maximization of the natural fundamental frequency and the design variables are the electric potential difference applied to the actuators or the ply thicknesses among others.     

A weight function methodology for the assessment of embedded and surface irregular plane cracks

A low cost numerical tool for the calculation of mode I stress intensity factors K in embedded and surface irregular cracks is presented in this paper. The proposed tool is an extension of the O-integral algorithm due to Oore and Burns for the assessment of embedded plane cracks using the weight function methodology. The performance of the O-integral is assessed first by comparing its K results to exact solutions for embedded elliptical and rectangular cracks. From the analysis of this data it is found that the error in the K results systematically depends on the crack aspect ratio and the local crack front curvature. Based on this evidence a corrective function is derived in order to remediate the limitations of the O-integral. Solutions due to Newman and Raju are used to account for the effects of free surfaces and finite thickness. The accuracy of the proposed procedure is assessed by solving a number of examples and by comparing the obtained results to those available in the literature.     

Differential Fos Expression Following Aspiration, Electrolytic, or Excitotoxic Lesions of the Perirhinal Cortex in Rats.

The authors explored the possibility that there are different neural consequences, beyond the primary site of brain damage, following perirhinal cortex (PRh) lesions made in different ways. Fos expression was used as a marker for neuronal activation and compared across the forebrains of rats that underwent the different types of surgery. Electrolytic and excitotoxic PRh lesions produced dramatic increases in Fos expression in the cortex, and excitotoxic and aspiration PRh lesions increased Fos expression in the dentate gyrus. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that different lesion methods have separable effects on neural function in regions outside the lesion site that could account for inconsistencies in the literature regarding the behavioral effects of PRh lesions on tests of spatial memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stabilization of electromechanical systems via interconnection and damping assignment

In this article, we propose a general controller structure for asymptotic position regulation of electromechanical systems derived using the Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity‐Based Control methodology recently proposed in the literature. The controller is applicable to arbitrary fully actuated electromechanical systems with linear magnetic materials consisting of inductances, permanent magnets, and one mechanical co‐ordinate. We assume linear magnetic materials and fully actuated electrical dynamics; however, no restrictions are imposed on the particular form of the parameters that define the system dynamics, i.e. the inductance matrix, the magnetic coupling or the potential energy function. This allows us to treat—in a unified framework and without any additional simplifying assumptions—very diverse applications, including magnetic suspensions, and stepper and permanent magnet synchronous motors. Instrumental for our developments is the inclusion of ‘virtual’ couplings between the electrical and the mechanical subsystem, which is naturally suggested in this control methodology. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mining sequential patterns by pattern-growth: the PrefixSpan approach

Sequential pattern mining is an important data mining problem with broad applications. However, it is also a difficult problem since the mining may have to generate or examine a combinatorially explosive number of intermediate subsequences. Most of the previously developed sequential pattern mining methods, such as GSP, explore a candidate generation-and-test approach [R. Agrawal et al. (1994)] to reduce the number of candidates to be examined. However, this approach may not be efficient in mining large sequence databases having numerous patterns and/or long patterns. In this paper, we propose a projection-based, sequential pattern-growth approach for efficient mining of sequential patterns. In this approach, a sequence database is recursively projected into a set of smaller projected databases, and sequential patterns are grown in each projected database by exploring only locally frequent fragments. Based on an initial study of the pattern growth-based sequential pattern mining, FreeSpan [J. Han et al. (2000)], we propose a more efficient method, called PSP, which offers ordered growth and reduced projected databases. To further improve the performance, a pseudoprojection technique is developed in PrefixSpan. A comprehensive performance study shows that PrefixSpan, in most cases, outperforms the a priori-based algorithm GSP, FreeSpan, and SPADE [M. Zaki, (2001)] (a sequential pattern mining algorithm that adopts vertical data format), and PrefixSpan integrated with pseudoprojection is the fastest among all the tested algorithms. Furthermore, this mining methodology can be extended to mining sequential patterns with user-specified constraints. The high promise of the pattern-growth approach may lead to its further extension toward efficient mining of other kinds of frequent patterns, such as frequent substructures.     

Analyzing Architectural Evolution Issues of Multimedia Frameworks

The growing complexity in the development of Web-based services in general, and multimedia services in particular, makes necessary the application of sound development methods. New multimedia devices, coding algorithms, network protocols, etc., are continually appearing but, unfortunately, current solutions for developing multimedia applications do not accurately support architectural evolution issues for already deployed applications. Thus, the latest Software Engineering technologies should be applied to the development of open, reusable, and high-quality multimedia and Web-based software. In this paper, we apply component and framework technologies, two of the current trends in Software Engineering, to the development of multimedia services over the Web, presenting and comparing widespread solutions in use today.