A web-based 3D ontology navigation system for spinal disease diagnosis

The Journal of Supercomputing - This paper presents a web-based three-dimensional (3D) navigation system for a spinal disease ontology using a 3D virtual human spine. The 3D navigation system...     

A method of accurate position control with a pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus

In this paper, a method of accurate position control using a pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus is presented. To overcome the effect of friction force and transmission line, low friction type cylinder applied externally pressurized air bearing structure is used and two control valves attached both side of the cylinder directly. To compensate nonlinear characteristics of control valves, linearized control input derived from the relation between control input and effective area of control valve, and dither signal are applied to the valve. The controller applied to the pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus is composed of a state feedback controller and a disturbance observer. Experimental results show that the effectiveness of the proposed method and position control error of 5 μm accuracy could be obtained easily.     

Vibration control of a cable-stayed bridge using electromagnetic induction based sensor integrated MR dampers

This paper presents a novel electromagnetic induction (EMI) system integrated in magnetorheological (MR) dampers: The added EMI system converts reciprocal motions of MR damper into electiral energy (electromotive force or emf) according to the Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction. Maximum energy dissipation algorithm (MEDA) is employed to regulate the MR dampers because it strives to simplify a complex design process by employing the Lyapunov’s direct approach. The emf signal, produced from the EMI, provides the necessary measurement information (i.e., realtive velocity across the damper) for the MEDA controller. Thus, the EMI acts as a sensor in the proposed MR-EMI system. In order to evaluate the performance and robustness of the MR-EMI sensor system with the MEDA control, this study performed an extensive simulation study using the first generation benchmark cable-stayed bridge. Moreover, it compared the performance and the robustness of proposed system with those of Clipped-Optimal Control (COC) and Sliding Mode Control (SMC), which were previously studied for the benchmark cable-stayed bridge. The results show that the MR-EMI system reduced the vibrations of the bridge structure more than those of COC and SMC and show more robust performance than that of SMC. These results suggest that EMIs can be used cost-effective sensing devices for MR damper control systems without compromising the performance of them.     

Modified Sturm Sequence Property for Damped Systems

This technical note presents a method of checking the number of complex eigenvalues in some interested regions or the multiplicity of some complex eigenvalues for nonproportionally damped system. A Schur–Cohn matrix is constructed from the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial for the damped system, and LDLT factorized using some standard numerical algorithms. By observing signs of the diagonal elements of the above diagonal matrix D, we can determine the number of complex eigenvalues in some interested regions or the multiplicity of some complex eigenvalues, which is very similar to the well-known Sturm sequence property for undamped systems. To verify the applicability of the proposed method, two numerical examples are considered.     

Improvement of the Eigenvalue-Counting Method Based on the Argument Principle

This note proposes an improved eigenvalue-counting method based on the argument principle by introducing Rombouts’ algorithm, which is a stable, efficient, and accurate algorithm to calculate the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a general square matrix. In addition, this note comprehensively investigates the effectiveness of the proposed method from the viewpoint of the practical consideration by comparing with the modified Sturm sequence property-based counting method which has been recently developed and also known as the well-proven method. In this note, the operation counts in each method are carefully compared and numerically verified. According to analytical and numerical comparison, the argument principle-based counting method is much better than the modified Sturm sequence property-based method from a practical point of view, even if the latter method is much well-established one theoretically.     

Simultaneous trajectory tracking control of position and force with pneumatic cylinder driving apparatus

In this study, a position and force simultaneous trajectory tracking control algorithm is proposed for a driving apparatus that consists of two pneumatic cylinders connected in series. The controller applied to the driving apparatus is composed of a non-interaction controller to compensate for interaction between cylinders and a disturbance observer aimed to reduce the effect of model discrepancy that cannot be compensated by the non-interaction controller. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is proved by experimental results.