Control of Motion of an Actively Bending Body in Channels with Dry Friction

Mechanics is described and equations are given of the motion of an actively bending homogeneous body of a finite thickness in a channel with dry friction under conditions of a weak bending. Control is suggested of the motion of a body in a sinusoidal channel, which retains a continuous first derivative of the controlling moment and a bounded second derivative. A process is described of the maximization of the speed of motion by control and then by the choice of the best parameters of a channel. Control is also considered of other modes of the motion of a body in the same channel.     

HelSweeper: Screw-sweeps of canal surfaces

A tube is a solid bounded by the union of a one-parameter family of circles that may be decomposed into canal-surfaces and planar disks or annuli. A screw-sweep is the region swept by a shape during a screw motion. HelSweeper computes the boundary of a screw-sweep of an arbitrary union of tubes and polyhedra. To do so, it generates a superset of faces, splits them at their intersections, and selects the face portions that form the desired boundary. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that the faces contributed to this superset by a tube are each a screw-sweeps of a rigid curve (generator), which is the locus of grazing points, and that each grazing point is formulated as the intersection of a circle of the tube with a corresponding screw-plane. Hence, each such face is a one-parameter family of helices, each being the screw-sweep of a grazing point.     

Applying the extended Kalman filter to systems described by nonlinear differential-algebraic equations

This paper describes a method for the state estimation of nonlinear systems described by a class of differential-algebraic equation models using the extended Kalman filter. The method involves the use of a time-varying linearisation of a semi-explicit index one differential-algebraic equation. The estimation technique consists of a simplified extended Kalman filter that is integrated with the differential-algebraic equation model. The paper describes a simulation study using a model of a batch chemical reactor. It also reports a study based on experimental data obtained from a mixing process, where the model of the system is solved using the sequential modular method and the estimation involves a bank of extended Kalman filters.     

Construction of a supermicro sense of force feedback and vision for micro-objects: development of a haptic device

This research aims to develop a combined sense system that uses both the force feedback and visual feedback to establish the shape of microscopic features of a microsample. It is thought that the efficiency of minute procedures would be improved if the operator could obtain a sense of force while using a manipulator. We used a cantilever to touch a minute object and obtain a reaction force from the degree of bending. We made a haptic device which gives a sense of that force to the operator, who can feel the force when a user touches a sample with a cantilever. In addition, when the haptic device is used in simulations, the user can feel a force just as if the user had touched a sample.     

High-Order Accurate Adaptive Kernel Compression Time-Stepping Schemes for Fractional Differential Equations

We present a goal-oriented a posteriori error estimator for finite element approximations of a class of homogenization problems. As a rule, homogenization problems are defined through the coupling of a macroscopic solution and the solution of auxiliary problems. In this work we assume that the homogenized problem is known and that it depends on a finite number of auxiliary problems. The accuracy in the goal functional depends therefore on the discretization error of the macroscopic and the auxiliary solutions. We show that it is possible to compute the error contributions of all solution components separately and use this information to balance the different discretization errors. Additionally, we steer a local mesh refinement for both the macroscopic problem and the auxiliary problems. The high efficiency of this approach is shown by numerical examples. These include the upscaling of a periodic diffusion tensor, the case of a Stokes flow over a porous bed, and the homogenization of a fuel cell model which includes the flow in a gas channel over a porous substrate coupled with a multispecies nonlinear transport equation.     

Vague集向Fuzzy集转化的一种新方法

提出Vague值向Fuzzy值转化的实用方法的定义。针对文献[6]中的一个Vague值向Fuzzy值转化的均值修正法,提出了加权均值修正法,并证明了这种方法同样是Vague值向Fuzzy转化的一种非常实用的方法。     

Exact combinatorial bounds on the probability of overfitting for empirical risk minimization

Three general methods for obtaining exact bounds on the probability of overfitting are proposed within statistical learning theory: a method of generating and destroying sets, a recurrent method, and a blockwise method. Six particular cases are considered to illustrate the application of these methods. These are the following model sets of predictors: a pair of predictors, a layer of a Boolean cube, an interval of a Boolean cube, a monotonic chain, a unimodal chain, and a unit neighborhood of the best predictor. For the interval and the unimodal chain, the results of numerical experiments are presented that demonstrate the effects of splitting and similarity on the probability of overfitting.     

On the controllability of systems with a time-varying delay†

This paper is concerned with the controllability of a system with a time-varying delay. The system to be considered here is described by a linear differential-difference equation of a retarded type, where a time-varying delay is a certain class of a time-varying function. First, the concepts of controllability for linear differential-difference systems with a constant delay, introduced by Weiss (1987), are developed to the system with a time-varying delay. Second, necessary and sufficient conditions for controllability are obtained. Finally, the controllability of a stationary system with a constant delay is treated, including the results of Chyung and Lee (1966).     

A superscalar simulation employing poisson distributed stalls

This paper presents a statistical approach to estimating the performance of a superscalar processor. Traditional trace-driven simulators can take a large amount time to conduct a performance evaluation of a machine, especially as the number of instructions increases. The result of this type of simulation is typically tied to the particular trace that was run. Elements such as dependencies, delays, and stalls are all a direct result of the particular trace being run, and can differ from trace to trace. This paper describes a model designed to separate simulation results from a specific trace. Rather than running a trace-driven simulation, a statistical model is employed, more specifically a Poisson distribution, to predict how these types of delay affects performance. Through the use of this statistical model, a performance evaluation can be conducted using a general code model, with specific stall rates, rather than a particular code trace. This model allows simulations to quickly run tens of millions of instructions and evaluate the performance of a particular micro-architecture while at the same time, allowing the flexibility to change the structure of the architecture.     

Branching processes of Petri nets

Summary The notion of a branching process is introduced, as a formalization of an initial part of a run of a Petri net, including nondeterministic choices. This generalizes the notion of a process in a natural way. It is shown that the set of branching processes of a Petri net is a complete lattice, with respect to the natural notion of partial order. The largest element of this lattice is the unfolding of the Petri net.     

Einstein equations with fluctuating volume

We develop a simple model for a study of classical fields in the background of a fluctuating spacetime volume. It is applied for a formulation of the Einstein equations with a perfect-fluid source. We investigate the particular case of a Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker cosmology and show that the resulting field equations can lead to solutions which avoid the initial Big Bang singularity. By interpreting the fluctuations as a result of the presence of quantum spacetime, we conclude that classical singularities can be avoided even within a semiclassical model that includes quantum effects in a very simple manner.     

The probabilistic orienteering problem

The probabilistic orienteering problem (POP) is defined on a directed graph where a cost is associated with each arc and a prize is associated with each node. Moreover, each node will be available for visit only with a certain probability. A server starts from a fixed origin, has a given budget to visit a subset of nodes, and ends at a fixed destination. In a first stage, a node subset has to be selected and a corresponding a priori path has to be determined such that the server can visit all nodes in the subset and reach the destination without exceeding the budget. The list of available nodes in the subset is then revealed. In a second stage, the server follows the a priori path by skipping the absent nodes. The POP consists in determining a first-stage solution that maximizes the expected profit of the second-stage path, where the expected profit is the difference between the expected total prize and the expected total cost.We discuss the relevance of the problem and formulate it as a linear integer stochastic problem. We develop a branch-and-cut approach for the POP and several matheuristic methods, corresponding to different strategies to reduce the search space of the exact method. Extensive computational tests on instances with up to 100 nodes show the effectiveness of the exact method and the efficiency of the matheuristics in finding high quality solutions in a few minutes. Moreover, we provide an extended analysis on a subset of instances to show the value of explicitly modeling the stochastic information in the problem formulation.     

A simulation-based heuristic algorithm for disposition of direction finders

A direction finder is a military weapon that is used to find locations of targets that emit radio frequencies. Multiple direction finders are used in a direction finder system for finding locations of targets in an area of interest. We present a two-stage heuristic algorithm for disposing direction finders in a direction finder system for the objective of maximizing the accuracy of estimation of the location of a target that is assumed to be located in the area of interest. In the suggested heuristic algorithm, a simulation-based method is used for estimating the probability of coverage, the probability that a target is in a given region (of a given size) surrounding the estimated location of the target, and another simulation-based method and a local search method are used to determine locations of direction finders that result in the maximum probability of coverage. Performance of the suggested algorithm is evaluated through computational experiments and results show that the algorithm gives a good disposition plan in a reasonable amount of computation time.     

Analysis of underwater thruster model with ambient flow velocity using CFD

Thrust force is a very important factor for underwater vehicles. The thrust force that is determined by the pressure gradient between a propeller and a thruster can be represented by the ambient flow velocity introduced as the control volume and the axial flow velocity of a propeller. Because a change in ambient flow velocity triggers a change in the pressure gradient between a propeller and a thruster, a model taking account of the ambient flow velocity is required for an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) system. However, the axial flow velocity introduced into a propeller is very difficult to measure without accurate test devices. Therefore, in this study, the axial flow velocity is calculated with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to use it as a basis for estimating the approximate value of the thrust force. As a result, a relatively accurate analysis of the effect of the ambient flow velocity on the thrust force can be obtained with considerable time and cost effectiveness as compared to the existing experimental methods. To evaluate the validity of the data from the CFD analysis results depending on the change in ambient flow velocity and the pressure gradient of a thruster, the resulting CFD values were compared with the thrust forces obtained in the previously performed thrust force experiment of a thruster depending on the ambient flow velocity in a circulating water channel.     

Bayesian recognition of local 3-d shape by approximating image intensity functions with quadric polynomials

The recognition in image data of viewed patches of spheres, cylinders, and planes in the 3-D world is discussed as a first step to complex object recognition or complex object location and orientation estimation. Accordingly, an image is partitioned into small square windows, each of which is a view of a piece of a sphere, or of a cylinder, or of a plane. Windows are processed in parallel for recognition of content. New concepts and techniques include approximations of the image within a window by 2-D quadric polynomials where each approximation is constrained by one of the hypotheses that the 3-D surface shape seen is either planar, cylindrical, or spherical; a recognizer based upon these approximations to determine whether the object patch viewed is a piece of a sphere, or a piece of a cylinder, or a piece of a plane; lowpass filtering of the image by the approximation. The shape recognition is computationally simple, and for large windows is approximately Bayesian minimum-probability-of-error recognition. These classifications are useful for many purposes. One such purpose is to enable a following processor to use an appropriate estimator to estimate shape, and orientation and location parameters for the 3-D surface seen within a window.     

Minimal states and maximum free energies of materials with memory

Definitions are given of the maximum and minimum free energy associated with a given state of a material with memory. Also, the concept of a minimal state is introduced. These concepts are then explored in detail for a specific isothermal model, where the stress is given by a non-linear elastic part and a memory part which is a linear functional of the strain tensor history. It is shown that the equivalence class constituting a minimal state is a singleton except where only isolated singularities occur in the Fourier transform of the relaxation tensor derivative. If the minimal state is not a singleton, then the maximum free energy is less than the work function and is a function of the minimal state. An explicit expression is given for the maximum free energy.     

Optimal hop-by-hop flow control in computer networks

The problem of hop-by-hop flow control in a computer network is formulated as a Markov decision process with a cost function composed of the delay of the messages and the buffer constraints. The optimal control is shown to be a linear truncated function of the state and the explicit form is found when the arrival process of the messages is a Bernoulli process. For a renewal arrival process, the long-rnn average cost of any policy with a linear truncated structure is expressed by a set of linear equations.     

Formatting texts accessed randomly

Full-text systems that access text randomly cannot normally determine the format operations in effect for a given target location. The problem can be solved by viewing the format marks as the non-terminals in a format grammar. A formatted text can then be parsed using the grammar to build a data structure that serves both as a parse tree and as a search tree. While processing a retrieved segment, a full-text system can follow the search tree from root to leaf, collecting the format marks encountered at each node to derive the sequence of commands active for that segment. The approach also supports the notion of a ‘well formatted’ document and provides a means for verifying the well-formedness of a given text. To illustrate the approach, a sample set of format marks and a sample grammar are given suitable for formatting and parsing the article as a sample text.