Control of the search for an immobile object aimed at its capture

Two similar methods for controlling a manipulator robot with the aim to search and capture an immobile target object placed on the two-dimensional bottom of the three-dimensional operation zone of the manipulator are considered. In contrast to [1, 2], where a search is carried out with fixed diameter of a circle of detection, in this work, the stage of the controlled search for a target object is carried out with varying diameters of the circle of detection; i.e., at this stage, the manipulator gripper approaches the target object simultaneously. Using diagrams constructed in the plane of the geometric parameters of the operation zone of the manipulator, the problem of selecting a control (from two constructed ones), under which a guaranteed search with a subsequent capture of the target object is carried out in a minimum time, is solved. By numerical computations, it is found that the obtained control makes it possible to decrease significantly the guaranteed time of steering the gripper of the manipulator to an immobile object compared with the corresponding characteristics under the controls constructed in [1, 2].     

An image recognition system aimed at search activities using cyber search and rescue dogs

Disaster response presents major challenges for robotics and computer vision alike. The Cyber‐Enhanced Canine Suit is a suit equipped with a camera, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and various other sensors, to be worn by search and rescue (SAR) dogs for the purpose of enhancing SAR dog operations. This paper presents an image recognition system for use in disaster scenarios and its integration with the Cyber‐Enhanced Canine Suit platform. The system’s intended use is to spot personal items of missing individuals or other visual clues in video streams from various disaster response platforms. The system facilitates quick learning of targets from limited data and makes providing that data quick and easy. It also provides backtrack recognition functionality, to rapidly find novel targets in the seen footage. We evaluated the recognition system on footage gathered in the field, obtaining promising results. Integrated with the Cyber‐Enhanced Canine Suit, the system can automatically plot detections of search targets onto a map display, to provide operators with a quick overview of what was seen where.     

Learning based brain emotional intelligence as a new aspect for development of an alarm system

The multi criteria and purposeful prediction approach has been introduced and is implemented by the fast and efficient behavioral based brain emotional learning method. On the other side, the emotional learning from brain model has shown good performance and is characterized by high generalization property. New approach is developed to deal with low computational and memory resources and can be used with the largest available data sets. The scope of paper is to reveal the advantages of emotional learning interpretations of brain as a purposeful forecasting system designed to warning; and to make a fair comparison between the successful neural (MLP) and neurofuzzy (ANFIS) approaches in their best structures and according to prediction accuracy, generalization, and computational complexity. The auroral electrojet (AE) index are used as practical examples of chaotic time series and introduced method used to make predictions and warning of geomagnetic disturbances and geomagnetic storms based on AE index.     

Developing an research and development (R&D) process improvement system to simulate the performance of R&D activities

Because of a shorter R&D cycle time and the increasing complexity of technology development, efficient decision support systems for R&D activities are necessary to facilitate R&D processes. In particular, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) require efficiency of R&D projects due to a lack of R&D budgets and resources. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a system which can assess current levels of R&D processes of companies and improve problematic processes. To this end, the proposed system applies a standard R&D process to evaluate the R&D level of companies, including four types of database and three modules: performance level analysis, comparison analysis, and performance simulation analysis. First, the module of performance level analysis aims to draw strong and weak R&D processes of companies, using three factors: importance, performance goal and current performance on each process. The second module provides the function of comparison analysis that compares the performance level of a company with that of others. Finally, the performance simulation analysis investigates influences of critical processes on R&D outcomes and predicts how much the processes can enhance technical, economic and process outcomes. In particular, a case study is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed system to an IT company. This system can help managers enhance their R&D performance by presenting necessary improvements on critical processes.     

Fundamentals of the design and the operation of an intelligent tutoring system for the learning of the arithmetical and algebraic way of solving word problems

Designers of interactive learning environments with a focus on word problem solving usually have to compromise between the amount of resolution paths that a user is allowed to follow and the quality of the feedback provided. We have built an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that is able to both track the user's actions and provide adequate supervision during the resolution. This is done without imposing any restriction on the resolution paths that are allowed. Instead, the system attempts to enforce metacognitive learning by requiring an appropriate definition of quantities before they are used. The program (a) supports both the arithmetical and algebraic way of solving problems; (b) allows the recurrence to one or more equations when solving a problem in an algebraic way; (c) determines the validity of the expressions when they are introduced; and (d) admits the incorporation of new problems without the need of being reprogrammed. In this paper, we explain the design foundations, which are mainly based on (a) a reflection of the steps that a student should follow to solve a problem in an algebraic way, and (b) the use of a domain specific notation to represent both the problem structure and the current state of the resolution process. In particular, hypergraphs are introduced as an adequate way to support tracking in both the arithmetical and algebraic case. Moreover, we offer an extensive experimental evaluation which highlights the potential of the ITS as a learning tool.     

An efficient,simplified multiple-coupled circuit model of the induction motor aimed to simulate different types of stator faults

This paper proposes an original simplified model aimed to simulate, an easy way, inter turns short circuit fault, phase to phase fault and phase to ground fault. In this model, the stator is considered as six magnetically coupled windings and the rotor as three not magnetically coupled R–L circuits. The paper also presents the star- and delta-connected stator configurations of the simplified model. However, the proposed simplified model is suitable only for steady-state operation. The performance of the simplified model is first verified by a comparison between the simulated current of the multiple-coupled model and the simplified model. Then, since the stator faults have an impact on the symmetrical components of the stator current, this paper uses these components to validate the behavior of the simplified model by simulation and experimentally using a 1.1 kW motor. In addition, simulated results of the simplified model for a 110 kW motor are presented in order to generalize the use of the proposed model to larger motors.     

A survey of search methodologies and automated system development for examination timetabling

Examination timetabling is one of the most important administrative activities that takes place in all academic institutions. In this paper, we present a critical discussion of the research on exam timetabling which has taken place in the last decade or so. This last ten years has seen a significantly increased level of research attention for this important area. There has been a range of insightful contributions to the scientific literature both in terms of theoretical issues and practical aspects. The main aim of this survey is to highlight the new trends and key research achievements that have been carried out in the last decade. We also aim to outline a range of relevant important research issues and challenges that have been generated by this body of work. We first define the problem and discuss previous survey papers. Within our presentation of the state-of-the-art methodologies, we highlight recent research trends including hybridisations of search methodologies and the development of techniques which are motivated by raising the level of generality at which search methodologies can operate. Summarising tables are presented to provide an overall view of these techniques. We also present and discuss some important issues which have come to light concerning the public benchmark exam timetabling data. Different versions of problem datasets with the same name have been circulating in the scientific community for the last ten years and this has generated a significant amount of confusion. We clarify the situation and present a re-naming of the widely studied datasets to avoid future confusion. We also highlight which research papers have dealt with which dataset. Finally, we draw upon our discussion of the literature to present a (non-exhaustive) range of potential future research directions and open issues in exam timetabling research.     

全文搜索引擎在煤矿运维系统中的应用

针对目前已有的煤矿运维系统功能单一、自动化程度低等问题,将全文搜索引擎应用到煤矿运维系统中,通过搜索引擎从故障解决方案数据库中搜索出匹配的解决方案。介绍了煤矿运维系统流程及故障解决方案来源、数据结构和录入流程;通过对比选型,选择Elasticsearch作为煤矿运维系统的全文搜索引擎,并给出了其具体应用方法。实例分析及测试结果表明,该搜索引擎提供的搜索结果与告警内容所反映的故障相关度较高,能够为解决故障提供有效帮助。     

Automation technology—on the way to an open system architecture

This contribution describes some basic rules for the construction of complex automation systems. It structures the factory from a control-technological view into functional blocks which are related to a 7-layer model of manufacturing technology. Thus, it becomes clear that the present MMS protocols end in the cell control layer in the functional unit of machine control. This unit, however, consists of functional blocks which, for flexible adaptation of future control tasks, should also be configurable and open. The function and communication structure of a factory are shown with a cube model.     

Optimal control of an object when it is aimed at a mobile target under uncertainty

In the paper, we study a problem of optimal aiming a dynamic object at a mobile target. We consider different types of available information about the behavior of an object and target according to which optimal open and close mixed circuits are defined. Methods for realizing the latter are described. The results are illustrated by examples.     

Modern technologies aimed at the development of large programs for solving computational problems on computers with various architectures

Problems concerning the development of large and complex computer programs for modern computers of various architectures are considered. Features of modern Fortran that improve the efficiency and facilitate the development of such programs are discussed. These features include the facilities for program decomposition, technologies for improving the portability, reliability, and readability of programs, as well as object-oriented, structured, and parallel programming.     

Routing straddle carriers for the loading operation of containers using a beam search algorithm

This paper discusses how to route straddle carriers during the loading operation of export containers in port container terminals. The objective of the routing is to minimize the total travel distance of straddle carriers in the yard. The routing problem is comprised of the container allocation problem and the carrier routing problem. In the container allocation problem, containers in the yard are divided into multiple classes, each of which will be loaded by a quay crane. The container allocation problem is formulated as a transportation problem. In the carrier routing problem, the sequence of yard-bays that a carrier visits is determined. A beam search algorithm is developed for the carrier routing problem. A numerical experimentation is carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.     

NLP-based faceted search: Experience in the development of a science and technology search engine

An appropriate promotion, distribution and dissemination of scientific, artistic and technology developments can foster the collaboration between a country’s productive and academic sectors. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel search engine aiming at helping people to access science and technology advances, researchers and institutions working in specific areas of research. Our search engine first collects information disseminated on the Web in academic institution sites and in researchers personal homepages. Then, after intensive text processing, it summarizes the information in an enriched and user-friendly presentation oriented to non-expert users. Stable performance and an acceptable level of effectiveness for automatic named entities recognition indicate the potential of our approach for bridging the gap between the heterogeneous and unstructured information available on the Web about the research and development advances in a country and the innovation required by the productive sectors.     

An affiliated search system for an electronic commerce and software component architecture

This paper describes an Electronic Commerce Goods Search System (ECGSS) that has functions that increase the precision of search results through training of the search system and uses affiliated business transaction processes. The software component architecture for ECGSS also allows the effective deployment of the system on every local business site, in view of the evolving trend in information technology toward easier configuration and re-usability. A general information gathering system with the infrastructure to accept every Internet communication protocol and access control is described. In this affiliated business transaction model, we classify Internet sites into two groups: a cooperative sites group, and a non-cooperative sites group. While designing the components, we optimized their specifications with respect to the whole architecture analysis, dependencies, and interface types using a component-based software development process. Experiments on the effectiveness of the user training function for the search system and the response time for simple queries for each communication protocol are presented. Comparisons of commercial search solutions and architectural standards of several organizations are also given.     

A characteristic-point-based fuzzy inference system aimed to minimize the number of fuzzy rules

This paper presents a characteristic-point-based fuzzy inference system (CPFIS) for fuzzy modeling from training data. The aim of the CPFIS is not only satisfactory precision performance, but also to employ as few purely linguistic fuzzy rules as possible by using a minimization-based systematic training method. Characteristic points (CPs) are defined as the few data points among the original training data which, when they are directly mapped to fuzzy rules and thus form the entire rule base, allow the underlying system to be effectively modeled. Three minimization-based algorithms in a sequence are proposed to train the CPFIS: a gradient-projection method, a Gauss-Jordan-elimination-based column elimination, and back-propagation. The CPs are determined by iterative computations of the first two minimization algorithms, after which the resulting fuzzy sets are further fine-tuned by the third algorithm. Experiments conducted on three benchmark problems showed that the CPFIS used one of the smallest number of fuzzy rules among the reported results for other methods. The Gaussian membership functions in both the input and output fuzzy sets and the small number of fuzzy rules make the rule interpretation of the CPFIS much easier than that of other methods, thus enhancing human-computer cooperation in knowledge discovery.     

The development of a sound viewer for an open hypermedia system

Abstract

While rich support for a wide variety of media such as text, video and image is common among contemporary hypermedia systems, so too is the inadequate support for audio. The primary reason that audio has not attracted as much attention as other media can be attributed to its obvious lack of visual identity. The main focus of this work was to identify a generic and meaningful visual representation of audio within a hypermedia context, and significantly promote hypermedia support for audio through the provision of a sound viewer.

This paper describes the inherent difficulties in providing a consistent interface to audio, and discusses in some depth the issues raised during the development process. The sound viewer is then introduced and the associated concepts described. The creation and traversal of links to and from audio are facilitated by the sound viewer across formats including WAV (proprietary digital sound file format from Microsoft), CD (Compact Disc) Audio and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The resultant viewer provides a unified and extensible framework for interacting with audio from within an open hypermedia environment. The open hypermedia system Microcosm was used as the development platform for this work. Microcosm can be augmented to supply a hypermedia link service to additional media with minimal overhead.     

Development of a servo-hydraulic system with a self-tuning fuzzy PID controller to simulate injection molding process

Microsystem Technologies - This study designs an experimental system to simulate two controlling stages, namely injection and packing, in the injection molding process. During the injection stage,...     

Neural networks for control in an artificial brain of a recognition and tracking system

This paper presents a new information-processing machine which is called the artificial brain (ABrain). It also considers the structure of artificial neural networks constructed in a Ricoh neurocomputer RN-2000 in the ABrain to track given trajectories which are produced in a micro-computer or by a light moved by hand in a recognition and tracking system. This work was presented, in part, at the Second International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita Japan, February 18–20, 1997