A Real-Time Visual Inspection System for Railway Maintenance: Automatic Hexagonal-Headed Bolts Detection

Rail inspection is a very important task in railway maintenance, and it is periodically needed for preventing dangerous situations. Inspection is operated manually by trained human operator walking along the track searching for visual anomalies. This monitoring is unacceptable for slowness and lack of objectivity, as the results are related to the ability of the observer to recognize critical situations. The correspondence presents a patent-pending real-time Visual Inspection System for Railway (VISyR) maintenance, and describes how presence/absence of the fastening bolts that fix the rails to the sleepers is automatically detected. VISyR acquires images from a digital line-scan camera. Data are simultaneously preprocessed according to two discrete wavelet transforms, and then provided to two multilayer perceptron neural classifiers (MLPNCs). The "cross validation" of these MLPNCs avoids (practically-at-all) false positives, and reveals the presence/absence of the fastening bolts with an accuracy of 99.6% in detecting visible bolts and of 95% in detecting missing bolts. A field-programmable gate array-based architecture performs these tasks in 8.09 mus, allowing an on-the-fly analysis of a video sequence acquired at 200 km/h     

Instrumental technique evolution for olive oil sensory analysis

At present, two systems have been usually used to identify olive oil aroma: the official panel test, according to the European Union Regulation [1], and the gas chromatographic method and its improvements. However, both types of techniques have two principal disadvantages: They need a long time for analysis and cannot be applied on‐line. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the development of a new device, the so‐called “electronic nose”. The aim of this work is to perform both a review of these techniques used for olive oil sensory analysis and their advantages and disadvantages.     

Isolation, structure elucidation, and biological activity of the steroid oligoglycosides and polyhydroxysteroids from the Antarctic starfish Acodontaster conspicuus

A total of 19 steroids, of which 13 steroidal oligoglycosides (nine new and four known) and six polyhydroxylated steroids (four new and two known), has been isolated from the Antarctic starfish Acodontaster conspicuus. The mixture is dominated by glycosides composed of steroidal aglycons having the hydroxyl groups typically disposed on one side of the tetracyclic nucleus, i.e., 3 beta,4 beta,6 alpha,8,15 beta-, with some having a sulfate at C-6, and differing in the side chains and/or in the disaccharide moieties that are usually attached at C-26, with some at C-28 and C-29. Those compounds are accompanied by minute amounts of glycosides with a delta 8(14)-double bond in the steroid, which is a structural feature not previously found among polyhydroxysteroids derived from starfish. Small amounts of six related unglycosidated polyhydroxysteroids and three higher-molecular-weight asterosaponins complete the composition of the mixture. The structures of the new compounds were determined by interpretation of their spectral data and by comparison with spectral data of known compounds. Eighteen of these compounds were evaluated for their ability to inhibit growth in Antarctic marine bacteria isolated from either the water column or the surfaces of benthic marine invertebrates. Of these compounds, 50% were active against at least one Antarctic marine bacterium. This suggests that these compounds may play an important role in deterring microbial fouling.     

Spreading of a Gravity Current over a Permeable Surface

Plane inertial gravity currents running over horizontal permeable surfaces are studied. An analytical simple model based on local and global balances is derived which describes the propagation and infiltration of an incompressible dense fluid on and through the surface. Results of laboratory experiments are presented which are in accordance with scaling laws suggested analytically. It is found that the loss of mass, the velocity, and the position of the front of the current follow exponential relationships. The dynamics is governed by a particular decay time related to the initial volume released and reduced gravity g0′. However this decay time exhibits a different functional relationship from that obtained for currents evolving over thin permeable bottoms when the downward flow is viscous. As a consequence of the loss of mass, the distance to extinction of the current is found to be independent of g0′.     

Two fast architectures for the direct 2-D discrete wavelettransform

We propose two architectures for the direct two-dimensional (2-D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The first one is based on a modified recursive pyramid algorithm (MRPA) and performs a “"nonstandard” decomposition (i.e., Mallat's (1989) tree) of an N×N image in approximately 2N²/3 clock cycles (ccs). This result consistently speeds up other known architectures that commonly need approximately N² ccs. Furthermore, the proposed architecture is simpler than others in terms of hardware complexity. Subsequently, we show how “symmetric”/“anti-symmetric” properties of linear-phase wavelet filter bases can be exploited in order to further reduce the VLSI area. This is used to design a second architecture that provides one processing unit for each level of decomposition (pipelined approach) and performs a decomposition in approximately N²/2 ccs. In many practical cases, even this architecture is simpler than general MRPA-based devices (having only one processing unit)     

On vanishing stability regions in nonlinear systems with high-gain feedback

When local stabilization of nonlinear systems is achieved by linear feedback, the resulting stability region may vanish as the feedback gains increase. This is demonstrated by examples in which neglected nonlinearities create an unstable limit cycle around an asymptotically stable equilibrium. As the feedback gains tend to infinity the unstable limit cycle shrinks to the equilibrium. If a feedback linearization design is applied, the same instability mechanism may occur when the nonlinearities are not precisely known.     

Effect of different ventilation regimens on ewes' milk and Canestrato Pugliese cheese quality in summer

The influence of three different ventilation regimens on air pollution in sheep houses and on the quality of ewe milk and of Canestrato Pugliese cheese was investigated during the summer season. The experimental treatments were low ventilation regimen (VR=35 m3/h per ewe) split in 30-min ventilation cycles (LOV-30); moderate ventilation regimen (VR=70 m3/h per ewe) split in 30-min ventilation cycles (MOV-30); moderate ventilation regimen (VR=70 m3/h per ewe) split in 60-min ventilation cycles (MOV-60). The LOV-30 milk had higher microbial load and bulk milk somatic cell count (BMSCC) and resulted in a weaker casein matrix in the curd compared with the MOV-30 and MOV-60 treatments. At 45 d of ripening, the LOV-30 cheeses had a lower casein content and higher non-casein nitrogen (NCN) and water-soluble nitrogen (WSN) contents than the MOV-30 and MOV-60 cheeses. Urea-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (urea-PAGE) of the pH 4.6-soluble N extract showed that the MOV-60 cheeses had fewer bands derived from casein (CN) hydrolysis than the LOV-30 or MOV-30 cheeses, despite its having exhibited the highest plasmin (PL) activity levels. Our results suggest that the ventilation regimen is critical in dairy sheep housing for optimizing the hygienic quality of ewe milk and the proteolytic processes occurring in Canestrato Pugliese cheese during ripening.     

Effect of microstructure on thermal expansion behaviour of nanocrystalline metallic materials

Materials properties, among which thermodynamic ones, are influenced by microstructural features. This is so also in the case of nanocrystalline materials, featuring average grain size below 100 nm. A reduced grain size involves that significant fractions of atoms are localised in grain boundary regions and this has remarkable effects on the resulting thermodynamic properties, like heat capacity, transition temperatures, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc. In the present work we consider the thermal expansion behaviour of ball-milled nanocrystalline metallic powders using dilatometric measurements. High-energy ball-milling, that is capable to achieve extremely high deformation degrees, induces in the milled powders microstructural defects, like vacancies, antisites, dislocations and planar faults. Another effect of milling is the reduction of the crystallite size, that, in the long run, may reach the nanometric range. In view of the microstructural changes that can be brought about by milling and of the numerous transformations occurring during the dilatometric runs, a comparative study has been conducted on intermetallic, NiAl and Ni₃Al, and on a pure metal, nickel, powders. The results emerging from the experimental investigation are quite complex, owing to the complex defect structures that are present in the ball-milled powders. It turns out that the thermal expansion coefficient of the nanocrystalline powders increases as the average grain size is reduced. However, when the average grain size achieves very low values, the strain relaxation of the crystalline lattice and the rearrangement of grain boundary regions result in a reduction of the thermal expansion coefficient. Another aspect that emerges from the dilatometric curves is the interplay between recrystallization and reordering, i.e. the re-establishment of the long-range order in the intermetallic powders, that had been partially or fully eliminated by ball-milling.     

The Effect of Surface Stresses on the Critical Debonding Stress Around Nanoparticles

With the aid of an energy analysis and the surface elasticity theory, this work provides a closed form solution for the critical debonding stress of a rigid nanoparticle embedded in an elastic matrix subjected to a remote hydrostatic stress. It is proved that the debonding stress depends on the particle radius, the matrix elastic properties and the fracture energy per unit surface. The solution allows quantifying the effects of surface elastic constants, also showing that the smaller the particle size the more significant those effects are.     

A decentralized kinematic control architecture for collaborative and cooperative multi-arm systems

In this paper a two-layer decentralized framework for kinematic control of cooperative and collaborative multi-robot systems is developed. The motion of the system is specified at the workpiece level, by adopting a task-oriented formulation for cooperative tasks. The first layer computes the motion of the single arms in the system. In detail, the control unit of each robot computes the end-effector motion references in a decentralized fashion on the basis of the knowledge of the assigned cooperative task and the motion references computed by its neighbors. Then, in the second layer, each control unit computes the reference joint motion of the corresponding manipulator from the end-effector reference motion. The approach is, then, tested in simulation on a work-cell composed by several manipulators, and experimentally on a dual-arm kinematically redundant work-cell composed by industrial manipulators.