Ultralow Expansion Glass as Material for Advanced Micromechanical Systems

Ultralow expansion (ULE) glasses are of special interest for temperature stabilized systems for example in precision metrology. Nowadays, ULE materials are mainly used in macroscopic and less in micromechanical systems. Reasons for this are a lack of technologies for parallel fabricating high-quality released microstructures with a high accuracy. As a result, there is a high demand in transferring these materials into miniaturized application examples, realistic system modeling, and the investigation of microscopic material properties. Herein, a technological base for fabricating released micromechanical structures and systems with a structure height above 100 μm in ULE 7972 glass is established. Herein, the main fabrication parameters that are important for the system design and contribute thus to the introduction of titanium silicate as material for glass-based micromechanical systems are discussed. To study the mechanical properties in combination with respective simulation models, microcantilevers are used as basic mechanical elements to evaluate technological parameters and other impact factors. The implemented models allow to predict the micromechanical system properties with a deviation of only ±5% and can thus effectively support the micromechanical system design in an early stage of development.     

Automated extraction of DNA from blood and PCR setup using a Tecan Freedom EVO liquid handler for forensic genetic STR typing of reference samples

We have implemented and validated automated protocols for DNA extraction and PCR setup using a Tecan Freedom EVO liquid handler mounted with the Te-MagS magnetic separation device (Tecan, M?nnedorf, Switzerland). The protocols were validated for accredited forensic genetic work according to ISO 17025 using the Qiagen MagAttract DNA Mini M48 kit (Qiagen GmbH, Hilden, Germany) from fresh whole blood and blood from deceased individuals. The workflow was simplified by returning the DNA extracts to the original tubes minimizing the risk of misplacing samples. The tubes that originally contained the samples were washed with MilliQ water before the return of the DNA extracts. The PCR was setup in 96-well microtiter plates. The methods were validated for the kits: AmpF?STR Identifiler, SGM Plus and Yfiler (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA), GenePrint FFFL and PowerPlex Y (Promega, Madison, WI). The automated protocols allowed for extraction and addition of PCR master mix of 96 samples within 3.5h. In conclusion, we demonstrated that (1) DNA extraction with magnetic beads and (2) PCR setup for accredited, forensic genetic short tandem repeat typing can be implemented on a simple automated liquid handler leading to the reduction of manual work, and increased quality and throughput.     

Scenario-based testing from UML/OCL behavioral models

We present in this article a way to produce test suites applied to the POSIX mini-challenge based on a behavioral model of a file system manager written in UML/OCL. We illustrate the limitations of a fully automated test generation approach, which justifies the use of test scenarios as a complement to a functional testing approach. Scenarios are expressed through regular expressions describing sequences of operations, possibly punctuated by intermediate states that have to be reached by the execution of the model. Scenarios are unfolded into extended sequences of operations that are played on the model using symbolic animation techniques. We experimented our approach by testing the conformance of two different file systems w.r.t. the POSIX standard: a recent Linux distribution and a customized Java implementation of POSIX used to evaluate the relevance of our approach and its complementarity with a structural test generation approach.     

Packing spherical discrete elements for large scale simulations

We introduce a new geometric method to generate sphere packings with restricted overlap values. Sample generation is an important, but time-consuming, step that precedes a calculation performed with the discrete element method (DEM). At present, there does not exist any software dedicated to DEM which would be similar to the mesh software that exists for finite element methods (FEM). A practical objective of the method is to build very large sphere packings (several hundreds of thousands) in a few minutes instead of several days as the current dynamic methods do. The developed algorithm uses a new geometric procedure to position very efficiently the polydisperse spheres in a tetrahedral mesh. The algorithm, implemented into YADE-OPEN DEM (open-source software), consists in filling tetrahedral meshes with spheres. In addition to the features of the tetrahedral mesh, the input parameters are the minimum and maximum radii (or their size ratio), and the magnitude of authorized overlaps. The filling procedure is stopped when a target solid fraction or number of spheres is reached. Based on this method, an efficient tool can be designed for DEMs used by researchers and engineers. The generated packings can be isotropic and the number of contacts per sphere is very high due to its geometric procedure. In this paper, different properties of the generated packings are characterized and examples from real industrial problems are presented to show how this method can be used. The current C++ version of this packing algorithm is part of YADE-OPEN DEM [20] available on the web (https://yade-dem.org).     

Demons非刚性配准算法拓扑保持性的研究

在基于配准的图像分割应用中, 拓扑保持性是非刚性图像配准算法的一个重要约束. 本文从矢量场特性出发, 分析了Demons非刚性图像配准算法导致目标拓扑改变时变形场的特点. 根据变形场特点与其雅可比行列式之间的关系, 给出了校正该算法拓扑保持性的方法. 实验表明, 改进后的变形场具有了拓扑保持性.     

A tabu search with an oscillation strategy for the discriminant analysis problem

This article proposes a tabu search approach to solve a mathematical programming formulation of the linear classification problem, which consists of determining an hyperplane that separates two groups of points as well as possible in ?^m. The tabu search approach proposed is based on a non-standard formulation using linear system infeasibility. The search space is the set of bases defined on the matrix that describes the linear system. The moves are performed by pivoting on a specified row and column. On real machine learning databases, our approach compares favorably with implementations based on parametric programming and irreducible infeasible constraint sets. Additional computational results for randomly generated instances confirm that our method provides a suitable alternative to the mixed integer programming formulation that is solved by a commercial code when the number of attributes m increases.     

On the Length and Area Regularization for Multiphase Level Set Segmentation

In this paper we introduce novel regularization techniques for level set segmentation that target specifically the problem of multiphase segmentation. When the multiphase model is used to obtain a partitioning of the image in more than two regions, a new set of issues arise with respect to the single phase case in terms of regularization strategies. For example, if smoothing or shrinking each contour individually could be a good model in the single phase case, this is not necessarily true in the multiphase scenario.     

Toward a wider use of formal methods for aerospace systems design and verification

Nowadays, it is well accepted that the development of critical systems involves the use of formal methods. One of the major fields where these methods made a lot of progress are the avionics, aerospace and more generally transport areas. Several methods, tools and techniques have been applied for the development of such systems in different parts of the world, and they have been actually put into practice during the development of specific aircraft programs. The aim of this introductory article and of this STTT special issue is to propose a brief overview of the state-of-the-art of current researches in formal methods applied to the development of avionics and aerospace systems and more broadly to take stock of the integration of formal methods in the aerospace industry.     

Principles of adjustable autonomy: a framework for resilient human–machine cooperation

Unmanned ground vehicles tend to be more and more autonomous, but both complete teleoperation and full autonomy are not efficient enough to deal with all possible situations. To be efficient, the human–robot system must be able to anticipate, react and recover from errors of different kinds, i.e., to be resilient. From this observation, this paper proposes a survey on the resilience of a human–machine system and the means to control the resilience. The resilience of a system can be defined as the ability to maintain or recover a stable state when subject to disturbance. Adjustable autonomy and human–machine cooperation are considered as means of resilience for the system. This paper then proposes three indicators to assess different meanings of resilience of the system: foresight and avoidance of events, reaction to events and recovery from occurrence of events. The third of these metrics takes into consideration the concept of affordances that allows a common representation for the opportunities of action between the automated system and its environment.     

Bond graph based control of a three-phase inverter with LC filter – Connection to passive and active loads

This paper proposes a model of a three phase electrical inverter with a LC output filter in delta connection used in a renewable energy supply system. The concept of inverse bond graph via bicausality is used for the control law design. The control law robustness is tested by connecting passive and active (induction machine) loads.