Correction to: Exploration of photoreduction ability of reduced graphene oxide–cadmium sulphide heteronanostructures and their intensified activities against harmful microbes

Journal of Materials Science -     

Cooperative formation control of autonomous underwater vehicles: An overview

Formation control is a cooperative control concept in which multiple autonomous underwater mobile robots are deployed for a group motion and/or control mission. This paper presents a brief review on various cooperative search and formation control strategies for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) based on literature reported till date. Various cooperative and formation control schemes for collecting huge amount of data based on formation regulation control and formation tracking control are discussed. To address the challenge of detecting AUV failure in the fleet, communication issues, collision and obstacle avoidance are also taken into attention. Stability analysis of the feasible formation is also presented. This paper may be intended to serve as a convenient reference for the further research on formation control of multiple underwater mobile robots.     

Position Control of a Flexible Manipulator Using a New Nonlinear Self-Tuning PID Controller

In this paper, a new nonlinear self-tuning PID controller(NSPIDC) is proposed to control the joint position and link deflection of a flexible-link manipulator(FLM) while it is subjected to carry different payloads. Since, payload is a critical parameter of the FLM whose variation greatly influences the controller performance. The proposed controller guarantees stability under change in payload by attenuating the non-modeled higher order dynamics using a new nonlinear autoregressive moving average with exogenous-input(NARMAX) model of the FLM. The parameters of the FLM are identified on-line using recursive least square(RLS) algorithm and using minimum variance control(MVC) laws the control parameters are updated in real-time. This proposed NSPID controller has been implemented in real-time on an experimental set-up. The joint tracking and link deflection performances of the proposed adaptive controller are compared with that of a popular direct adaptive controller(DAC). From the obtained results, it is confirmed that the proposed controller exhibits improved performance over the DAC both in terms of accurate position tracking and quick damping of link deflections when subjected to variable payloads.     

A Comprehensive Review of Path Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Machine Intelligence Research - The underwater path planning problem deals with finding an optimal or sub-optimal route between an origin point and a termination point in marine environments. The...     

Polarization phase shifting cyclic interferometer for surface profilometry of non-birefringent phase samples

A rectangular path cyclic interferometer has the unique property that the counter-propagating wavefronts travelling in the interferometer arms are folded with respect to each other in the plane of the interferometer although the two wavefronts finally emerge from the interferometer unfolded. A phase disturbance introduced in one lateral half of the interferometer arm is therefore manifested in complementary lateral halves of the observed interference pattern. This phenomenon is utilized to evaluate the surface profile of a reflecting sample placed on one of the interferometer mirrors. The sample phase is retrieved using polarization phase shifting. Experimental results showing three-dimensional surface morphology of a small scale integrated circuitry directly etched on silicon are presented.     

Real source–sink pair

This work is concerned with the interaction of a source–sink pair. The main parameters of the problem are source and sink flow rates, the axial and lateral separations of the source and sink, and the angle between the axes of source and sink. Of concern is the percentage of source fluid that enters the sink as a function of these parameters. The experiments have been carried using the source nozzle diameter of 6 mm and the sink pipe diameter of two sizes: 10 mm and 20 mm. The Reynolds numbers of the source jet is about 3200. The main diagnostics are flow visualization using dye, laser induced fluorescence (LIF), particle streak photographs and particle image velocimetry (PIV). To obtain the removal effectiveness (that is percentage of source fluid that is going through the sink pipe), titration method is used. The sink diameter and the angle between source and the sink axes do not influence efficiencies as do the sink flow rate and the lateral separation. Data from experiments have been consolidated so that these results can be used for designing sinks for removal of heat and pollutants.     

A novel texture segmentation method based on co-occurrence energy-driven parametric active contour model

In this paper, a novel approach to texture segmentation based on the parametric active contour model (ACM) is proposed. At first, gray-level co-occurrence matrix and subsequently co-occurrence energy of the regions inside and outside of the dynamic contour are calculated. Difference of this energy corresponding to both the regions is used as the external energy of the proposed ACM. The contour stops and converges completely when this difference attains a maximum value. The proposed approach requires only initial contour selection and no object point selection like the other variants of parametric ACM used for texture segmentation. Experiments on a number of synthetic and real-world texture images show that in all cases, we are getting a better segmentation of the object although for few cases the execution time is bit more than that of other existing methods.     

Soft computing methods applied to the control of a flexible robot manipulator

The paper describes use of soft computing methods (fuzzy logic and neural network techniques) in the development of a hybrid fuzzy neural control (HFNC) scheme for a multi-link flexible manipulator. A manipulator with multiple flexible links is a multivariable system of considerable complexity due to the inter-link coupling effects that are present in both rigid and flexible motions. Modelling and controlling the dynamics of such manipulators is therefore difficult. The proposed HFNC scheme generates control actions combining contributions form both a fuzzy controller and a neural controller. The primary loop of the proposed HFNC contains a fuzzy controller and a neural network controller in the secondary loop to compensate for the coupling effects due to the rigid and flexible motion along with the inter-link coupling. It has been ascertained from the present investigation that the proposed soft-computing-based controller works effectively in the tracking control of such a multi-link flexible manipulator. The results are extendable to other multivariable systems of similar complexity.     

Variable Gain Output Feedback Control of A Networked Temperature Control System Based on Online Delay Estimation

In this paper, a gradient descent method based delay estimator is proposed for use with a variable gain control strategy for networked control systems. The delay estimator is developed in such a way that its boundedness is ensured. The performance of the estimator with variable gain controller is evaluated on a temperature control plant with network in the feedback loop.