State estimation and experimental verification of a robotic vehicle with six in-wheel drives using Kalman filter

Microsystem Technologies - In this research we present an algorithm for a six-wheeled robotic vehicle with articulated suspension (RVAS) to estimate the vehicle velocity and acceleration states,...     

Modeling and control of a finger-like mechanism using bending shape memory alloys

Microsystem Technologies - In this research a biologically inspired finger-like mechanism similar to human musculoskeletal system is developed based on Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs). SMA actuators are...     

Lung nodules detection using semantic segmentation and classification with optimal features

Neural Computing and Applications - Lung cancer is a deadly disease if not diagnosed in its early stages. However, early detection of lung cancer is a challenging task due to the shape and size of...     

Blind estimation of the PN sequence in lower SNR DS-SS signals with residual carrier

This paper presents a method of singular value decomposition (SVD) plus digital phase lock loop (DPLL) to solve the difficult problem of blind pseudo-noise (PN) sequence estimation in low signal to noise ratios (SNR) direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS, DS) signals with residual carrier. Of course, the method needs to know the parameters of DS signal, such as the period and code rate of PN sequence. Firstly, the received signal is sampled and divided into non-overlapping signal vectors according to a temporal window, whose duration is two periods of PN sequence. Then, an autocorrelation matrix is computed and accumulated by the signal vectors one by one. The PN sequence with residual carrier can be estimated by the principal eigenvector of this autocorrelation matrix. Furthermore, a DPLL is used to deal with the estimated PN sequence with residual carrier, it estimates and tracks the residual carrier, removes the residual carrier in the end. Theory analysis and computer simulation results show that this method can effectively realize the PN sequence estimation from the input DS signals with residual carrier in lower SNR.     

Register allocation for write activity minimization on non-volatile main memory for embedded systems

Non-volatile memories are good candidates for DRAM replacement as main memory in embedded systems and they have many desirable characteristics. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of non-volatile memory co-exist with its advantages. First, the lifetime of some of the non-volatile memories is limited by the number of erase operations. Second, read and write operations have asymmetric speed or power consumption in non-volatile memory. This paper focuses on the embedded systems using non-volatile memory as main memory. We propose register allocation technique with re-computation to reduce the number of store instructions. When non-volatile memory is applied as the main memory, reducing store instructions will reduce write activities on non-volatile memory. To re-compute the spills effectively during register allocation, a novel potential spill selection strategy is proposed. During this process, live range splitting is utilized to split certain long live ranges such that they are more likely to be assigned into registers. In addition, techniques for re-computation overhead reduction is proposed on systems with multiple functional units. With the proposed approach, the lifetime of non-volatile memory is extended accordingly. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique can efficiently reduce the number of store instructions on systems with non-volatile memory by 33% on average.     

RFID-based interactive multimedia system for the children

In this paper, we present an interactive edutainment system for the children that leverages multimedia and RFID technologies in a seamless manner. The proposed system allows children to learn about new objects/entities by tapping on physical objects through a specially designed RFID-Bluetooth based Tangible User Interface (TUI) tool. The output of the system is delivered as a set of appropriate multimedia representations related to the objects being tapped. The TUI uses RFID technology for object identification and Bluetooth communication to transmit data to the computer where the system??s software is running. We incorporated our system in three games that allow children of different ages to benefit from the system??s functionalities and encourage them to interact with it.     

Incorporation of a Regularization Term to Control Negative Correlation in Mixture of Experts

Combining accurate neural networks (NN) in the ensemble with negative error correlation greatly improves the generalization ability. Mixture of experts (ME) is a popular combining method which employs special error function for the simultaneous training of NN experts to produce negatively correlated NN experts. Although ME can produce negatively correlated experts, it does not include a control parameter like negative correlation learning (NCL) method to adjust this parameter explicitly. In this study, an approach is proposed to introduce this advantage of NCL into the training algorithm of ME, i.e., mixture of negatively correlated experts (MNCE). In this proposed method, the capability of a control parameter for NCL is incorporated in the error function of ME, which enables its training algorithm to establish better balance in bias-variance-covariance trade-off and thus improves the generalization ability. The proposed hybrid ensemble method, MNCE, is compared with their constituent methods, ME and NCL, in solving several benchmark problems. The experimental results show that our proposed ensemble method significantly improves the performance over the original ensemble methods.     

Integer linear programming optimization of joint RRM policies for heterogeneous wireless systems

Wireless systems will be characterized by the coexistence of heterogeneous Radio Access Technologies (RATs) with different, but also complementary, performance and technical characteristics. These heterogeneous wireless networks will provide network operators the possibility to efficiently and coordinately use the heterogeneous radio resources, for which novel Joint Radio Resource Management (JRRM) policies need to be designed. In this context, this work proposes and evaluates a JRRM policy that simultaneously determines for each user an adequate combination of RAT and number of radio resources within such RAT to guarantee the user/service QoS requirements, and efficiently distribute the radio resources considering a user fairness approach aimed at maximizing the system capacity. To this aim, the JRRM algorithm, which takes into account the discrete nature of radio resources, is based on integer linear programming optimization mechanisms.     

Computability of Countable Subshifts in One Dimension

We investigate the computability of countable subshifts in one dimension, and their members. Subshifts of Cantor?CBendixson rank two contain only eventually periodic elements. Any rank two subshift in 2^? is decidable. Subshifts of rank three may contain members of arbitrary Turing degree. In contrast, effectively closed ( $\Pi^{0}_{1}$ ) subshifts of rank three contain only computable elements, but $\Pi^{0}_{1}$ subshifts of rank four may contain members of arbitrary $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ degree. There is no subshift of rank ??+1.