Self-aligned offset gated poly-Si TFTs with a floating sub-gate

We have fabricated a self-aligned offset-gated poly-Si thin film transistor (TFT) by employing a novel photoresist reflow process. The gate structure of the new device is consisted of two unique patterns: A main-gate and a sub-gate. The new fabrication method extends the gate-oxide over the offset region. With the assistance of the sub-gate and reflowed photoresist a self-aligned offset region is successfully obtained due to the offset oxide acting as an implantation mask. The poly-Si TFT with symmetrical offsets is easily fabricated and the new method does not require any additional offset mask step. Compared with the misaligned offset gated poly-Si TFTs, excellent symmetric electrical characteristics are obtained     

Cure kinetics of high performance epoxy resin systems

Summary Isothermal cure kinetics ofEPON HPT 1071/DDS system have been performed by means of differential scanning calorimetry. The maximum cure rate and the extent of conversion at various DDS concentrations were studied as a function of cure temperature. Maximum cure rate increases with increasing cure temperature and DDS concentration. At various DDS concentrations, the maximum cure rate occured between 19–22% conversion. In order to evaluate the kinetic parameters, numerical calculations by means of a Newton-Raphson technique and experimental results obtained from the peak of reaction rate curve were undertaken.     

A note on the differential regulator equation for non-minimum phase linear systems with time-varying exosystems

Some control problems in practice are often formulated as a linear output regulation problem with time-varying exosystems. Although this problem has been studied recently, an explicit and constructive solution has been given only for minimum phase systems. This paper presents a solution for non-minimum phase systems whose zero dynamics is hyperbolic (or has an exponentially dichotomic split in the case of time-varying zero dynamics). The idea is inspired by the non-causal stable inversion.     

A new vertical‐alignment LC mode with high‐transmittance and fast‐response‐time features

Abstract— A novel pixel design for vertical‐alignment LCDs with superior transmittance has been developed. The new liquid‐crystal mode, refered to as the hole‐induced vertical‐alignment mode (Hi‐VA), uses a via hole of an organic layer on a TFT substrate to achieve multi‐domain alignment. Compared to the conventional design, the Hi‐VA mode has a transmittance of up to 135% with a contrast ratio of 2000:1. Moreover, the new structure is free from ITO patterning or protrusion on the color‐filter side, which makes the fabrication process simple and low cost.     

Chaotic exploration and learning of locomotion behaviors

We present a general and fully dynamic neural system, which exploits intrinsic chaotic dynamics, for the real-time goal-directed exploration and learning of the possible locomotion patterns of an articulated robot of an arbitrary morphology in an unknown environment. The controller is modeled as a network of neural oscillators that are initially coupled only through physical embodiment, and goal-directed exploration of coordinated motor patterns is achieved by chaotic search using adaptive bifurcation. The phase space of the indirectly coupled neural-body-environment system contains multiple transient or permanent self-organized dynamics, each of which is a candidate for a locomotion behavior. The adaptive bifurcation enables the system orbit to wander through various phase-coordinated states, using its intrinsic chaotic dynamics as a driving force, and stabilizes on to one of the states matching the given goal criteria. In order to improve the sustainability of useful transient patterns, sensory homeostasis has been introduced, which results in an increased diversity of motor outputs, thus achieving multiscale exploration. A rhythmic pattern discovered by this process is memorized and sustained by changing the wiring between initially disconnected oscillators using an adaptive synchronization method. Our results show that the novel neurorobotic system is able to create and learn multiple locomotion behaviors for a wide range of body configurations and physical environments and can readapt in realtime after sustaining damage.     

Time-of-flight sensor and color camera calibration for multi-view acquisition

This paper presents a multi-view acquisition system using multi-modal sensors, composed of time-of-flight (ToF) range sensors and color cameras. Our system captures the multiple pairs of color images and depth maps at multiple viewing directions. In order to ensure the acceptable accuracy of measurements, we compensate errors in sensor measurement and calibrate multi-modal devices. Upon manifold experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the major sources of systematic error in sensor measurement and construct an error model for compensation. As a result, we provide a practical solution for the real-time error compensation of depth measurement. Moreover, we implement the calibration scheme for multi-modal devices, unifying the spatial coordinate for multi-modal sensors. The main contribution of this work is to present the thorough analysis of systematic error in sensor measurement and therefore provide a reliable methodology for robust error compensation. The proposed system offers a real-time multi-modal sensor calibration method and thereby is applicable for the 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes.     

Recursive nonlinear observer design: beyond the uniform observability

We propose a recursive design scheme of a state observer for multiple-input-multiple-output, partly lower triangular nonlinear systems. The design begins from the subdynamics far from the output and propagates to the subdynamics close to the output, recalling the backstepping scheme for nonlinear control. The proposed class of systems is fairly general since it includes nonuniformly observable and/or detectable multioutput systems. Error convergence to zero is proved assuming boundedness of inputs a posteriori (i.e., after the design), which is preferable whereas most results in the literature assume the boundedness; a priori (i.e., before the design). A global observer is proposed with the global Lipschitz condition of the system, but without any restriction on the size of Lipschitz coefficient. The Lipschitz condition can be removed when a semiglobal observer is of interest.     

A flight control system for aerial robots: algorithms and experiments

This paper presents a hierarchical flight control system for unmanned aerial vehicles. The proposed system executes high-level mission objectives by progressively substantiating them into machine-level commands. The acquired information from various sensors is propagated back to the higher layers for reactive decision making. Each vehicle is connected via standardized wireless communication protocol for scalable multi-agent coordination. The proposed system has been successfully implemented on a number of small helicopters and validated in various applications. Results from waypoint navigation, a probabilistic pursuit-evasion game and vision-based target tracking demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach toward intelligent flying robots.     

WALRUS: a similarity retrieval algorithm for image databases

Approaches for content-based image querying typically extract a single signature from each image based on color, texture, or shape features. The images returned as the query result are then the ones whose signatures are closest to the signature of the query image. While efficient for simple images, such methods do not work well for complex scenes since they fail to retrieve images that match the query only partially, that is, only certain regions of the image match. This inefficiency leads to the discarding of images that may be semantically very similar to the query image since they may contain the same objects. The problem becomes even more apparent when we consider scaled or translated versions of the similar objects. We propose WALRUS (wavelet-based retrieval of user-specified scenes), a novel similarity retrieval algorithm that is robust to scaling and translation of objects within an image. WALRUS employs a novel similarity model in which each image is first decomposed into its regions and the similarity measure between a pair of images is then defined to be the fraction of the area of the two images covered by matching regions from the images. In order to extract regions for an image, WALRUS considers sliding windows of varying sizes and then clusters them based on the proximity of their signatures. An efficient dynamic programming algorithm is used to compute wavelet-based signatures for the sliding windows. Experimental results on real-life data sets corroborate the effectiveness of WALRUS'S similarity model.