Lammers, T 2012, Komplexitätsmanagement für Distributionssysteme Konzeption eines strategischen Ansatzes zur Komplexitätsbewertung und Ableitung von Gestaltungsempfehlungen, BoD – Books on Demand.
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Logistische Netzwerke ziehen sich von der Beschaffung über die Produktion bis hin zur Distribution durch die gesamte Wertschöpfungskette und sind auf nahezu allen Ebenen von Komplexitätsauswirkungen betroffen.
Bardet, N 2012, 'Introduction' in Segal, G & Goodman, DSG (eds), Towards Recovery in Pacific Asia, EDP Sciences, London UK, pp. 3-4.
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Guertler, MR, Kortler, S, Helms, B, Berkovich, M, Leimeister, J, Krcmar, H, Shea, K, Lindemann, U & Maurer, M 2012, 'Von Anforderungslisten zum konzeptionellen Design' in Thomas, O & Nüttgens, M (eds), Dienstleistungsmodellierung 2012 Product-Service Systems und Produktivität, Springer-Verlag, pp. 96-113.
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Die Herausgeber Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Thomas ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Informationsmanagement und Wirtschaftsinformatik sowie Mitglied des Fachbereichs Wirtschaftswissenschaften an der Universität Osnabrück.
Kersten, W, Lammers, T & Skirde, H 2012, 'Complexity Management in Distribution Systems – Development of a Structured Framework for Driver-Based Complexity Analysis' in Blecker, T, Kersten, W & Ringle, C (eds), Pioneering Supply Chain Design A Comprehensive Insight Into Emerging Trends, Technologies and Applications, Eul, Lohmar, pp. 383-404.
Meyer, L & Poiger, U 2012, 'preface', pp. 287-292.
Tiemann, I, Sick, N & Leker, J 2012, 'Supplier involvement in customer new product development: new insights from the supplier’s perspective' in Perspectives on Supplier Innovation Theories, Concepts and Empirical Insights on Open Innovation and the Integration of Suppliers, World Scientific.
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Theories, Concepts and Empirical Insights on Open Innovation and the Integration of Suppliers Alexander Brem, Joe Tidd. John, S. ... Supplier involvement in customer new product development: New insights from the supplier's perspective, ...
Upcroft, B, Makarenko, A, Brooks, A, Moser, M, Alempijevic, A, Donikian, A, Sprinkle, J, Uther, W & Fitch, R 2012, 'Empirical Evaluation of an Autonomous Vehicle in an Urban Environment' in Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge, Springer London, pp. 273-301.
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Upcroft, B, Makarenko, A, Brooks, A, Moser, M, Alempijevic, A, Donikian, A, Sprinkle, J, Uther, W & Fitch, R 2012, 'Empirical Evaluation Of An Autonomous Vehicle In An Urban Environment' in Experience From The Darpa Urban Challenge, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Berlin, pp. 273-301.
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Operation in urban environments creates unique challenges for research in autonomous ground vehicles. Due to the presence of tall trees and buildings in close proximity to traversable areas, GPS outage is likely to be frequent and physical hazards pose r
Wei, DB & Jiang, ZY 2012, 'Tribology in Hot Rolling of Steel Strip' in Davim, JP (ed), Materials Forming, Machining and Tribology, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, pp. 121-149.
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Contact friction is of crucial importance for accurate simulation, optimum design and control of industrial rolling processes. It affects the shape, profile, dimensional accuracy and surface quality of hot rolled strips. This chapter focuses on the tribology of hot strip rolling of plain carbon steel and stainless steel, which is significantly affected by oxide scales. The fundamental of oxidation of pure iron, plain carbon steel and stainless steel, and the formation of oxide scales in hot rolling process have been discussed. The morphology of the oxide scales and their deformation behaviours that depend on oxide scale thickness, constitution and the rolling parameters have been disclosed. Surface roughness of oxide scales and the tribological effect of oxide scales in hot strip rolling have been studied. A multi oxide scale layers simulation has been established to study the deformation and fracture of oxide scales taking into account the effect of surface roughness.
Almotairy, S, Wei, DB & Jiang, ZY 2012, 'Study on Surface Roughness Transformation during Metal Rolling', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 418-420, pp. 897-902.
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Increasing the demand for cold rolled ultra thin strip as feedstock for miniaturized products has encouraged researchers to investigate the ways to increase the quality of such products, especially those related to strip surface roughness. Surface is known as quality factor in most of manufacturing processes. In this paper, the effect of the rolling parameters on the surface roughness transformation during metal rolling has been studied. The experimental results demonstrate that the surface roughness transformation during metal rolling is highly affected by the designation of the processing parameters such as finishing temperature, reduction, rolling passes and lubrication. The results have been discussed to verify the validity of the new findings.
Bilek, E, Busch, F, Hartung, J, Scheele, C, Thomas, C, Deuse, J & Kuhlenkötter, B 2012, 'Intelligente Erstellung und Nutzung von Maschinendokumentation', Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb, vol. 107, no. 9, pp. 652-656.
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Kurzfassung Mit zunehmender Komplexität von Maschinen und Anlagen steigen auch die Anforderungen und der Aufwand für die Erstellung technischer Dokumentationsunterlagen. Daher müssen Maschinen zukünftig so ausgerüstet werden, dass Mitarbeiter durch Bereitstellung zustandsabhängiger Informationen bei Instandhaltungs- und Dokumentationsaufgaben unterstützt werden. Dazu wird ein Konzept für eine Hardwarekomponente vorgestellt, welche Veränderungen in der Anlage automatisch erkennt, analysiert und aufbereitet.
Blamires, SJ, Lai, C-H, Cheng, R-C, Liao, C-P, Shen, P-S & Tso, I-M 2012, 'Body spot coloration of a nocturnal sit-and-wait predator visually lures prey', Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 69-74.
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BLAMIRES, SJ, WU, C-L, BLACKLEDGE, TA & TSO, I-M 2012, 'Environmentally induced post-spin property changes in spider silks: influences of web type, spidroin composition and ecology', Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 580-588.
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Blamires, SJ, Wu, C-L, Blackledge, TA & Tso, I-M 2012, 'Post-secretion processing influences spider silk performance', Journal of The Royal Society Interface, vol. 9, no. 75, pp. 2479-2487.
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Phenotypic variation facilitates adaptations to novel environments. Silk is an example of a highly variable biomaterial. The two-spidroin (MaSp) model suggests that spider major ampullate (MA) silk is composed of two proteins—MaSp1 predominately contains alanine and glycine and forms strength enhancing β-sheet crystals, while MaSp2 contains proline and forms elastic spirals. Nonetheless, mechanical properties can vary in spider silks without congruent amino acid compositional changes. We predicted that post-secretion processing causes variation in the mechanical performance of wild MA silk independent of protein composition or spinning speed across 10 species of spider. We used supercontraction to remove post-secretion effects and compared the mechanics of silk in this ‘ground state’ with wild native silks. Native silk mechanics varied less among species compared with ‘ground state’ silks. Variability in the mechanics of ‘ground state’ silks was associated with proline composition. However, variability in native silks did not. We attribute interspecific similarities in the mechanical properties of native silks, regardless of amino acid compositions, to glandular processes altering molecular alignment of the proteins prior to extrusion. Such post-secretion processing may enable MA silk to maintain functionality across environments, facilitating its function as a component of an insect-catching web.
Brunner, N, Fallböhmer, M, Sousanabady, RJ, Schallow, J & Deuse, J 2012, 'Plattformkonzept für die Montageplanung', Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb, vol. 107, no. 11, pp. 825-830.
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Kurzfassung Die starke Individualisierung der Produkte im globalen Wettbewerb erzeugt eine hohe Anzahl unterschiedlicher Varianten, die auf Grund sinkender Produktlebenszyklen zu einer hohen Planungshäufigkeit führen. Entscheidend für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit produzierender Unternehmen ist eine schnelle Anpassungsfähigkeit der Produktionssysteme an die Anforderungen des zu realisierenden Produktprogramms. Einen wesentlichen Beitrag hierzu kann die Montageplanung leisten. In diesem Artikel wird beschrieben, wie ein standardisiertes Montagesystem basierend auf einem Produktbaukasten durch die Analyse der Schnittstelle zwischen Produkt und Montageanlagen entwickelt werden kann.
Cagno, E & Trianni, A 2012, 'Analysis of the Most Effective Energy Efficiency Opportunities in Manufacturing Primary Metals, Plastics, and Textiles Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises', Journal of Energy Resources Technology, vol. 134, no. 2.
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Governments are pursuing a variety of measures to reach common and more efficient environmental and energetic policies: Nonetheless, the effort has shown to be not sufficient, since the objectives stated in the European Union (EU) Directive 2009/28/EC on energy efficiency seem quite distant to be reached. A greater attention has obviously been paid toward the industrial sector, which utilizes a major share of primary energy consumption: Till now several actions have been taken to achieve the energy performance of buildings, but very few are in operations. Nonetheless, in order to be most effective, governments should focus their attention not only on energy intensive large enterprises (LEs) but also on nonenergy intensive small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that represent the majority of the total number of industries, cover a consistent share of the energy consumption of a whole domestic industrial sector, and are usually less efficient than LEs. This paper aims to highlight the most effective energy savings opportunities (ESOs) for reducing energy consumption in industrial operations that have been successfully implemented in a large number of SMEs case studies investigated in North America and Italy, showing a correspondence (in terms of savings and costs) between the two databases. This paper analyzes the ESOs, characterized by best available technologies and practices (BAT/Ps), with a cross-analysis within three manufacturing sectors, i.e., primary metals, plastics, and textiles, and considering different subsizes among SMEs, in order to show commonalities and differences among the sample. The ESOs have been analyzed and ranked according to different criteria of importance, highlighting the most diffused, those having the highest energy savings, and those with the shortest pay-back time. The scope of the elaboration of these criteria is twofold: on one side, it allows to be closer to the entrepreneurial sensibility, guiding entrepreneurs in...
Cheng, S, Ji, JC & Zhou, J 2012, 'Second-order consensus of multiple non-identical agents with non-linear protocols', IET CONTROL THEORY AND APPLICATIONS, vol. 6, no. 9, pp. 1319-1324.
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The second-order consensus of multiple interacting non-identical agents with non-linear protocols is studied in this article. Firstly, it is shown that all agents with different non-linear dynamics can achieve consensus without a leader. Secondly, an explicit expression of the consensus value is analytically developed for the group of all agents. Thirdly, for the consensus of multiple agents with a leader, it is proved that each agent can track the position and velocity of the leader, which are different from those of the follower agents. Finally, numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical results. © 2012 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.
Chotiprayanakul, P, Liu, DK & Dissanayake, G 2012, 'Human-robot-environment interaction interface for robotic grit-blasting of complex steel bridges', AUTOMATION IN CONSTRUCTION, vol. 27, pp. 11-23.
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This paper presents a human-robot-environment interaction (HREI) interface using haptic feedback for a grit-blasting robot operating in close proximity to a complex steel bridge structure. The productivity requirements dictate the need for efficient algorithms for mapping, exploration, and collision-free motion planning. While a large portion of the grit-blasting operation can be automated, a tele-operation is essential to deal with some difficult to access sections such as edges, complex corners, and surfaces which can only be approached through hole. A 3-dimensional virtual force field (3D-VF 2) method is developed for capturing the relationship between the robot and its environment. A novel haptic force generation method and a workspace mapping algorithm allow intuitive interaction between the operator and the robot through haptic feedback. The strategies presented are verified in extensive simulations and experiments conducted on a steel bridge with a prototype grit-blasting robot. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.
Ding, F, Han, X, Luo, Z & Zhang, N 2012, 'Modelling and characteristic analysis of tri-axle trucks with hydraulically interconnected suspensions', Vehicle System Dynamics, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 1877-1904.
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In this paper, a new hydraulically interconnected suspension (HIS) system is proposed for the implementation of a resistance control for the pitch and bounce modes of tri-Axle heavy trucks. A lumped-mass half-truck model is established using the free-body diagram method. The equations of motion of a mechanical and hydraulic coupled system are developed by incorporating the hydraulic strut forces into the mechanical subsystem as externally applied forces. The transfer matrix method (TMM) is used to evaluate the impedance matrix of the hydraulic subsystem consisting of models of fluid pipes, damper valves, accumulators, and three-way junctions. The TMM is further applied to find the quantitative relationships between the hydraulic strut forces and boundary flow of the mechanical-fluid interactive subsystem. The modal analysis method is employed to perform the vibration analysis between the trucks with the conventional suspension and the proposed HIS. Comparison analysis focuses on free vibration with identified eigenvalues and eigenvectors, isolation vibration capacity, and force vibration in terms of the power spectrum density responses. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed HIS system in reducing the pitch motion of sprung mass and simultaneously maintaining the ride comfort. The pitch stiffness is increased while the bounce stiffness is slightly softened. The peak values of sprung mass and wheel hop motions are greatly reduced, and the vibration decay rate of sprung mass is also significantly increased. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Droste, M, Hasselmann, VR & Deuse, J 2012, 'Optimization of in-plant milkrun systems: Development of a parameter-based model to optimize the provision of materials', Productivity Management, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 25-28.
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This paper introduces a parameter-based model which supports the planning and adjustment of an efficient and ergonomic material provision system based on in-plant milkrun. The holistic approach establishes a new methodology in planning and dimensioning of production logistics which integrates elements from consignment, storage, time management and ergonomics into a modeling tool that fulfills the requirements of today's lean production systems. © GITO Verlag.
Eager, DM & Little, H 2012, 'A new Standard for children's space nets', Journal Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia, vol. April/May, pp. 20-22.
Gainder, S, Raveendran, A, Bagga, R, Saha, SC, Dhaliwal, LK & Srinivasan, R 2012, 'Hydatidiform Mole with Coexistant Viable Fetus', Journal of Gynecologic Surgery, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 150-152.
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Gao, X, Wei, D & Jiang, Z 2012, 'Analysis of Temperature Field in Liquid-Solid Bimetal Casting of Laminated Metal Composite', Advanced Science Letters, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 48-52.
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In order to improve the low toughness and poor crack resistance of high chromium cast iron (HCCI), the laminated metal composite (LMC) consisting of HCCI and carbon steel has received increasingly attentions in modern industries. Considering that the controllable temperature field at interface of LMC is a key issue in liquid-solid bimetal casting process, a three layered finite element method (FEM) model has been proposed. The influence of parameters including pouring temperature - T pour, preheating temperature - T pre and effective volume ratio - VR e on temperature field are discussed. Simulation results show that the temperature at the interface between two dissimilar metals increases with increasing the value of T pour, T pre or VR e. Through the adjustment of processing parameters, the contact surface of solid metal can be heated up to mushy state, and then form a thin transient mushy layer. The prefect metallurgical bonding can be achieved by adopting the optimized parameters in bimetal casting process. © 2012 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.
Hasan, MN, Saha, S & Saha, SC 2012, 'Effects of corrugation frequency and aspect ratio on natural convection within an enclosure having sinusoidal corrugation over a heated top surface', International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 368-377.
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Hasan, MN, Saha, SC & Gu, YT 2012, 'Unsteady natural convection within a differentially heated enclosure of sinusoidal corrugated side walls', International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, vol. 55, no. 21-22, pp. 5696-5708.
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Hashemi, SH, Khorshidi, K, Es’haghi, M, Fadaee, M & Karimi, M 2012, 'On the effects of coupling between in-plane and out-of-plane vibrating modes of smart functionally graded circular/annular plates', Applied Mathematical Modelling, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 1132-1147.
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In recent years many articles concerned with the mechanics of functionally graded plates have been published. The variation in material properties through the thickness of the plate introduces a coupling between in-plane and transverse displacements, the coupling is important in the vibration of functionally graded plates (FGPs), but none have produced an exact closed-form solution for the in-plane as well as transverse vibrations of smart circular/annular FGPs. Therefore, this paper develops an exact closed-form solution for the free vibration of piezoelectric coupled thick circular/annular FGPs subjected to different boundary conditions on the basis of the Mindlin’s first-order shear deformation theory. Through the comparison of present results with those available, the accuracy of the present method was verified. The effects of coupling between in-plane and transverse displacements on the frequency parameters are proved to be significant. It is concluded that the developed model can describe vibrational behavior of smart FGM plates more realistic. Due to the inherent features of the present solution, all findings will be a useful benchmark for evaluating other analytical and numerical methods developed by researchers in the future. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.
Herath, DC, Kodagoda, S & Dissanayake, G 2012, 'A two-tier map representation for compact-stereo-vision-based SLAM', ROBOTICA, vol. 30, pp. 245-256.
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Vision sensors are increasingly being used in the implementation of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Even though the mathematical framework of SLAM is well understood, considerable issues remain to be resolved when a particular sensing modal
Hosseini Hashemi, S, Atashipour, R, Karimi, M & Es haghi, M 2012, 'Free vibration analysis of elliptical functionally graded plates', International Journal of Maritime Technology, vol. 3, pp. 43-60.
Hosseini-Hashemi, S, Karimi, M & Rokni, H 2012, 'Natural frequencies of rectangular Mindlin plates coupled with stationary fluid', Applied Mathematical Modelling, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 764-778.
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The present study is concerned with the free vibration analysis of a horizontal rectangular plate, either immersed in fluid or floating on its free surface. The governing equations for a moderately thick rectangular plate are analytically derived based on the Mindlin plate theory (MPT), whereas the velocity potential function and Bernoulli’s equation are employed to obtain the fluid pressure applied on the free surface of the plate. The simplifying hypothesis that the wet and dry mode shapes are the same, is not assumed in this paper. In this work, an exact-closed form characteristics equation is used for the plate subjected to a combination of six different boundary conditions. Two opposite sides are simply supported and any of the other two edges can be free, simply supported or clamped. To demonstrate the accuracy of the present analytical solution, a comparison is made with the published experimental and numerical results in the literature, showing an excellent agreement. Then, natural frequencies of the plate are presented in tabular and graphical forms for different fluid levels, fluid densities, aspect ratios, thickness to length ratios and boundary conditions. Finally, some 3-D mode shapes of the rectangular Mindlin plates in contact with fluid are illustrated. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.
Ji, JC, Li, XY, Luo, Z & Zhang, N 2012, 'TWO-TO-ONE RESONANT HOPF BIFURCATIONS IN A QUADRATICALLY NONLINEAR OSCILLATOR INVOLVING TIME DELAY', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BIFURCATION AND CHAOS, vol. 22, no. 3.
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The trivial equilibrium of a weakly nonlinear oscillator having quadratic nonlinearities under a delayed feedback control can change its stability via a single Hopf bifurcation as the time delay increases. Double Hopf bifurcation occurs when the characteristic equation has two pairs of purely imaginary solutions. An interaction of resonant HopfHopf bifurcations may be possible when the two critical time delays corresponding to the two Hopf bifurcations have the same value. With the aid of normal form theory and centre manifold theorem as well as the method of multiple scales, the present paper studies the dynamics of a quadratically nonlinear oscillator involving time delay in the vicinity of the point of two-to-one resonances of HopfHopf bifurcations. The ratio of the frequencies of two Hopf bifurcations is numerically found to be nearly equal to two. The two resonant Hopf bifurcations can generate two respective periodic solutions. Consequently, the centre manifold corresponding to these two solutions is determined by a set of four first-order differential equations under two-to-one internal resonances. It is shown that the amplitudes of the two bifurcating periodic solutions admit the trivial solution and two-mode solutions for the averaged equations on the centre manifolds. Correspondingly, the cumulative behavior of the original nonlinear oscillator exhibits the initial equilibrium and a quasi-periodic motion having two frequencies. Illustrative examples are given to show the unstable zero solution, stable zero solution, and stable two-mode solution of the nonlinear oscillator under the two-to-one resonant HopfHopf interactions. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.
Jiang, ZY, Cheng, XW, Du, XZ, Wei, DB & He, XF 2012, 'Modelling of Strip Shape and Profile during Cold Rolling of Ultra Thin Strip', Materials Science Forum, vol. 706-709, pp. 1421-1426.
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In this paper, finite element models of the strip shape during cold rolling of ultra thin strip in both symmetrical and asymmetrical rolling cases have been successfully developed, and the strip shape such as the thickness distribution along the strip width has been obtained. The strip shape and edge drop are discussed under both symmetrical and asymmetrical rolling conditions. Simulation results show that the asymmetrical rolling can reduce strip edge drop dramatically. The work roll edge curve also affects strip shape significantly. The developed finite element model has been verified with the experimental values.
Kang, Z, Wang, X & Luo, Z 2012, 'Topology Optimization for Static Shape Control of Piezoelectric Plates With Penalization on Intermediate Actuation Voltage', Journal of Mechanical Design, vol. 134, no. 5.
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This paper investigates the simultaneous optimal distribution of structural material and trilevel actuation voltage for static shape control applications. In this optimal design problem, the shape error between the actuated and the desired shapes is chosen as the objective function. The energy and the material volume are taken as constraints in the optimization problem formulation. The discrete-valued optimization problem is relaxed using element-wise continuous design variables representing the relative material density and the actuation voltage level. Artificial interpolation models which relate the mechanical/piezoelectrical properties of the material and the actuation voltage to the design variables are employed. Therein, power-law penalization functions are used to suppress intermediate values of both the material densities and the control voltage. The sensitivity analysis procedure is discussed, and the design variables are optimized by using the method of moving asymptotes (MMA). Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method. It is shown that the proposed method is able to yield distinct material distribution and to suppress intermediate actuation voltage values as required.
Keepanasseril, A, Nanjappa, B, Prasad, GV, Saha, SC & Mandal, AK 2012, 'Vesical calculus: An unusual cause of labour dystocia', Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 596-597.
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Khushaba, RN, Greenacre, L, Kodagoda, S, Louviere, J, Burke, S & Dissanayake, G 2012, 'Choice modeling and the brain: A study on the Electroencephalogram (EEG) of preferences', EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS, vol. 39, no. 16, pp. 12378-12388.
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Choice conjures the idea of a directed selection of a desirable action or object, motivated by internal likes and dislikes, or other such preferences. However, such internal processes are simply the domain of our human physiology. Understanding the physiological processes of decision making across a variety of contexts is a central aim in decision science as it has a great potential to further progress decision research. As a pilot study in this field, this paper explores the nature of decision making by examining the associated brain activity, Electroencephalogram (EEG), of people to understand how the brain responds while undertaking choices designed to elicit the subjects' preferences. To facilitate such a study, the Tobii-Studio eye tracker system was utilized to capture the participants' choice based preferences when they were observing seventy-two sets of objects. These choice sets were composed of three images offering potential personal computer backgrounds. Choice based preferences were identified by having the respondent click on their preferred one. In addition, a brain computer interface (BCI) represented by the commercial Emotiv EPOC wireless EEG headset with 14 channels was utilized to capture the associated brain activity during the period of the experiments. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was utilized to preprocess the EEG data before analyzing it with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to observe the changes in the main principal frequency bands, delta (0.5-4 Hz), theta (4-7 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz), and gamma (30-40 Hz). A mutual information (MI) measure was then used to study left-to-right hemisphere differences as well as front-to-back difference. Eighteen participants were recruited to perform the experiments with the average results showing clear and significant change in the spectral activity in the frontal (F3 and F4), parietal (P7 and P8) and occipital (O1 and O2) areas while the participants were indicating their...
Khushaba, RN, Kodagoda, S, Takruri, M & Dissanayake, G 2012, 'Toward improved control of prosthetic fingers using surface electromyogram (EMG) signals', EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS, vol. 39, no. 12, pp. 10731-10738.
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A fundamental component of many modern prostheses is the myoelectric control system, which uses the electromyogram (EMG) signals from an individual's muscles to control the prosthesis movements. Despite the extensive research focus on the myoelectric con
Kirchner, N & Alempijevic, A 2012, 'A Robot Centric Perspective on the HRI Paradigm', Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 135-157.
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The industrial revolution undoubtedly defined the role of machines in our society, and it directly shaped the paradigm for human machine interaction - a paradigm which was inherited by the field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) as the machines became robots. This paper argues that, for a foreseeable set of interactions, reshaping this paradigm would result in more effective and more often successful interactions. This paper presents our Robot Centric paradigm for HRI. Evidence in the form of summaries of relevant literature and our past efforts in developing social-robotics enabling technology is presented to support our paradigm. A definition and a set of recommendations for designing the key enabling component, sociocontextual cues, of our paradigm are presented. Finally, empirical evidence generated through a number of experiments and field studies (N = 456 and N = 320) demonstrates our paradigm is both feasibly incorporated into HRI and moreover, yields significant contributions to the successfulness of a set of HRIs.
Lammers, T, Kersten, W & Grussenmeyer, R 2012, 'Current Approaches in Complexity Management – Practical and Theoretical Implications for Distribution Networks', Research in Logistics & Production, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 55-68.
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In the up to date competition, the optimal degree of complexity severely influences the success of distribution networks and therefore the success of the entire company. Nevertheless, it seems that up to now, limited research has been done on distribution network complexity. Therefore, this paper deals with current theoretical and practical approaches of complexity management in distribution networks. Methodologically, first an in-depth literature review is conducted, highlighting the existing complexity handling tools in different areas. Since this analysis shows that no approach specifically copes with the requirements of distribution networks, exploratory expert interviews are carried out. Comparing the findings shows that neither literature, nor industrial practice investigate or institutionalize complexity management in distribution networks. Thus, this paper provides opportunities to close this gap. On the one hand, a framework which can be used to elaborate suitable complexity management strategies for distribution networks is presented. On the other hand, the relevant areas of distribution networks are narrowed down in order to create a basis for developing a comprehensive method for complexity management in distribution systems.
Li, H, Jiang, Z & Wei, D 2012, 'Crystal Plasticity Finite Modelling of 3D Surface Asperity Flattening in Uniaxial Planar Compression', Tribology Letters, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 101-112.
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Rate-dependent crystal plasticity constitutive model has been employed into finite element software ABAQUS to simulate surface asperity flattening in uniaxial planar compression. Measured textures and surface roughness are introduced into the 3D surface roughness model. The calculated results show a good agreement with the experimental results. With an increase of reduction, the surface asperity flattening tends to increase, and Goss texture {011} aOE (c) 100 > and brass component {110} aOE (c) 112 > become stronger, whilst the cubic texture {001} aOE (c) 100 > becomes weaker. If the reduction reaches 40%, Schmid in-grain shear band appears and the strain localisation starts. The evolution of surface feature (roughness) shows the obvious sensitivity on the orientation {111} of near-top surface.
Lu, HN, Wei, DB & Jiang, ZY 2012, 'Application of Centroidal Voronoi Diagram in Numerical Model of Microforming Process', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 476-478, pp. 508-512.
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Grain size, shape and orientation play an important role on the deformability of micro workpiece as the geometrical dimensions approach to a characteristic scale in micro-forming process. This paper addresses the three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model with weighed centroidal voronoi diagram (WCVD). Steady-state grains are generated when the voronoi generating points approach the grain centroid utilising a simplex integration algorithm. As a result of the centroidal process, the topological features of grains advance the uniform and steady state gradually, which may cause a decrease of interfacial energy. The grain size distribution is compared between the 3D domain and random cross-sectional plan. The effects of centroidal process on the distributions of grain size and number of grain corners, facet and edge are analysed.
Luo, Q & Tong, L 2012, 'Analytic formulas of energy release rates for delamination using a global–local method', International Journal of Solids and Structures, vol. 49, no. 23-24, pp. 3335-3344.
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Luo, Q & Tong, L 2012, 'Laminated plate formulation for photostrictive actuators and sensors', Journal of Composite Materials, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 557-573.
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This paper presents a model for a laminated plate with surface mounted photostrictive materials. The photo-induced electrical, thermal, and mechanical fields in lanthanum zirconate titanate (PLZT) ceramics with 0-3 polarization are considered as the coupled multi-physics fields in PLZT ceramics. The formulation is presented for general multi-physics fields in PLZT ceramics. The actuating and sensing equations are formulated for a 0-3 polarized PLZT laminated plate and they are also applicable to other photostrictive materials such as polymers and semiconductors. The actuated behaviors of a 0-3 polarized PLZT laminated plate subjected to light illumination are investigated and the numerical results calculated using the present formulations are compared with those available in the literatures.
Luo, Q & Tong, L 2012, 'Multifunctional behaviors of an indium tin oxide/PbLa(ZrTi)O3/indium tin oxide wafer illuminated by ultraviolet light', Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 765-774.
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This article presents multifunctional behaviors of a Pb0.97La0.03(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (3/52/48) wafer subjected to ultraviolet light illumination with a focus on its photoresistive effects. When this PLZT wafer that is spurted with indium tin oxide electrodes and then polarized through thickness is illuminated by ultraviolet light, its resistance increases rather than decreases as observed in conventional photoresistors made of semiconductors. Giant negative voltage and resistance are detected when light is switched off. The bending deformation caused by the photovoltaic and converse piezoelectric effects is examined and the photoinduced electrical field strength is further investigated. The electrical fields in light on–off states are studied. Hysteresis and memristive features of the indium tin oxide/PbLa(ZrTi)O3/indium tin oxide (ITO/PLZT/ITO) sample under repetitive light on–off operations are investigated.
Luo, Z, Zhang, N, Gao, W & Ma, H 2012, 'Structural shape and topology optimization using a meshless Galerkin level set method', International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, vol. 90, no. 3, pp. 369-389.
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SUMMARYThis paper aims to propose a meshless Galerkin level set method for shape and topology optimization of continuum structures. To take advantage of the implicit free boundary representation scheme, the design boundary is represented as the zero level set of a scalar level set function, to flexibly handle complex shape fidelity and topology changes by maintaining concise and smooth interface. Compactly supported radial basis functions (CSRBFs) are used to parameterize the level set function and construct the shape functions for meshfree approximations based on a set of unstructured field nodes. The meshless Galerkin method with global weak form is used to implement the discretization of the state equations. This provides a pathway to unify the two different numerical stages in most conventional level set methods: (1) the propagation of discrete level set function on a set of Eulerian grid and (2) the approximation of discrete equations on a set of Lagrangian mesh. The original more difficult shape and topology optimization based on the level set equation is transformed into a relatively easier size optimization, to which many efficient optimization algorithms can be applied. The proposed level set method can describe the moving boundaries without remeshing for discontinuities. The motion of the free boundary is just a question of advancing the discrete level set function in time by solving the size optimization. Several benchmark examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The numerical results show that the proposed method can simplify numerical process and avoid numerical difficulties involved in most conventional level set methods. It is straightforward to apply the proposed method to more advanced shape and topology optimization problems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Luo, Z, Zhang, N, Ji, J & Wu, T 2012, 'A meshfree level-set method for topological shape optimization of compliant multiphysics actuators', COMPUTER METHODS IN APPLIED MECHANICS AND ENGINEERING, vol. 223, pp. 133-152.
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This paper proposes a topology optimization method for compliant multiphysics actuators of geometrically nonlinear structures using meshfree Galerkin weak-forms and level set methods. The design boundary is implicitly represented as the zero level set of a higher-dimensional level set function, leading to a level set model capable of handling complex shape and topological changes with flexibilities. A family of compactly supported radial basis functions (CSRBFs) is firstly used to interpolate the level set function of Lipschitz continuity, and then augmented to construct the shape function for meshless approximation by satisfying basic requirements, in particular the predetermined consistency and the Kronecker delta function property. A meshless Galerkin method (MGM) with global weak-forms is established to implement the discretization of the state equations. The design of actuators is transformed into an easier size optimization from a more difficult shape and topology optimization. The design boundary evolution is just a question of advancing the discrete level set function in time by updating the design variables of the size optimization. Compared to most conventional level set methods, the proposed meshless level set method is able to implement the free moving boundary discontinuities without remeshing, and unify two different numerical procedures in propagating the discrete level set function (e.g. Eulerian grid) and approximating the state equation (e.g. Lagrangian mesh), respectively. This method can also avoid numerical difficulties in solving a series of complicate Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equations (PDEs) with explicit time schemes. Two typical numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.
Molla, M, Saha, SC & Khan, MAI 2012, 'MHD natural convection flow from an isothermal horizontal circular cylinder under consideration of temperature dependent viscosity', Engineering Computations, vol. 29, no. 8, pp. 875-887.
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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss, with numerical simulations, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) natural convection laminar flow from an isothermal horizontal circular cylinder immersed in a fluid with viscosity proportional to a linear function of temperature.Design/methodology/approachThe governing boundary layer equations are transformed into a non‐dimensional form and the resulting nonlinear system of partial differential equations are reduced to convenient form, which are solved numerically by two very efficient methods: implicit finite difference method together with Keller box scheme; and direct numerical scheme.FindingsNumerical results are presented by velocity and temperature distributions of the fluid as well as heat transfer characteristics, namely the shearing stress and the local heat transfer rate in terms of the local skin‐friction coefficient and the local Nusselt number for a wide range of MHD parameter, viscosity‐variation parameter and viscous dissipation parameter.Originality/valueMHD flow in this geometry with temperature dependent viscosity is absent in the literature. IN this paper, the results obtained from the numerical simulations have been verified by two methodologies.
Molla, MM, Saha, SC & Hossain, MA 2012, 'The Effect of Temperature Dependent Viscosity on MHD Natural Convection Flow from an Isothermal Sphere', Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics, vol. 5, no. 02, pp. 25-31.
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Rothberg, SJ, Halkon, BJ, Tirabassi, M & Pusey, C 2012, 'Radial vibration measurements directly from rotors using laser vibrometry: The effects of surface roughness, instrument misalignments and pseudo-vibration', Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, vol. 33, pp. 109-131.
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Laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV) offers an attractive solution when radial vibration measurement directly from a rotor surface is required. Research to date has demonstrated application on polished-circular rotors and rotors coated with retro-reflective tape. In the latter case, however, a significant cross-sensitivity to the orthogonal radial vibration component occurs and post-processing is required to resolve individual radial vibration components. Until now, the fundamentally different behaviour observed between these cases has stood as an inconsistency in the published literature, symptomatic of the need to understand the effect of surface roughness. This paper offers the first consistent mathematical description of the polished-circular and rough rotor behaviours, combined with an experimental investigation of the relationship between surface roughness and cross-sensitivity. Rotors with surface roughness up to 10 nm satisfy the polished-circular rotor definition if vibration displacement is below 100% beam diameter, for a 90 μm beam, and below 40% beam diameter, for a 520 μm beam. On rotors with roughness between 10 nm and 50 nm, the polished-circular rotor definition is satisfied for vibration displacements up to 25% beam diameter, for a 90 μm beam, and up to 10% beam diameter, for a 520 μm beam. As roughness increases, cross-sensitivity increases but only rotors coated in retro-reflective tape satisfied the rough rotor definition fully. Consequently, when polished-circular surfaces are not available, rotor surfaces must be treated with retro-reflective tape and measurements post-processed to resolve individual vibration components. Through simulations, the value of the resolution and correction algorithms that form the post-processor has been demonstrated quantitatively. Simulations incorporating representative instrument misalignments and measurement noise have enabled quantification of likely error levels in radial vibration measurements. On a p...
Saha, SC 2012, 'Effect of MHD and heat generation on natural convection flow in an open square cavity under microgravity condition', Engineering Computations, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 5-20.
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Saha, SC & Khan, MMK 2012, 'An improved boundary layer scaling with ramp heating on a sloping plate', International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, vol. 55, no. 9-10, pp. 2268-2284.
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Saha, SC, Brown, RJ & Gu, YT 2012, 'Prandtl number scaling of the unsteady natural convection boundary layer adjacent to a vertical flat plate for Pr>1 subject to ramp surface heat flux', International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, vol. 55, no. 23-24, pp. 7046-7055.
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Saha, SC, Brown, RJ & Gu, YT 2012, 'Scaling for the Prandtl number of the natural convection boundary layer of an inclined flat plate under uniform surface heat flux', International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, vol. 55, no. 9-10, pp. 2394-2401.
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Saha, SC, Gu, Y, Molla, MM, Siddiqa, S & Hossain, MA 2012, 'Natural convection from a vertical plate embedded in a stratified medium with uniform heat source', DESALINATION AND WATER TREATMENT, vol. 44, no. 1-3, pp. 7-14.
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Saleem, M, Hossain, MA & Saha, SC 2012, 'Mixed Convection Flow of Micropolar Fluid in an Open Ended Arc-Shape Cavity', Journal of Fluids Engineering, vol. 134, no. 9.
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Numerical simulations for mixed convection flow of micropolar fluid in an open ended arc-shape cavity have been carried out in this study. Computation is performed using the alternate direct implicit (ADI) method together with the successive over relaxation (SOR) technique for the solution of governing partial differential equations. The flow phenomenon is examined for a range of values of Rayleigh number 102 ≤ Ra ≤ 106, Prandtl number 7 ≤ Pr ≤ 50, and Reynolds number 10 ≤ Re ≤ 100. The study is mainly focused on how the micropolar fluid parameters affect the fluid properties in the flow domain. It was found that despite the reduction of flow in the core region, the heat transfer rate increases, whereas the skin friction and microrotation decrease with the increase in the vortex viscosity parameter Δ.
Schneider, S, Fallböhmer, M, Schallow, J, Hartung, J & Deuse, J 2012, 'Agile Prozessplanung im Produktentstehungsprozess', ZWF Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 158-162.
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Increased product and process complexity as well as raised time and cost pressure within the product development process create the demand for continuous adjustment and new methods in the field of process planning. In answer of such permanent demand for adjustment in other fields, the concept of Agile Software Development has been evolved in the field of software development. Therefore this paper evaluates and describes the adaption of this approch for process planning leading to the concept of Agile Process Planning. © Carl Hanser Verlag.
Seiler, KM, Singh, SPN, Sukkarieh, S & Durrant-Whyte, H 2012, 'Using Lie group symmetries for fast corrective motion planning', The International Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 151-166.
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In this paper we develop an algorithmic framework allowing for fast and elegant path correction exploiting Lie group symmetries and operating without the need for explicit control strategies such as cross-track regulation. These systems occur across the gamut of robotics, notably in locomotion, be it ground, underwater, airborne, or surgical domains. Instead of reintegrating an entire trajectory, the method selectively alters small key segments of an initial trajectory in a consistent way so as to transform it via symmetry operations. The algorithm is formulated for arbitrary Lie groups and applied in the context of the special Euclidean group and subgroups thereof. A sampling-based motion planner is developed that uses this method to create paths for underactuated systems with differential constraints. It is also shown how the path correction method acts as a controller within a feedback control loop for real-time path correction. These approaches are demonstrated for ground vehicles in the plane and for flexible bevel tip needle steering in space. The results show that using symmetry-based path correction for motion planning provides a prudent and simple, yet computationally tractable, integrated planning and control strategy.
Siddiqa, S, Hossain, MA & Saha, SC 2012, 'Double Diffusive Magneto-Convection Fluid Flow in a Strong Cross Magnetic Field With Uniform Surface Heat and Mass Flux', JOURNAL OF HEAT TRANSFER-TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASME, vol. 134, no. 11.
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Solà, J, Vidal-Calleja, T, Civera, J & Montiel, JMM 2012, 'Impact of Landmark Parametrization on Monocular EKF-SLAM with Points and Lines', International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 97, no. 3, pp. 339-368.
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This paper explores the impact that landmark parametrization has in the performance of monocular, EKFbased, 6-DOF simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in the context of undelayed landmark initialization. Undelayed initialization in monocular SLAM challenges EKF because of the combination of non-linearity with the large uncertainty associated with the unmeasured degrees of freedom. In the EKF context, the goal of a good landmark parametrization is to improve the model's linearity as much as possible, improving the filter consistency, achieving robuster and more accurate localization and mapping. This work compares the performances of eight different landmark parametrizations: three for points and five for straight lines. It highlights and justifies the keys for satisfactory operation: the use of parameters behaving proportionally to inverse-distance, and landmark anchoring. A unified EKF-SLAM framework is formulated as a benchmark for points and lines that is independent of the parametrization used. The paper also defines a generalized linearity index suited for the EKF, and uses it to compute and compare the degrees of linearity of each parametrization. Finally, all eight parametrizations are benchmarked employing analytical tools (the linearity index) and statistical tools (based on Monte Carlo error and consistency analyses), with simulations and real imagery data, using the standard and the robocentric EKF-SLAM formulations. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Trianni, A & Cagno, E 2012, 'Dealing with barriers to energy efficiency and SMEs: Some empirical evidences', Energy, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 494-504.
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Velani, N, Wilson, O, Halkon, BJ & Harland, AR 2012, 'Measuring the risk of sustaining injury in sport a novel approach to aid the re-design of personal protective equipment', Applied Ergonomics, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 883-890.
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Despite the possibilities offered by new approaches in design and advances in materials and manufacturing methods, few items of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) used in sport have seen significant change for many decades. A major reason for this is the tradition and conservative attitudes associated with many sports, although the absence of appropriate tools and techniques to assist the design and development process has also played a large part. The aim of this study was to develop the first stage of a method of identifying specific regions of the human anatomy that are at the greatest risk of sustaining injury during participation in sports in which the player is subjected to multiple ballistic impacts. It is proposed that the findings could be used to confirm future designs of sports PPE. Previous studies have identified the amount and the location of the protection provided by current commercially available products but, until now, no evidence has been reported to determine what protection is required based on an understanding of the likely impact and the anatomy of the athlete.Using the leg and cricket as examples of an anatomical feature and a sporting application respectively, the severity and probability of injury due to ball impacts typically observed in play are quantified, with respect to their location on the leg, to estimate the level of risk in that region. Results show that the level of risk is greatest in the shin regions of the front leg, suggesting that this region should be offered the greatest degree of protection, as is generally the case in commercially available leg guard designs. Conversely, however, the inner region of the mid shin of the back leg is at the lowest risk, suggesting that protection in this region might be substantially reduced, a feature which is certainly not included in current product; such a reduction may significantly enhance the ergonomic performance of the leg guard design.The findings of this preliminar...
Wang, GC, Zheng, W, Wu, T, Jiang, H, Zhao, GQ, Wei, DB & Jiang, ZY 2012, 'A multi-region model for numerical simulation of micro bulk forming', Journal of Materials Processing Technology, vol. 212, no. 3, pp. 678-684.
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Due to the small billet size in micro forming, each grain, especially that on the surface layer, has direct influence on the deformation behavior of the billet. The multi-region model was proposed for simulating the micro bulk forming process in this paper. The object in the model is divided into three different regions: the inner polycrystal region, the grain interior of the surface region and the grain-boundary layer in the surface region. Each surface grain has different orientation. Depending on the Hall-Petch formula, which is applicable to describe polycrystal materials, and introducing scale parameters, the constitutive equation of each region is deduced based on the unidirectional compression tests data of the copper specimen. Using the multi-region model, the coining process with micro feature is simulated to investigate the size effect in micro forming. Moreover, an experiment of coining process with micro-feature is performed to verify the correctness of the multi-region simulation model. The experimental results show a good agreement with those in numerical simulation. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Wang, Y & Luo, Z 2012, 'Design of Compliant Mechanisms of Distributed Compliance Using a Level-Set Based Topology Optimization Method', Applied Mechanics and Materials, vol. 110-116, pp. 2319-2323.
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This paper presents a level set-based structural shape and topology optimization for the design of compliant mechanisms. The design boundary of the compliant mechanism is implicitly represented as the zero level-set of a higher-dimensional level set surface. A quadratic energy functional is introduced to augment the objective function in order to control the structural geometric size of the resulting mechanism. The optimization is thus changed to a numerical process that describes the design as a sequence of motions by updating the implicit boundaries until the optimized structure is achieved under specified constraints. A semi-implicit scheme with an additive operator splitting (AOS) algorithm is used to solve the Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equation (PDE) in the level set method. In doing so, it is expected that numerical difficulties in most conventional level set methods can be eliminated. The final mechanism is characterized with strip-like members able to generate distributed compliance, and so that to resolve the hinge problem long sought-after in the design of compliant mechanisms. Typical numerical case is used to evidence the effectiveness of this method in the design of monolithic compliant mechanisms.
Wei, DB, Jiang, ZY, Huang, JX, Zhang, AW, Shi, X & Jiao, SH 2012, 'Study on Surface Roughness and Friction during Hot Rolling of Stainless Steel 301', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 500, pp. 403-409.
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A well-defined boundary condition is important for generating an accurate model for simulating metal forming process. It is important to characterize the features of the oxide scale in hot rolling of stainless steel strip. Short time oxidation tests in humid air with water vapor content of 7.0 vol. % were carried out using Gleeble 3500 thermo-mechanical simulator. The deformation, surface morphology of oxide scale, and the friction in hot rolling were studied by conducting hot rolling tests. The results show that the surface roughness decreases with an increase of reduction. The effect of oxide scale on friction and surface roughness transfer in hot rolling depends on oxide scale generated during reheating. When reheating time is increased, the average thickness of oxide scale increases and a relatively rough surface was obtained after hot rolling. Thick oxide scale of 301 steel shows the high lubricative effect.
Yu, X, Jiang, Z, Wei, D, Wang, X & Yang, Q 2012, 'Modelling of Temperature-Dependent Growth Kinetics of Oxide Scale on Hot-Rolled Steel Strip', Advanced Science Letters, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 219-223.
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A numerical simulation, developed to predict the temperature distribution and calculate the growth rate of the oxide scale formed on the microalloyed low carbon steel during the laminar cooling of hot strip rolling, was conducted by two-dimensional finite element method. The model takes into account the different thermophysical properties of the multilayered oxide scales and the film boundary conditions for the water jet impingement zone and the stable film boiling zone through the run-out table. Complied with the parabolic growth of the oxide layers and the distribution of the oxide phase, it is found that the present of wustite (FeO) results in a significant increase of the oxidation rate. However, the parabolic rate constant for the simultaneous growth of the two outer layers of magnetite (Fe 3O 4) and hematite (Fe 2O 3) reduce rapidly compared to that of three-layer oxide scale. The growth rates and temperature gradients predicted by the model can be employed to elucidate the formation mechanism of oxide scales, as well as to analyse oxide scale failure. © 2012 American Scientific Publishers. All rights reserved.
Yu, XL, Jiang, ZY, Wang, XD, Wei, DB & Yang, Q 2012, 'Effect of Coiling Temperature on Oxide Scale of Hot-Rolled Strip', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 415-417, pp. 853-858.
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The influence of the coiling temperature, ranging from 550 to 570°C, on the morphology and the phase composition of the oxide scale formed on the microalloyed low carbon steel for automobiles after hot strip rolling was investigated. Physicochemical characteristics of the oxide scales were examined and their formation mechanism was discussed. Thickness of the oxide scale is in the range of 8-11µm and decreases with a decrease of coiling temperature. The microstructure and phase composition, XRD analysis shows a large amount of magnetite (Fe3O4) and some sparse hematite (Fe2O3) exist on the surface of hot rolled strip when the coiling temperature reduces from 570 to 550°C. The coiling temperature substantially affects the internal microstructure and magnetite phase.
Yu, XL, Jiang, ZY, Yang, DJ, Wei, DB & Yang, Q 2012, 'Precipitation Behavior of Magnetite in Oxide Scale during Cooling of Microalloyed Low Carbon Steel', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 572, pp. 249-254.
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Precipitation behavior of magnetite particles in the thermal grown oxide scale during isothermal cooling of microalloyed low carbon steel was studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and thin film X-ray. The oxide scale was generated from Gleeble 3500 Thermal Mechanical Simulator connected with a humid air generator, to simulate 550 and 450C isothermal treatments. Several types of magnetite precipitates were observed during different cooling processes with respect to the possible mechanisms of precipitation have been discussed. It is found that magnetite particles is as a result of pro-eutectoid precipitation from oxygen-rich wustite, and also as a product of the partial decomposition of wustite during the cooling process due to change of oxygen concentration and migration of iron ions. Furthermore, microalloyed elements in steel reduce the stability of wustite thereby facilitate the precipitation process, whose products of multi-phase oxide finally determine the adhesive strength of oxide scale and steel substrate.
Yu, XL, Wei, DB, Wang, XD & Jiang, ZY 2012, 'Experimental Study on Adhesion of Oxide Scale on Hot-Rolled Steel Strip', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 472-475, pp. 622-625.
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An experimental method was developed to study the adherence properties of the oxide scale formed on microalloyed low carbon steel after hot strip rolling. The evolution of the oxide scale during laminar cooling was investigated using Gleeble 3500 Thermal-Mechanical Simulator connected with a humid air generator. After the sample cooled down to ambient temperature, the oxide scale was protected by lacquer to prevent the scale from losing. Physicochemical characteristics of the oxide scale were examined and the adherence mechanism was discussed. Decomposed wustite a mixture of α-iron and magnetite (Fe3O4), can substantially improve the integrity of oxide scale. However, large quantities of hematite (Fe2O3) or retained wustite (FeO) were found detrimental to the adhesion of the oxide scale. It is found that the adherence of oxide scales significantly depends on the phase composition of oxide scales with different thickness.
Zhang, AW, Jiao, SH, Jiang, ZY & Wei, DB 2012, 'Bubble Structures, Fishscaling Resistance and Adhesion of Vitreous Enamel to Low Carbon Steel', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 409, pp. 736-742.
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The bubble structures, fishscaling resistance, adhesion and its mechanism of vitreous enamel to low carbon steels were evaluated by microscopic methods. The results show that the microalloying elements deteriorates the adhesion but suppress the fishscaling tendency, the enamel-steel interface adhesion could be explained as mainly the mechanical interlocking and chemical bonding during the firing process; the lower carbon substrate causes higher proportion of bigger bubbles in the enamel layer and subsequently causes the lower fishscaling susceptibility.
Zhang, Q, Jiang, Z & Wei, D 2012, 'Adhesion at oxide layer/substrate interface during sliding wear', International Journal of Surface Science and Engineering, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 270-270.
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Protective oxide film plays an indispensable role in reducing wear during metal-metal sliding contact, and its adherence to the substrate and stability is a major issue. This review examines some prevalent views proposed in literature on the adhesion between protective oxide layer formed during sliding wear and the steels and cast irons substrate under unlubricated condition. Attempt has been made to correlate some of them to be more connected and take them into account in a broader sliding condition in some sections in this review. Although this review is more relevant to the steels and cast irons as the tested materials during unlubricated unidirectional sliding, other alloys such as aluminium and Ni-based alloys would be hopefully to some extent associated.
Zhang, Q, Jiang, ZY, Xie, GL, Wei, DB & Han, JT 2012, 'Study on Microstructure and Friction of Bimetal 1.5Cr4.8Ni with Cast Iron and Low Carbon Steel', Advanced Materials Research, vol. 565, pp. 650-655.
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A cast iron/low carbon steel sandwich-structured bimetal fabricated through composite casting, followed by hot rolling and hot compression (40% reduction) in a vacuum, and water quenched using Gleeble 3500 thermomechanical simulator. The microstructure of a predominantly martensitic structure is transferred to a matrix with an amount of austenite. The measured results show that the macro-hardness is significantly lower due to the evolution of matrix. A considerable amount of secondary carbides were precipitated from the matrix. This study also shows that a significant difference in the value of coefficient of friction (COF) at the end when hot rolling (HR) was tested under three sets of sliding wear conditions, while those for hot rolling and heat treatment (HT) tends to be merged. An increased wear resistance of interfacial zone is expectable.
Zhang, Y, Wei, D & Jiang, Z 2012, 'Solidification During Vertical Twin-Roll Casting of Magnesium Alloy', Advanced Science Letters, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 101-105.
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The process of vertical twin-roll casting including pouring, solidifying, rolling and cooling can be accomplished in a very short time. Some important process parameters in roll casting that are not difficult to be obtained in experiment may be acquired using numerical simulation. In this paper, a numerical simulation based on a 2D finite element model of vertical twin-roll strip casting coupling temperature, flow and thermal stress has been conducted. The influences of key process parameters including pouring temperature and casting speed have been studied. The distribution of thermal stress was obtained, and its effect on cracks on the surface of the strip was discussed. © 2012 American Scientific Publishers. All rights reserved.
Zheng, W, Wang, G, Lin, X, Jiang, H, Wei, D & Jiang, Z 2012, 'Study on the effects of polycrystal grain orientations on indentation hardness', International Journal of Surface Science and Engineering, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 338-338.
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The effects of polycrystal grain orientations on the indentation hardness were studied by both the experimental investigation and numerical simulation. The surface grain orientations of the sample were measured using the electron back scatter diffraction (EBSD) technique, and are divided into three types of grains according to the characteristics of orientations. The indentation experiment was carried out on the surface grains with various orientations as the same direction of the indenter axis. According to the polycrystalline plastic forming theory, a new finite element method (FEM) model was established and the indentation processes on the grains with orientations of [111] and [1001 were numerically simulated. By comparing the hardness from simulation results with those of experiments, the new FEM model considering grain orientations was validated. The forming mechanism of the contour during indentation on surface grains with different orientations is also discussed in the study.
Ahmad, A, Huang, S, Wang, JJ, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'A New State Vector and a Map Joining Algorithm for Range-Only SLAM', 2012 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & VISION (ICARCV), International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 1024-1029.
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This paper presents a new state vector and a map joining algorithm for range-only SLAM problems. Local maps are built by least squares optimization using the new state vector and a landmark initialization strategy which is an improvement on our preliminary work [1]. The map joining algorithm combines the local maps using least squares optimization to maintain the estimation consistency. Both the local map building and the map joining algorithm maintain a list of 'unused range observations' to minimize the potential for information loss. The accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated using a simulation dataset, and an experimental dataset provided by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). © 2012 IEEE.
Ahmad, A, Zhao, L, Huang, S, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'Convergence Comparison of Least Squares Based Bearing-Only SLAM Algorithms Using Different Landmark Parametrizations', 2012 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & VISION (ICARCV), International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 1006-1011.
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This paper compares the convergence of least squares based 2D bearing-only SLAM algorithms using different landmark parametrizations. It is shown that the requirement on the accuracy of the initial value vary significantly when using different landmark parametrizations. Especially, for small scale bearing-only SLAM problems, the region of attraction of the global minimum for Gauss-Newton iteration based bearing-only SLAM algorithm using parallax angle landmark parametrization is significantly larger as compared with those of bearing-only SLAM algorithms using other landmark parametrizations. © 2012 IEEE.
Almotairy, S, Wei, DB & Jiang, ZY 1970, 'Study on Surface Roughness Transformation during Metal Rolling', Materials Science Forum, 7th International Conference on Processing and Manufacturing of Advanced Materials, Trans Tech Publications, Ltd., Quebec City, CANADA, pp. 2517-2522.
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Increasing the demand for cold rolled ultra thin strip as feedstock for miniaturized products has encouraged researchers to investigate the ways to increase the quality of such products, especially those related to strip surface roughness. Surface is known as quality factor in most of manufacturing processes. In this paper, the effect of the rolling parameters on the surface roughness transformation during metal rolling has been studied. The experimental results demonstrate that the surface roughness transformation during the metal rolling is highly affected by the designation of the processing parameters such as finishing temperature, reduction, rolling passes and lubrication. The results have been discussed to verify the validity of the new findings.
Al-Zubaydi, AYT, Dartnall, J & Dowd, A 1970, 'Design, Construction and Calibration of an Instrument for Measuring the Production of Chilled Water by the Combined Effects of Evaporation and Night Sky Radiation', Volume 7: Fluids and Heat Transfer, Parts A, B, C, and D, ASME 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 1523-1532.
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This paper presents the design and mathematical modeling of thermal radiator panels to be used primarily to measure night sky radiation from dry and wet coated surfaces. Three panels may be used in conjunction as a combined measuring system. One panel consists of an upper dry surface coated aluminum sheet laminated to an ethylene vinyl acetate foam backing block having a pattern of parallel flow water channels and header channels milled into its mating surface prior to lamination to the aluminum sheet. This configuration provides a fin and channel radiator instrument whereby circulating water may be used to measure the heat loss from this panel to night sky radiation. In a second configuration, the surface of a panel without buried water channels but otherwise identical may be wetted in order to study and compare the night sky radiation from its wet surface. In this case, the measuring water is circulated over the upper face of this panel. In a third configuration, water is sprayed onto the surface of the second panel (or a similar panel) so that an evaporative cooling effect is gained in addition to the radiation effect. Initial TRNSYS simulations for the performance of all three configurations are presented and it is planned to use the panels as calibrated instruments for discriminating between the cooling effects of night sky radiation and evaporation.
Bücker, D & Deuse, J 1970, 'Concept of Energy-Efficient Job Sequencing for Heat Treatment Processes', Leveraging Technology for a Sustainable World - Proceedings of the 19th CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 417-421.
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Production planning and control systems offer solutions to solving job sequencing problems regarding main production goals like on-time delivery, short lead time, low costs, high capacity utilization, low inventory or high flexibility. The job sequence also influences a system's energy consumption. Therefore, and because of rising energy prices and ecological requirements, energy consumption plays an increasing role, especially in energy-intensive industries. In steel production, high energy demand is mainly caused by heating, cooling and reheating processes. The authors distinguish between necessary and avoidable energy consumption with regard to cooling and reheating processes among hot rolling and heat treatment.
Carmichael, MG & Dikai Liu 1970, 'A task description model for robotic rehabilitation', 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2012 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), IEEE, San Diego, CA, pp. 3086-3089.
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The desire to produce robots to aid in physical neurorehabilitation has led to the control paradigm Assistance-As-Needed. This paradigm aims to assist patients in performing physical rehabilitation tasks whilst providing the least amount of assistance required, maximizing the patient's effort which is essential for recovery. Ideally the provided assistance equals the gap between the capability required to perform the task and the patient's available capability. Current implementations derive a measure of this gap by critiquing task performance based on some criteria. This paper presents a task description model for tasks performed by a patient's limb, allowing physical requirements to be calculated. Applied to two upper limb tasks typical of rehabilitation and daily activities, the effect of task variations on the task's physical requirements are observed. It is proposed that using the task description model to compensate for changing task requirements will allow better support by providing assistance closer to the true needs of the patient. © 2012 IEEE.
Erohin, O, Kuhlang, P, Schallow, J & Deuse, J 1970, 'Intelligent Utilisation of Digital Databases for Assembly Time Determination in Early Phases of Product Emergence', Procedia CIRP, Elsevier BV, pp. 424-429.
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Manufacturing industry has been progressively using digital tools for product development and manufacturing control to handle product and process complexity as well as to react to ever-increasing cost and time pressure. This paper presents aims and potentials of the application of knowledge discovery processes in industrial databases for the identification and extraction of new knowledge in order to support planning and decision making processes in product emergence. Therefore, it describes basic approaches for the intelligent utilisation of discovered knowledge on the example of prospective assembly time determination in early phases of product emergence. © 2012 The Authors.
Goriel, K, Avakian, V & Huynh, BP 1970, 'Study of Natural Ventilation Flow in a Room Fitted With a Solar Chimney', Volume 6: Energy, Parts A and B, ASME 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 1359-1367.
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The past few decades have seen a considerable change in terms of technological innovation. The recent technological trend is a shift towards the incorporation of natural processes such as hydro, solar and wind in design and implementation. For the purpose of this report, a miniaturised solar chimney test rig was constructed which utilises the principles of natural ventilation. Analysis of similar types of technologies was conducted and various ideas considered in the construction of the test rig. Computational fluid dynamics software was also used in conjunction with the experiment to see the similarities associated with the experiment and software package, taking into account the limitation of various instruments. A comprehensive experimental and theoretical approach was developed and reported.
Halkon, B, Webster, J, Mitchell, S & Mientjes, M 1970, 'Development of a test methodology for the assessment of human impacts in sport', Procedia Engineering, 9th Conference of the International-Sports-Engineering-Association (ISEA), Elsevier BV, Univ Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, pp. 813-818.
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The study described in this paper aims to develop a suitable method for the measurement of contact forces, pressures and velocities of simulated human-on-human impacts typical of those experienced within American Football. A thin-film pressure sensor system was chosen to enable the impacts to be quantified, however, initial testing suggested that the measured impact forces were underestimated by circa 30% with the system calibrated in the standard, static pressure manner. A two-stage, dynamic calibration was therefore developed, in which the sensors were subsequently dynamically loaded in a manner more representative of the impacts, allowing an appropriate dynamic calibration factor to be derived. To determine the typical impact force levels experienced in a shoulder-on-thigh impact event, eight subjects were required to perform three 'good' tackles at two different velocities. The processed results identified a peak, transmitted force of 1.1 (0.4) and 1.7 (0.5) kN for 'low' and 'medium' velocities respectively, with corresponding effective areas of application of 70 (22) cm2 and 85 (25) cm2 and contact times of 0.257 (0.098) s and 0.245 (0.112) s respectively. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Hartung, J, Baudzus, B & Deuse, J 1970, 'A Life Cycle Oriented Evaluation of Changeable Manufacturing and Assembly Systems', Leveraging Technology for a Sustainable World - Proceedings of the 19th CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 357-362.
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Today's companies have to face a rapidly changing production environment which raises the need for a quick and cost effective possibility to adapt the production to different demands. The principle of the changeability represents an important approach to face this situation. Within this paper a practicable and cost effective methodology is presented to evaluate the changeability of manufacturing and assembly systems. The methodology enables a target-oriented implementation of changeability. It offers different users a possibility to identify actual lacks of changeability and allows a life cycle oriented design of manufacturing and assembly systems.
Hill, J, Williams, P & Herries, D 1970, 'An investigation into the effect of receiving side arrangements on measurements made in accordance with ISO 7235', Proceedings - European Conference on Noise Control, pp. 537-542.
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ISO 7235 specifies the substitution method for the determination of insertion loss of ducted silencers. The substitution method involves taking sound pressure level measurements with the test object in place and when the object has been replaced by a substitution duct. For the measurement of the transmitted wave the standard gives three methods, which are, in order of preference, 1) In a reverberation room, 2) In a test duct after the silencer and 3) In an essentially free field. An identical silencer has been measured on two different silencer test rigs complying to the requirements of ISO 7235, one with a reverberation room termination and one using the induct method with anechoic termination. An analysis of the effect of the receiving side equipment on the experimental results is then carried out. The ISO 7235 standard is used for measuring most types of dissipative silencers including those in HVAC systems and intakes or exhausts of flue gases. It can also be used for measurements of other ductwork components such as bends, T-connectors and air-terminal units. © European Acoustics Association.
Himstedt, M, Alempijevic, A, Zhao, L, Huang, S & Boehme, H-J 1970, 'Towards robust vision-based self-localization of vehicles in dense urban environments', 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012), IEEE, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 3152-3157.
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Self-localization of ground vehicles in densely populated urban environments poses a significant challenge. The presence of tall buildings in close proximity to traversable areas limits the use of GPS-based positioning techniques in such environments. This paper presents an approach to global localization on a hybrid metric-topological map using a monocular camera and wheel odometry. The global topology is built upon spatially separated reference places represented by local image features. In contrast to other approaches we employ a feature selection scheme ensuring a more discriminative representation of reference places while simultaneously rejecting a multitude of features caused by dynamic objects. Through fusion with additional local cues the reference places are assigned discrete map positions allowing metric localization within the map. The self-localization is carried out by associating observed visual features with those stored for each reference place. Comprehensive experiments in a dense urban environment covering a time difference of about 9 months are carried out. This demonstrates the robustness of our approach in environments subjected to high dynamic and environmental changes. © 2012 IEEE.
Hu, G, Huang, S, Zhao, L, Alempijevic, A & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'A robust RGB-D SLAM algorithm', 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012), IEEE, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 1714-1719.
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Recently RGB-D sensors have become very popular in the area of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). The major advantage of these sensors is that they provide a rich source of 3D information at relatively low cost. Unfortunately, these sensors in their current forms only have a range accuracy of up to 4 metres. Many techniques which perform SLAM using RGB-D cameras rely heavily on the depth and are restrained to office type and geometrically structured environments. In this paper, a switching based algorithm is proposed to heuristically choose between RGB-BA and RGBD-BA based local maps building. Furthermore, a low cost and consistent optimisation approach is used to join these maps. Thus the potential of both RGB and depth image information are exploited to perform robust SLAM in more general indoor cases. Validation of the proposed algorithm is performed by mapping a large scale indoor scene where traditional RGB-D mapping techniques are not possible. © 2012 IEEE.
Huang, S, Wang, H, Frese, U, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'On the Number of Local Minima to the Point Feature Based SLAM Problem', 2012 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, pp. 2074-2079.
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Map joining is an efficient strategy for solving feature based SLAM problems. This paper demonstrates that joining of two 2D local maps, formulated as a nonlinear least squares problem has at most two local minima, when the associated uncertainties can be described using spherical covariance matrices. Necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of two minima is derived and it is shown that more than one minimum exists only when the quality of the local maps used for map joining is extremely poor. The analysis explains to some extent why a number of optimization based SLAM algorithms proposed in the recent literature that rely on local search strategies are successful in converging to the globally optimal solution from poor initial conditions, particularly when covariance matrices are spherical. It also demonstrates that the map joining problem has special properties that may be exploited to reliably obtain globally optimal solutions to the SLAM problem. © 2012 IEEE.
Huynh, P 1970, 'Thermal Effects in Slider Bearings With Limited Corrugation and Power-Law Lubricant', Proceedings of the ASME 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, ASME, Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 1-5.
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Influence of temperature on the performance of slider bearings of infinite width but having corrugation of limited extent is investigated numerically, using a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package. Lubricant is assumed to be a fluid of power-law type with temperature-dependent viscosity. Over a range of the powerlaw index, combined effects of temperature and the corrugated section's location on load-supporting capacity Fy of the bearing's fluid film are considered. Influence of the bearing-gap surfaces' thermal boundary condition is also examined. Compared with isothermal situation, thermal effects result in significant reduction in Fy, especially with shear-thickening lubricants. This reduction in Fy is also affected significantly by the corrugated section's location.
Idris, A & Huynh, P 1970, 'Computational Study of Single-Sided Ventilation Flow through a 3-Dimensional Room', Proceedings of the ASME 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, ASME, Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 1-7.
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This is a 2-authored paper. The authors are Awang Idris, B.P. Huynh Conference website: http://www.asmeconferences.org/Congress2012/
Khushaba, RN, Kodagoda, S & IEEE 1970, 'Electromyogram (EMG) Feature Reduction Using Mutual Components Analysis for Multifunction Prosthetic Fingers Control', 2012 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & VISION (ICARCV), International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 1534-1539.
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Surface Electromyogram (EMG) signals are usually utilized as a control source for multifunction powered prostheses. A challenge that arises with the current demands of such prostheses is the ability to accurately control a large number of individual and combined fingers movements and to do so in a computationally efficient manner. As a response to such a challenge, we present a combined feature selection and projection algorithm, denoted as Mutual Components Analysis (MCA). The proposed MCA algorithm extends the well-known Principal Components Analysis (PCA) by pruning the noisy and redundant features before projecting the data. To implement the feature selection step, the mutual information concept is utilized to implement a new information gain evaluation function. The performance and significance of the proposed MCA is demonstrated on EMG datasets collected for the purpose of this research from eight subjects with eight electrodes attached on their forearm. Fifteen classes of fingers movements where considered in this paper with MCA achieving >95% accuracy on average across all subjects. © 2012 IEEE.
Khushaba, RN, Kodagoda, S, Dissanayake, G, Greenacre, L, Burke, S, Louviere, J & IEEE 1970, 'A Neuroscientific Approach to Choice Modeling: Electroencephalogram (EEG) and User Preferences', 2012 INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON NEURAL NETWORKS (IJCNN), IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 1-8.
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Paper available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6252561&contentType=Conference+Publications&sortType%3Ddesc_p_Publication_Year%26queryText%3Dkhushaba
Khushaba, RN, Lei Shi & Kodagoda, S 1970, 'Time-dependent spectral features for limb position invariant myoelectric pattern recognition', 2012 International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies (ISCIT), 2012 International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies (ISCIT), IEEE, Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast, Australia, pp. 1020-1025.
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Recent studies on the myoelectric control of powered prosthetics revealed several factors that affect its clinical performance. One of the important factors is the variation in the limb position associated with normal use which can have a substantial impact on the robustness of Electromyogram (EMG) pattern recognition. To solve this problem, we propose in this paper a new feature extraction algorithm based on set of spectral moments that extracts the relevant information about the EMG power spectrum in an accurate and efficient manner. The main goal is to rely on effective knowledge discovery and pattern recognition methods to discover the neural information embedded in the EMG signals regardless of the limb position. Specifically, the proposed features define descriptive qualities for the general time domain-based characterization of the EMG spectral amplitude, spectral sparsity, and irregularity factor by the application of mathematical-statistical methods which also include frequency consideration. The performance of the proposed spectral moments is tested on EMG data collected from eight subjects, while implementing eight classes of movements, each at five different limb positions. Practical results indicate that training the classifier on the EMG moments collected from multiple positions and testing on completely unseen positions can achieve significant reduction in the classification error rates of upon â10% on average across all subjects and limb ositions.
Kirchner, N, Alempijevic, A, Virgona, A & IEEE 1970, 'Head-to-shoulder signature for person recognition', 2012 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, St Paul, MN, USA, pp. 1226-1231.
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Ensuring that an interaction is initiated with a particular and unsuspecting member of a group is a complex task. As a first step the robot must effectively, expediently and reliably recognise the humans as they carry on with their typical behaviours (in situ). A method for constructing a scale and viewing angle robust feature vector (from analysing a 3D pointcloud) designed to encapsulate the inter-person variations in the size and shape of the people's head to shoulder region (Head-to-shoulder signature - HSS) is presented. Furthermore, a method for utilising said feature vector as the basis of person recognition via a Support-Vector Machine is detailed. An empirical study was performed in which person recognition was attempted on in situ data collected from 25 participants over 5 days in a office environment. The results report a mean accuracy over the 5 days of 78.15% and a peak accuracy 100% for 9 participants. Further, the results show a considerably better-than-random (1/23 = 4.5%) result for when the participants were: in motion and unaware they were being scanned (52.11%), in motion and face directly away from the sensor (36.04%), and post variations in their general appearance. Finally, the results show the HSS has considerable ability to accommodate for a person's head, shoulder and body rotation relative to the sensor - even in cases where the person is faced directly away from the robot.
Li, H, Wei, D & Jiang, Z 1970, 'Crystal plasticity finite element analysis of 3D surface asperity flattening in metal forming process', Steel Research International, pp. 1131-1134.
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In order to figure out the relationship between the surface asperity flattening (surface roughness) and texture, rate-dependent crystal plasticity constitutive model has been employed into the finite element software ABAQUS to simulate the surface asperity flattening in the uniaxial planar compression. Measured textures and surface roughness are introduced into the 3D surface roughness model. The calculated results show a good agreement with the experimental results. With an increase of reduction, the surface asperity flattening tends to increase, and brass component {110}<112> of silk texture becomes stronger, while the cubic texture {001}<100> becomes weaker. © 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Lie, S, Liu, DK & Bongers, B 1970, 'A cooperative approach to the design of an Operator Control Unit for a semi-autonomous grit-blasting robot', Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA, Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, Australian Robotics and Automation Association (ARAA), Wellington, New Zealand, pp. 1-7.
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Due to the diverse range of applications that robots cover today, Human Robot Interaction interface design has become an equally diverse area. This diverse area is characterised by the different types of end users that make use of the robots. For robots to be useful to end users their needs have to be well understood by the robotics development teams. One approach that facilitates understanding the end users needs is Cooperative Design. This paper presents the results of a study that took a Cooperative Design approach to the design and development of a robotic Operator Control Unit. The results presented here demonstrate that end users involved in the cooperative design approach thought it added important value to the design outcome, that they enjoyed the process and that it helped build interpersonal relationships within the development team.
Lieber, D, Konrad, B, Deuse, J, Stolpe, M & Morik, K 1970, 'Sustainable Interlinked Manufacturing Processes through Real-Time Quality Prediction', Leveraging Technology for a Sustainable World - Proceedings of the 19th CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 393-398.
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Based on a rolling mill case study, this paper discusses how data mining techniques and intelligent machine-to-machine telematics could be used to predict internal quality issues of intermediate products in manufacturing processes. The huge amount of data recorded during processing and the distributed but sequential nature of the manufacturing lead to challenging questions for data mining applications and advanced process control approaches in industries like steel production. Moreover, the discovery for hidden information, knowledge and dependencies in the process data contribute significantly to support avoiding waste of resources and achieving the objectives of zero-defect-production, sustainable and energy-efficient manufacturing processes.
Liu, M, Huang, S, Dissanayake, G, Wang, H, IEEE & Japan, RSO 1970, 'A Convex Optimization Based Approach for Pose SLAM Problems', 2012 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 1898-1903.
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This paper demonstrates that 2D pose SLAM has an underlining near convex structure when formulated as a least squares (LS) optimization problem. By introducing new variables and some approximations, the LS pose SLAM problem can be formulated as a quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem. The QCQP formulation can then be relaxed into a semi-definite programming (SDP) problem which is convex. Unique solution to the convex SDP problem can be obtained without initial state estimate and can be used to construct a candidate solution to the original LS pose SLAM problem. Simulation datasets and the Intel Research Lab dataset have been used to demonstrate that when the relative pose information contain noises with reasonable level, the candidate solution obtained through the relaxation is very close to the optimal solution to the LS SLAM problem. Thus in practice, the candidate solution can serve as either an approximate solution or a good initial guess for a local optimization algorithm to obtain the optimal solution to the LS pose SLAM problem. © 2012 IEEE.
Manabe, KI, Sato, H, Furushima, T, Wei, D, Mathew, N & Jiang, Z 1970, 'Deformation behavior in micro sheet hydroforming process', Steel Research International, pp. 651-654.
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A novel forming method, micro sheet hydroforming, is investigated to fabricating for complex stamping micro components. This process has several advantages of hydroforming such as, the reduction in required accuracy of stamping tools, the improvement of forming limit and shape accuracy. In this study, a micro hydromechanical deep drawing (MHDD) apparatus has been developed and the effects of counter pressure on deformation behavior of blank foils are investigated. MHDD experiments are designed as the blanking-drawing process and conducted at forced pressurization using phosphor bronze, stainless steel and pure titanium foils with a thickness of 0.05mm. As a result, the counter pressure is stably generated in the drawing process and the micro cups are fabricated successfully by MHDD. The occurrence of wrinkling can be prevented by applying a proper counter pressure in the MHDD process. Consequently, the forming limit, and the shape accuracy of drawn cups in MHDD are improved compared with that in the conventional micro deep drawing. © 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Nguyen, LV, Kodagoda, S, Ranasinghe, R, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'Simulated Annealing Based Approach for Near-Optimal Sensor Selection in Gaussian Processes', 2012 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION AND INFORMATION SCIENCES (ICCAIS), International Conference on Control, Automation and Information Sciences, IEEE, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, pp. 142-147.
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This paper addresses the sensor selection problem associated with monitoring spatial phenomena, where a subset of k sensor measurements from among a set of n potential sensor measurements is to be chosen such that the root mean square prediction error is minimised. It is proposed that the spatial phenomena to be monitored is modelled using a Gaussian Process and a simulated annealing based approximately heuristic algorithm is used to solve the resulting minimisation problem. The algorithm is shown to be computationally efficient and is illustrated using both indoor and outdoor environment monitoring scenarios. It is shown that, although the proposed algorithm is not guaranteed to find the optimum, it always provides accurate solutions for broad range real-world and computer generated datasets.
Norouzi, M, Miro, JV, Dissanayake, G, IEEE & Japan, RSO 1970, 'Planning High-Visibility Stable Paths for Reconfigurable Robots On Uneven Terrain', 2012 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 2844-2849.
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This paper proposes a motion planning strategy for reconfigurable mobile robots in uneven terrain. Paths that guarantee stability while at the same time maximise the height of the sensor payload, thereby enhancing the capacity of the robot to explore the environment are obtained using a search algorithm based on A*. This is particularly applicable to operations such as search and rescue where observing the environment for locating victims is the major objective, although the proposed technique can be generalised to incorporate other potentially conflicting objectives such as minimising energy. The proposed planning strategy looks at exploiting the (possibly incomplete) environment information available to the robot and/or operator as it explores novel terrain. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated using data obtained from a multi-tracked robot fitted with a manipulator arm and a range camera in a mock-up search and rescue arena. © 2012 IEEE.
Oberst, S & Lai, JCS 1970, 'Analysis of disc brake squeal: Progress and challenges', 19th International Congress on Sound and Vibration 2012, ICSV 2012, pp. 2874-2881.
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Brake squeal noise has been the subject of intense research efforts owing to concerns of car manufacturers caused by complaints lodged and warranty claim related costs arising from dissatisfied customers. Brake squeal is known to be fugitive, and often not repeatable, even under apparently similar operating conditions. The production of brake squeal is dependent on a large number of interacting parameters, such as the mechanical properties of the brake lining materials, contact conditions, wear, operating pressure and temperature which contribute to its often observed nonrepeatability. In this paper, an overview of the state-of-the-art understanding of brake squeal mechanisms and numerical analysis methods (primarily based on finite element analysis) for the prediction of brake squeal propensity is presented. The question of nonlinearity of brake squeal is raised in terms of analysing the mechanisms and how present solution methods reflect this degree of nonlinearity. This is complemented by a description of current industrial practice in the treatment of brake squeal which is, generally, managed on a case-by-case, trial-and-error basis using expensive equipment and time-consuming noise dynamometer and/or on-vehicle tests. The gaps between theory and industrial practice and, hence, challenges for brake squeal research are identified. Recommendations for bridging these gaps and improving the usefulness of current numerical methods for practical industrial use are proposed.
Oberst, S & Lai, JCS 1970, 'The role of nonlinearity in disc brake squeal', Proceedings - European Conference on Noise Control, pp. 1334-1339.
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The prediction of disc brake squeal propensity remains difficult despite significant progress made in the last two decades towards understanding its nature. Most of the numerical analysis of brake squeal is based on linear methods that have found some success in guiding the development of brakes in industry. One popular approach is the complex eigenvalue analysis using finite element models to predict unstable vibration modes. However, the complex eigenvalue analysis may over-predict or under-predict the number of unstable vibration modes and not all predicted unstable vibration modes will result in squeal. Therefore, extensive brake testing in noise dynamometers is required in order to ensure that the noise performance of brakes is acceptable. Although the analysis of brake squeal propensity is primarily based on linear approaches, it has been recognised that the operation of a brake contains a number of nonlinearities such as the excitation through the friction contact between the disc and pad, material properties, and operating conditions. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on nonlinearity as one mechanism of the cause of brake squeal and to discuss how such knowledge could be used to develop alternative strategies in numerical prediction of brake squeal propensity. © European Acoustics Association.
Pagano, D, Liu, D, Waldron, K & IEEE 1970, 'A Method for Optimal Design of an Inchworm Climbing Robot', 2012 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND BIOMIMETICS (ROBIO 2012), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 1293-1298.
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Many ferromagnetic structures require regular inspection and maintenance to ensure their longevity, structural integrity and aesthetics. These operations are often very hazardous to workers, as they are normally performed at height or in confined spaces, and can expose workers to hazardous materials such as lead based paints and vehicle fumes. An inchworm climbing robot has been proposed as a solution that would improve the quality of the inspection procedure and the occupational health and safety for the maintenance personnel while reducing setup times and costs. However, a number of challenges in designing such an inchworm robot arise from the environmental, mobility and safety factors. This paper describes these challenges for given design applications and presents a method to optimise the design to address the challenges. Analyses of the results attest to the feasibility of the solution. © 2012 IEEE.
Parnell, J 1970, 'Development of the draft nsw planning guidelines: Wind farms', Acoustics Australia, pp. 79-83.
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The NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure has released its Draft NSW Planning Guidelines: Wind Farms (the Draft) for public consultation. The period for consultation was until 14 March 2012, which had not been reached at the time of writing this Technical Note. Site selection is important, particularly as these sites may be revisited for compliance over the life of the wind farm. Whilst this should be a basic consideration for an acoustician, the draft gives some guidance on positioning, particularly in relation to trees. It is generally considered that extraneous noise from foliage is not a significant problem for low scrubs and bushes, however tall trees such as eucalypts and poplar trees which seem to be common in high wind areas can cause difficulties in collection valid noise data. In the knowledge that it can be extremely difficult to separate wind turbine noise from the ambient when at large distances, the Draft allows for supporting noise data to be collected at intermediate locations where the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher.
Patel, M, Miro, JV & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'A Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model to Support Activities of Daily Living with an Assistive Robotic Walker', 2012 4TH IEEE RAS & EMBS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON BIOMEDICAL ROBOTICS AND BIOMECHATRONICS (BIOROB), IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Biomechatronics, IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Biomechatronics, Rome, Italy, pp. 1071-1076.
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This paper proposes a Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM) framework as the most suitable tool to exploit the interactions between an intelligent mobility aid and their human operator. The framework presented is capable of learning a mixed array of the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) that the typical user of these supportive devices would normally engage in, both navigational and non-navigational in nature, and provide assistance as and when required. The main contribution of this paper is the demonstration of how this probabilistic tool capable of modelling behaviours at multiple levels of abstraction is a natural embodiment of machine intelligence to support user activities. Effectiveness of the proposed HHMM framework is evaluated with a number of healthy volunteers using a conventional rolling walker equipped with sensing and navigational aids whilst operating in a structured environment resembling a home. A comparison with more traditional discriminative models and mixed generative-discriminative models is also presented to provide a complete picture that highlights the benefits of the proposed approach. © 2012 IEEE.
Saha, SC & Gu, YT 1970, 'Thermo-magnetic convection of paramagnetic fluids with non-instantaneous heating', Proceedings of the 18th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference, AFMC 2012.
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The unsteady boundary-layer development for thermo-magnetic convection of paramagnetic fluids inside a square cavity has been considered in this study. The cavity is placed in a microgravity condition (no gravitation acceleration) and under a uniform magnetic field which acts vertically. A ramp temperature boundary condition is applied on left vertical side wall of the cavity where the temperature initially increases with time up to some specific time and maintain constant thereafter. A distinct magnetic convection boundary layer is developed adjacent to the left vertical wall due to the effect of the magnetic body force generated on the paramagnetic fluid. An improved scaling analysis has been performed using triple-layer integral method and verified by numerical simulations. The Prandtl number has been chosen greater than unity varied over 5-100. Moreover, the effect of various values of the magnetic parameter and magnetic Rayleigh number on the fluid flow and heat transfer has been shown.
Shi, L, Kodagoda, S, Dissanayake, G, IEEE & Japan, RSO 1970, 'Application of Semi-supervised Learning with Voronoi Graph for Place Classification', 2012 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 2991-2996.
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Representation of spaces including both geometric and semantic information enables a robot to perform high-level tasks in complex environments. Therefore, in recent years identifying and semantically labeling the environments based on onboard sensors has become an important competency for mobile robots. Supervised learning algorithms have been extensively used for this purpose with SVM-based solutions showing good generalization properties. The CRF-based approaches take the advantage of connectivity information of samples thereby provide a mechanism to capture complex dependencies. Blending the complementary strengths of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Conditional Random Field (CRF), there have been algorithms to exploit the advantages of both to enhance the overall accuracy of place classification in indoor environments. However, experiments show that none of the above approaches deal well with diversified testing data. In this paper, we focus mainly on the generalization ability of the model and propose a semi-supervised learning strategy, which essentially improves the performance of the system. Experiments have been carried out on six real-world maps from different universities around the world and the results from rigorous testing demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
Shi, L, Kodagoda, S, Khushaba, R, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'Application of CRF and SVM based Semi-supervised Learning for Semantic Labeling of Environments', 2012 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & VISION (ICARCV), International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, IEEE, Guangzhou, pp. 835-840.
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Understanding the environment in both geometric and semantic levels enables a robot to perform high-level tasks in complex environments. Therefore in recent years research towards identifying and semantically labeling the environments based on onboard sensors for mobile robots has been gaining popularity. After the era of heuristic and rule-based approaches, supervised learning algorithms like Support Vector Machines (SVM) and AdaBoost have been extensively used for this purpose showing satisfactory performance. With the introduction of graphical models, approaches like Conditional Random Fields (CRF) which take the advantage of connectivity of samples provide more flexibility to capture complex dependencies. In this paper, we focus on a real-world task which challenges the generalization ability of the model, evaluate some graph based features, propose a semi-supervised learning algorithm by iteratively utilizing the results from SVM and CRF, and suggest a solution for CRF parameter estimation with partially labeled training data. Experiments have been conducted on six realworld indoor environments demonstrating the competence of the algorithm.
Sojoudi, A, Vakilimoghaddam, F, Neishabouri, R & Saha, SC 1970, 'On the oscillatory behavior of transient rayleigh benard convection of air for 2D channel flow at moderate rayleigh numbers', Lecture Notes in Engineering and Computer Science, pp. 1874-1878.
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Unsteady numerical simulation of Rayleigh Benard convection heat transfer from a 2D channel is performed. The oscillatory behavior is attributed to recirculation of ascending and descending flows towards the core of the channel producing organized rolled motions. Variation of the parameters such as Reynolds number, channel outlet flow area and inclination of the channel are considered. Increasing Reynolds number (for a fixed Rayleigh number), delays the generation of vortices. The reduction in the outflow area leads to the later and the less vortex generation. As the time progresses, more vortices are generated, but the reinforced mean velocity does not let the eddies to enter the core of the channel. Therefore, they attach to the wall and reduce the heat transfer area. The inclination of the channel (both positive and negative) induces the generated vortices to get closer to each other and make an enlarged vortex.
Steffen, M, May, D & Deuse, J 1970, 'The Industrial Engineering Laboratory', Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 2012 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), IEEE.
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This paper presents how Problem Based Learning is integrated in Industrial Engineering higher education provided by the Industrial Engineering Laboratory at TU Dortmund University in Germany. After pointing out the necessary asset of competences for Industrial Engineers as the intended learning outcome, Problem Based Learning is presented as one appropriate concept for competence development in higher education in engineering. The implementation of this explicit course design and its advantages is shown by explaining the specific course example Workplace Design in detail, which is carried out in a hands-on laboratory-the Industrial Engineering Laboratory. © 2012 IEEE.
Tang, R & Liu, D 1970, 'An enhanced dynamic model for McKibben pneumatic muscle actuators', Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA.
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An enhanced dynamic force model of a type of small and soft McKibben-type pneumatic muscle (PM) actuator has been developed. This model takes the factor of external loads and a more sophisticated form of friction into account, and is presented as a polynomial function of pressure, contraction length, contraction velocity and external load. The coefficients in this model are determined from a series of experiments with constant loads and step pressure inputs. Comparison study with other models is conducted assuming the Coulomb friction as a constant force. The results demonstrate a solid enhancement of the presented model.
To, AW-K, Paul, G, Rushton-Smith, D, Liu, D & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'Automated and Frequent Calibration of a Robot Manipulator-mounted IR Range Camera for Steel Bridge Maintenance.', FSR, International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, Springer, Matsushima, Miyagi, Japan, pp. 205-218.
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This paper presents an approach to perform frequent hand-eye calibration of an Infrared (IR) range camera mounted to the end-effector of a robot manipulator in a field environment. A set of three reflector discs arranged in a structured pattern is attached to the robot platform to provide high contrast image features with corresponding range readings for accurate calculation of the camera-to-robot base transform. Using this approach the hand-eye transform between the IR range camera and robot end-effector can be determined by considering the robot manipulator model. Experimental results show that a structured lighting-based IR range camera can be reliably hand-eye calibrated to a six DOF robot manipulator using the presented automated approach. Once calibrated, the IR range camera can be positioned with the manipulator so as to generate a high resolution geometric map of the surrounding environment suitable for performing the grit-blasting task. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.
Valencia, R, Miro, JV, Dissanayake, G, Andrade-Cetto, J, IEEE & Japan, RSO 1970, 'Active Pose SLAM', 2012 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 1885-1891.
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We present an active exploration strategy that complements Pose SLAM [1] and optimal navigation in Pose SLAM [2]. The method evaluates the utility of exploratory and place revisiting sequences and chooses the one that minimizes overall map and path entropies. The technique considers trajectories of similar path length taking marginal pose uncertainties into account. An advantage of the proposed strategy with respect to competing approaches is that to evaluate information gain over the map, only a very coarse prior map estimate needs to be computed. Its coarseness is independent and does not jeopardize the Pose SLAM estimate. Moreover, a replanning scheme is devised to detect significant localization improvement during path execution. The approach is tested in simulations in a common publicly available dataset comparing favorably against frontier based exploration. © 2012 IEEE.
Van Nguyen, L, Ranasinghe, R, Kodagoda, S & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'Sensor selection based routing for monitoring Gaussian processes modeled spatial phenomena', Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA, Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, The ACRA 2012 Organising Committee, Wellington, New Zealand, pp. 1-7.
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This paper addresses the trade-off between the sensing quality and the energy consumption in the wireless sensor network associated with monitoring spatial phenomena. We use a non-parametric Gaussian Process to model the spatial phenomena to be monitored and simulated annealing based approximately heuristic algorithm for sensor selection. Our novel Sensor Selection based Routing (SSR) algorithm uses this model to identify the most informative nodes, which gives the root mean square prediction error less than a specified threshold, to construct the minimal energy-expended routing tree rooted at the sink. Our experiments have verified that the proposed computationally efficient SSR algorithm has significant advantages over conventional techniques.
Vidal-Calleja, TA & Agammenoni, G 1970, 'Integrated probabilistic generative model for detecting smoke on visual images', 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE, St Paul, MN, pp. 2183-2188.
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Early fire detection is crucial to minimise damage and save lives. Video surveillance smoke detectors do not suffer from transport delays and can cover large areas. The smoke detection on images is, however, a difficult problem due the variability of smoke density, lighting conditions, background clutter, and unstable patterns. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised object classifier. Single visual features are classified using a model that simultaneously creates a codebook and categorises the smoke using a bag-of-words paradigm based on LDA model. Our algorithm can also tell the amount of smoke present on the image. Multiple image sequences from different cameras are used to show the viability of the proposed approach. Our experiments show that the model generalises well for different cameras, perspectives and scales. © 2012 IEEE.
Wang, H, Hu, G, Huang, S & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'On the Structure of Nonlinearities in Pose Graph', Robotics: Science and Systems VIII, Robotics: Science and Systems 2012, Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation, Sydney, Australia, pp. 1-8.
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Pose graphs have become an attractive representation for solving Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems. In this paper, we analyze the structure of the nonlinearities in the 2D SLAM problem formulated as the optimizing of a pose graph. First, we prove that finding the optimal configuration of a very basic pose graph with 3 nodes (poses) and 3 edges (relative pose constraints) with spherical covariance matrices, which can be formulated as a six dimensional least squares optimization problem, is equivalent to solving a one dimensional optimization problem. Then we show that the same result can be extended to the optimizing of a pose graph with two anchor nodes where every edge is connecting to one of the two anchor nodes. Furthermore, we prove that the global minimum of the resulting one dimensional optimization problem must belong to a certain interval and there are at most 3 minima in that interval. Thus the globally optimal pose configuration of the pose graph can be obtained very easily through the bisection method and closed-form formulas.
Wang, S, Khushaba, R & Kodagoda, S 1970, 'Towards speed-independent road-type classification', 2012 12th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV), 2012 12th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV 2012), IEEE, Guangzhou, CHina, pp. 614-619.
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The knowledge of terrain types is not only useful for improving passenger's safety and comfort, but also for bounding safe navigation routes for autonomous vehicles. Most of the work in the literature is limited to rover operations at slower speeds or rovers with rigid wheels. This paper discusses and presents a critical analysis of speed independency of classifiers for passenger vehicles with tyres at road operating speeds. The suitability of using different features calculated based on vertically mounted accelerometer data as well as road profile data were analyzed. The experimental results agree with the literature, where speed independency could be achieved by using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) features extracted from the estimated road profiles. However, we also show that it is possible to achieve comparable results by extracting different features directly from acceleration data. This eliminates the requirement of accurate knowledge of the vehicle model parameters or speed of the vehicle. © 2012 IEEE.
Wang, S, Kodagoda, S & Ranasinghe, R 1970, 'Road terrain type classification based on laser measurement system data', Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA, Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ARAA, Wellington, New Zealand, pp. 1-6.
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For road vehicles, knowledge of terrain types is useful in improving passenger safety and comfort. The conventional methods are susceptible to vehicle speed variations and in this paper we present a method of using Laser Measurement System (LMS) data for speed independent road type classification. Experiments were carried out with an instrumented road vehicle (CRUISE), by manually driving on a variety of road terrain types namely Asphalt, Concrete, Grass, and Gravel roads at different speeds. A looking down LMS is used for capturing the terrain data. The range data is capable of capturing the structural differences while the remission values are used to observe anomalies in surface reflectance properties. Both measurements are combined and used in a Support Vector Machines Classifier to achieve an average accuracy of 95% on different road types.
Wang, S, Kodagoda, S, Li, H & Shi, L 1970, 'Road Type Recognition Based on Vibration and Image Classification', PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MECHATRONIC SYSTEM AND MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY, 1st International Conference on Mechatronic System and Measurement Technology, SCIENCE PRESS USA INC, Nanjing, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. 70-78.
Wang, Z, Dissanayake, G & IEEE 1970, 'Exploiting Vehicle Motion Information in Monocular SLAM', 2012 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL, AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & VISION (ICARCV), International Conference onControl Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV), IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 1030-1035.
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It is now well known that increasing the number of features maintained in the mapping process of the monocular SLAM improves the accuracy of the outcome. This, however, increases the state dimension and the associated computational cost. This paper investigates and evaluates the improvement on SLAM results by exploiting camera motion information. For a camera mounted on a vehicle, its motion is subject to the vehicle motion model. The work of this paper shows that by introducing relative pose constraints calculated from image points by considering the underlying vehicle motion model (for example the non-holonomic vehicle motion model), it is possible to incorporate vehicle motion information into the system and achieve even more accurate SLAM results than maintaining all extracted features in the map. It is demonstrated that in this process, the state dimension is not increased, and the sparse structure of the SLAM problem is maintained. So the underlying sparseness in the SLAM problem structure can still be exploited for computational efficiency. Simulation and experiment results are presented to demonstrate the relative merits of incorporating vehicle motion information for motion estimation and mapping.
Ward, P & Liu, D 1970, 'Design of a high capacity Electro Permanent Magnetic adhesion for climbing robots', 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), IEEE, Guangzhou, China, pp. 217-222.
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The interest for robotic solutions to perform inspection and maintenance of steel structures is realised with reduced costs, improved safety and improved efficiency. However current robotic solutions are limited by the required adhesion to support the robot and payload device. The design of an Electro Permanent Magnetic device is studied to yield a high capacity adhesion method for use with industrial climbing robots. The adhesion device must provide a lightweight, low power and a failsafe solution for ferromagnetic surfaces. The design process to achieve maximum holding force for Electro Permanent Magnets is presented. © 2012 IEEE.
Wu, J, Luo, Z, Zhang, N & Zhang, Y 1970, 'A Chebyshev meta-model for uncertain optimization of vehicle suspensions', Proceedings: 4th International Conference on Computational Methods, International Conference on Computational Methods, Queensland Uinersity of Technology, Crowne Plaza, Gold Coast, Australia, pp. 1-9.
Yang, L & Deuse, J 1970, 'Multiple-attribute Decision Making for an Energy Efficient Facility Layout Design', Procedia CIRP, Elsevier BV, pp. 149-154.
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Due to restricted energy resources, energy efficiency which was always ignored over the past decades becomes a significant challenge for many factories. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate energy relevant criteria with traditional criteria in the layout planning phase. The proposed approach employs a hybrid approach which integrates analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and preference ranking organization methods for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) with the purpose of solving a facility layout problem (FLP). The AHP is used to determine the weights for each criterion and PROMETHEE is applied to get the final ranking. Finally, a case study is used to validate the proposed approach. © 2012 The Authors.
Yu, X, Jiang, Z, Wei, D, Yang, D & Yang, Q 1970, 'Enthalpy-based modelling of phase transformation of oxide scale on hot-rolled steel strip', Steel Research International, pp. 999-1002.
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Based upon enthalpy formations within the framework of the finite element method, a mathematical model is developed to solve nonlinear heat problems involving phase change of oxide scale formed on the hot-rolled steel strip. In the enthalpy-based finite element method (FEM), an iterative solution procedure where a temperature update at the nodal level followed by an enthalpy update at the level of the integration points, avoid discontinuity problems of the isothermal transformation in the temperature-based approach. An attempt to employ the algorithmic treatment coupled with temperature and phase transformation in 2D geometry with specific interests in oxide scale phase transformation at the interface and adjacent to the steel substrate during cooling after hot rolling, is conducted. The presented results provide insight into the formation mechanism of multilayered oxide scale, to explore the generation of the magnetite seam adjacent to the steel substrate. © 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Zainudin, Z, Kodagoda, S & Van Nguyen, L 1970, 'Mutual information based data selection in Gaussian processes for people tracking', Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA, Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, The ACRA 2012 Organising Committee, Wellington, New Zealand, pp. 1-6.
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It is the general perception that models describing human motion patterns enhance tracking even with long term occlusions. One effective way of learning such patterns is to use Gaussian Processes (GP). However, with the increase of the amount of training data with time, the GP becomes computationally intractable. In this work, we have proposed a Mutual Information (MI) based technique along with the Mahalanobis Distance (MD) measure to keep the most informative data while discarding the least informative data. The algorithm is tested with data collected in an office environment with a Segway robot equipped with a laser range finder. It leads to more than 80% data reduction while keeping the rms errors within the required bounds. We have also implemented a GP based Particle filter tracker for long term people tracking with occlusions. The comparison results with Extended Kalman Filter based tracker shows the superiority of the proposed approach.
Zhang, WD, Robinson, C, Zheng, XF & Zhang, JF 1970, 'Characterisation of electron traps in high-k dielectric stacks for Flash memory applications using fast pulse techniques', 2012 IEEE 11th International Conference on Solid-State and Integrated Circuit Technology, 2012 IEEE 11th International Conference on Solid-State and Integrated Circuit Technology (ICSICT), IEEE, Xian, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. 1030-1033.
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Zhang, YC, Han, TY, Jiang, ZY & Wei, DB 1970, 'Analysis of Thermal Stress during of Twin-Roll Casting of Magnesium Alloy', Applied Mechanics and Materials, 2nd International Conference on Advanced Design and Manufacturing Engineering (ADME 2012), Trans Tech Publications, Ltd., Taiyuan, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. 1928-1933.
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The process of twin-roll casting including pouring, solidifying, rolling and cooling can be accomplished in a very short time. Consequently, some important process parameters in the twin-roll casting that are difficult to be obtained in experiment can be acquired using numerical simulation. In this paper, a numerical simulation based on a 2D finite element model of vertical twin-roll strip casting of magnesium alloy has been conducted, and the thermal stress fields are significantly discussed. The influences of key process parameters consisting of submerged nozzle depth and nozzle spray angle have been studied. The thermal cracks on the surface of the strip are analysed according to the thermal stress distribution.
Lammers, T, Kersten, W & Skirde, H 2012, Abschlussbericht zum Projekt Komplexitätsanalyse von Distributionssystemen, Bundesvereinigung Logistik.
