1,720,965 research outputs found
Automation of underwater operations on wave energy converters using remotely operated vehicles
No full textIn the last fifteen years, the Division of Electricity at Uppsala University has been developing a wave energy converter (WEC) concept. The concept is based on a point-absorbing buoy with a directly driven linear generator placed on the seabed. Several units are connected to a marine substation, whose role is to collect and smooth the power absorbed from the waves and then bring it to the shore through one single cable. A big challenge in the project is to reduce the costs related to the deployment and maintenance of the WECs and substation. Currently, those operations are performed by divers, which is costly and entail considerable risks. A possibility is to replace divers with automated solutions using small robots called remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). This PhD thesis proposes and analyses a method for deployment and maintenance of underwater devices with no use of diving operations. Existing ROVs need additional modules and equipment in order to carry out operations with the required force and precision. Typical missions are inspection, shackles or slings removal, valve closing, and cable connection. The latter demands especially high precision in the positioning: 5 mm in distance and 5◦ in heading angle. In addition, this operation involves forces up to 200 N. This combination power-precision is not reached by existing ROVs. This PhD thesis presents a positioning system for underwater robot to enable autonomous positioning of the vehicle before cable connection. The positioning system is composed of two green lasers and a monocular camera, and is based on image processing. Experimental results from laboratory testing show that the mean absolute error in distance measurement is as low as 6 mm at 0.7 m from the target, whereas the heading is minimized to 2◦. The computational time for the image processing is 13.6 ms per image, meaning the possibility of a 30 Hz measurement system. Used together with a closed-loop path-following unit, this positioning system can support autonomous docking. This PhD thesis presents the model of an autopilot and results from docking simulations, showing the performance of the positioning system used in closed-loop
Underwater Electrical Connections and Remotely Operated Vehicles
No full textRemotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are underwater robots that perform different kind of operations, from observation to heavier tasks like drilling, carrying and pulling cables, etc. Those ROVs are costly and require skilled personal to operate it as well as equipment for transportation and deployment (boats, cranes, etc.). The division for electricity at Uppsala University, is developing a wave energy converter (WEC) concept. The concept is based on a point-absorbing buoy with a directly driven linear generator placed on the seabed. Several units are connected to a marine substation that is located on the seabed, whose role is to collect and smooth the power absorbed from the waves and then bring it to the shore through one single cable. Cable connection is a big challenge in the project because the WEC concept is small and many units are necessary to create a rentable farm. Nowadays this operation is performed by divers but using Observation Class ROV (OCROV) could be an interesting alternative since they are affordable at lower costs and easier to operate. Cable connection is however a heavy task and requires force that an OCROV does not have. It will need a docking system from which the vehicle will take its force. It would then go to the station, dock itself to this support plate, grab the cables and connect them together. This procedure cannot be done by the ROV operator because it requires accurate displacement and quick adjustment of the robot’s behavior. An autopilot was created in Matlab Simulink that consists of three units: the path following, the ROV, and the positioning unit. The first one uses the vehicle’s position and computes the speed and heading to be applied on the ROV in order to guide it on the desired path. The second one contains a controller that will adapt the thrust of each propeller to the force needed to reach the desired heading and speed from the path following unit. It also contains the model of the ROV that computes its position and speed. The last unit consists of a Kalman filter that estimates the ROV position and will be used in case of delay or failure in the communication with the positioning sensors. The autopilot model is used with a positioning system that utilizes green lasers and image processing. Two green lasers are used as fixed points in each camera picture and from their distance on the image, the actual distance between the ROV and the docking platform can be computed. In addition, optical odometry is used. The idea behind is to estimate how the ROV is behaving by evaluating the changes between two pictures of the camera. Those two systems, laser and odometry, work together in order to get more accurate results. The laser system has so far been tested in air. The distance measurements gave interesting results with an error inferior to 3%, and angle measurements gave less than 10% error for a distance of one meter. One advantage with the system is that it gets more accurate as the vehicle gets closer to the docking point. In addition to the ROV project, a review study was conducted on the variability of wave energy compared with other resources such as tidal, solar, and wind power. An analysis of the different tools and models that are used to forecast the power generation of those sources was done. There is a need for collaboration between the different areas because the future will aggregate those different sources to the grid and requires a unification of the models and methods.Lysekil projec
Autonomous docking based on optical positioning system for remotely operated vehicle
No full textUnderwater docking is of high interest as it could be used to chargeunderwater robots while on a mission, thus extending their range of ac-tion, or to upload data without retrieving the vehicle, thus increasing itsmemory capacity. In this paper, the purpose of the docking system is toperform cable connections using remotely operated vehicles. The modelof an autopilot for autonomous docking is presented and the performancesof its components are analysed. This autopilot is based on measurementsfrom an optical positioning system which localizes the vehicle based onfeature detection from image processing. It shows that this positioning system could be integrated to the modelled autopilot and used in closed-loop for autonomous docking.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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