169,718 research outputs found

    A Unifying Task Priority Approach for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Integrating Homing and Docking Maneuvers

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    This research proposes a unified guidance and control framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) based on the task priority control approach, incorporating various behaviors such as path following, terrain following, obstacle avoidance, as well as homing and docking to stationary and moving stations. The integration of homing and docking maneuvers into the task priority framework is thus a novel contribution of this paper. This integration allows, for example, to execute homing maneuvers close to uneven seafloor or obstacles, ensuring the safety of the AUV, as safety tasks can be given the highest priority. Furthermore, another contribution shown in the paper is that the proposed approach tackles a wide range of scenarios without ad hoc solutions. Indeed, the proposed approach is well suited for both the emerging trend of resident AUVs, which stay underwater for a long period inside garage stations, exiting to perform inspection and maintenance missions and homing back to them, and for AUVs that are required to dock to moving stations such as surface vehicles, or towed docking stations. The proposed techniques are studied in a simulation setting, taking into account the rich number of aforementioned scenarios

    Autonomous Deep Sea Mining Exploration: The EU ROBUST Project Control Framework

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    This paper presents the control framework developed within the Horizon 2020 ROBUST project aimed at building an autonomous system for exploring deep sea mining sites. First, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle analyzes the initial zone of interest with the aim of finding a sub area with the highest probability to contain a manganese nodule field. When such an area is found, a low altitude survey is performed. When a possible nodule is detected, the vehicle lands on the seafloor, allowing a dedicated sensor mounted on the manipulator's end-effector to perform the nodule analysis.This work presents the ROBUST control framework and the task priority based kinematic used for its implementation. In addition, software in the loop simulation, dry and pool test results are shown to validate the control framework addressed

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

    Control and Perception Framework for Deep Sea Mining Exploration

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    This paper presents the control and perception framework used in the ROBUST EU Horizon 2020 project, aimed at integrate different technologies for developing an underwater autonomous robotic system for exploring deep-sea mining sites. The vehicle firstly collects data of the initial zone of interest and it selects a sub area which is the most probable to contain a manganese nodule field; then it carries out a low altitude survey. When a possible nodule is detected by the cameras, the vehicle lands on the seafloor, allowing the following fixed based manipulation which is designed to perform the nodule analysis. The work reports the implemented control and perception architecture and the preliminary pool experiments results.</p

    Mitomycin C in highly myopic eyes - Author reply

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    Ophthalmology. 2005 Feb;112(2):208-18; discussion 219. Mitomycin C modulation of corneal wound healing after photorefractive keratectomy in highly myopic eyes. Gambato C, Ghirlando A, Moretto E, Busato F, Midena E. SourceRefractive Surgery Service and Antimetabolite Therapy Research Unit, Department of Ophthalmology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy. Abstract PURPOSE: To evaluate the role of topical mitomycin C in corneal wound healing (CWH) after photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) in highly myopic eyes. DESIGN: Prospective, double-masked, randomized clinical trial. PARTICIPANTS: Seventy-two eyes of 36 patients affected by high (>7 diopters) myopia. METHODS: In each patient, one eye was randomly assigned to PRK with intraoperative topical 0.02% mitomycin C application, and the fellow eye was treated with a placebo. Postoperatively, mitomycin C-treated eyes received artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months), whereas the fellow eye was treated with fluorometholone sodium 2% and artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA) and best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), contrast sensitivity, manifest refraction, and biomicroscopy. Contrast sensitivity was determined using the Pelli-Robson chart. Corneal confocal microscopy documented CWH. RESULTS: Mean follow-up was 18 months (range, 12-36). No side effects or toxic effects were documented. At 12-month follow-up examination, UCVAs (logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution) were 0.4+/-0.48 and 0.5+/-0.53 (P = .03) in mitomycin C-treated eyes and corticosteroid-treated eyes, respectively. At 1 year, corneal haze developed in 20% of corticosteroid-treated eyes, versus 0% of mitomycin C-treated eyes. At 12, 24, and 36 months, corneal confocal microscopy showed activated keratocytes and extracellular matrix significantly more evident in untreated eyes (Ps = 0.004, 0.024, and 0.046, respectively). CONCLUSION: Topical intraoperative application of 0.02% mitomycin C can reduce haze formation in highly myopic eyes undergoing PRK. Comment in Ophthalmology. 2006 Feb;113(2):357; author reply 357-8

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We 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

    Decoupled Sampling-Based Motion Planning for Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles

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    There is increasing interest in the deployment and operation of multiple autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs) for a number of challenging scientific and commercial operational mission scenarios. Some of the missions, such as geotechnical surveying and 3D marine habitat mapping, require that a number of heterogeneous vehicles operate simultaneously in small areas, often in close proximity of each other. In these circumstances safety, reliability, and efficient multiple vehicle operation are key ingredients for mission success. Additionally, the deployment and operation of multiple AMVs at sea are extremely costly in terms of the logistics and human resources required for mission supervision, often during extended periods of time. These costs can be greatly minimized by automating the deployment and initial steering of a vehicle fleet to a predetermined configuration, in preparation for the ensuing mission, taking into account operational constraints. This is one of the core issues addressed in the scope of the Widely Scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology project (WiMUST), an EU Horizon 2020 initiative for underwater robotics research.WiMUST uses a team of cooperative autonomous marine robots, some of which towing streamers equipped with hydrophones, acting as intelligent sensing and communicating nodes of a reconfigurable moving acoustic network. In WiMUST, the AMVs maintain a fixed geometric formation through cooperative navigation and motion control. Formation initialization requires that all the AMVs start from scattered positions in the water and maneuver so as to arrive at required target configuration points at the same time in a completely automatic manner. This paper describes the decoupled prioritized vehicle motion planner developed in the scope of WiMUST that, together with an existing system for trajectory tracking, affords a fleet of vehicles the above capabilities, while ensuring inter-vehicle collision and streamer entanglement avoidance. Tests with a fleet of seven marine vehicles show the efficacy of the system planner developed

    A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams

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    We create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

    A 0.12mm<sup>2</sup> Wien-Bridge Temperature Sensor with 0.1°C (3σ) Inaccuracy from -40°C to 180°C

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    Resistor-based temperature sensors can achieve much higher resolution and energy efficiency than conventional BJT-based sensors [1], but they typically occupy more area (&gt; 0.25 mm 2 ) and have lower operating temperatures (le 125 {circ} {C}) [2]-[4]. This work describes a 0.12mm 2 resistor-based sensor that uses a Wien-bridge (WB) filter to achieve 0.1 {circ} {C} (3 sigma) inaccuracy from - 40 {circ} {C} to 180 {circ} {C}. Compared to a state-of-the-art WB sensor [4], it occupies 6 × less area and achieves comparable relative accuracy over a 76% wider operating range. Session 10.3 Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Electronic InstrumentationMicroelectronic

    A ±25A Versatile Shunt-Based Current Sensor with 10kHz Bandwidth and ±0.25% Gain Error from -40°C to 85°C Using 2-Current Calibration

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    Accurate current sensing is critical in many industrial applications, such as battery management and motor control. Precise shunt-based current sensors have been reported with gain errors of less than 1% over the industrial temperature range (-40°C to 85°C) [1]–[4]. However, since they are intended for coulomb counting, their bandwidth is limited to a few tens of Hz, making them unsuitable for battery impedance or motor-current sensing. This paper presents a current sensor with a wide (10kHz) bandwidth and a tunable temperature compensation scheme (TCS), which allows it to be flexibly used with different types of shunts while maintaining high accuracy. A low-cost room-temperature calibration scheme is proposed to optimize gain flatness over temperature by exploiting the shunt's self-heating at large currents. Over the industrial temperature range and a ±25A current range, it achieves state-of-the-art gain error (±0.25%) with both low-cost PCB and stable metal-alloy shunts.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Electronic InstrumentationMicroelectronic
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