Comparison of Hough Transform and Mean Shift Algorithm for Estimation of the Orientation Angle of Industrial Data Matrix Codes

In automatic manufacturing and assembling of mechanical, electrical and electronic parts one needs to reliably identify the position of components and to extract the information of these components. Data Matrix Codes (DMC) are established by these days in many areas of industrial manufacturing thanks to their concentration of information on small spaces. In today’s usually order-related industry, where increased tracing requirements prevail, they offer further advantages over other identification systems. This underlines in an impressive way the necessity of a robust code reading system for detecting DMC on the components in factories. This paper compares two methods for estimating the angle of orientation of Data Matrix Codes: one method based on the Hough Transform and the other based on the Mean Shift Algorithm. We concentrate on Data Matrix Codes in industrial environment, punched, milled, lasered or etched on different materials in arbitrary orientation.

An Interactive 3D Experience for the Creation of Personalized Styling

This research proposes an Interactive 3D Experience to enhance customer value in the fantasy era. As products reach maturity, they become more similar in the range of functions that they provide. This leads to competition via reduced retail price and ultimately reduced profitability. A competitive design method is therefore needed that can produce higher value products. An Enhanced Value Experience has been identified that can assist designers to provide quality products and to give them a unique positioning. On the basis of this value opportunity, the method of Interactive 3D Experience has been formulated and applied to the domain of retail furniture. Through this, customers can create their own personalized styling via the interactive 3D platform.

Dual Mode Navigation for Two-Wheeled Robot

This project relates to a two-wheeled self balancing robot for transferring loads on different locations along a path. This robot specifically functions as a dual mode navigation to navigate efficiently along a desired path. First, as a plurality of distance sensors mounted at both sides of the body for collecting information on tilt angle of the body and second, as a plurality of speed sensors mounted at the bottom of the body for collecting information of the velocity of the body in relative to the ground. A microcontroller for processing information collected from the sensors and configured to set the path and to balance the body automatically while a processor operatively coupled to the microcontroller and configured to compute change of the tilt and velocity of the body. A direct current motor operatively coupled to the microcontroller for controlling the wheels and characterized in that a remote control is operatively coupled to the microcontroller to operate the robot in dual navigation modes.

The Structure of Weakly Left C-wrpp Semigroups

In this paper, the class of weakly left C-wrpp semigroups which includes the class of weakly left C-rpp semigroups as a subclass is introduced. To particularly show that the spined product of a left C-wrpp semigroup and a right normal band which is a weakly left C-wrpp semifroup by virtue of left C-full Ehremann cyber groups recently obtained by authors Li-Shum, results obtained by Tang and Du-Shum are extended and strengthened.

Wireless Sensor Network: Characteristics and Architectures

An information procuring and processing emerging technology wireless sensor network (WSN) Consists of autonomous nodes with versatile devices underpinned by applications. Nodes are equipped with different capabilities such as sensing, computing, actuation and wireless communications etc. based on application requirements. A WSN application ranges from military implementation in the battlefield, environmental monitoring, health sector as well as emergency response of surveillance. The nodes are deployed independently to cooperatively monitor the physical and environmental conditions. The architecture of WSN differs based on the application requirements and focus on low cost, flexibility, fault tolerance capability, deployment process as well as conserve energy. In this paper we have present the characteristics, architecture design objective and architecture of WSN

Measurement of Rainwater Chemical Composition in Malaysia based on Ion Chromatography Method

Air quality in Setapak district of Kuala Lumpur was studied by analysing the rainwater chemical composition using ion chromatography method. Twelve sampling sites were selected and 120 rainwater samples were collected in the period of 10 weeks. The results of this study were compared to the earlier published data and the evaluation showed that the NO3 - ion concentration increased from 0.41 to 3.32 ppm, while SO4 2- ion concentration increased from 0.39 to 3.26 ppm over the past two decades that is mostly due to rapid urban development of the city. However, it was found that the chemical composition for both residential and industrial areas does not have significant difference. Most of the rainwater samples showed alkaline pH (pH > 5.6). The possible factors for such alkaline pH in rainwater samples are assumed to be the marine sources, biomass burning and alkaline character of soil particles.

Variable Structure Model Reference Adaptive Control for Vehicle Steering System

A variable structure model reference adaptive control (VS-MRAC) strategy for active steering assistance of a two wheel steering car is proposed. An ideal steering system with fixed properties and moving on an ideal road is used as the reference model, and the active steering assistance system is forced to attain the same behavior as the reference model. The proposed system can treat the nonlinear relationships between the side slip angles and lateral forces on tire, and the uncertainties on friction of the road surface, whose compensation are very important under critical situations. Simulation results show improvements on yaw rate and side slip.

The Integration between Transportation Solutions, Economic Development and Community Development as an Approach for Sustainability – A Case Study of Curitiba, Brazil

Sustainability and sustainable development have been the main theme of many international conferences, such the UN Rio de Janeiro 1992 Earth Summit This was followed by the appearance of the global conferences at the late of the nineties and the early of 2000 to confirm the importance of the sustainable development .it was focused on the importance of the economic development as it is considered an effective tool in the operations of the sustainable development. Industry plays a critical role in technological innovations and research and development activities, which are crucial for the economic and social development of any country. Transportation and mobility are an important part or urban economics and the quality of life. To analyze urban transportation and its environmental impacts, a comprehensive approach is needed. So this research aims to apply new approach for the development of the urban communities that insure the continuity and facing the deterioration. This approach aims to integrate sustainable transport solutions with economic development and community development. For that purpose we will concentrate on one of the most sustainable cities in the world (Curitiba in Brazil) which provides the world with a model in how to integrate sustainable transport considerations into business development, road infrastructure development, and local community development.

Outcomes of Teenage Mothers at Dankhunthot Hospital, Nakhon Ratchasima

The aim of this study was to investigate the pregnancy outcomes of teenage mothers at DanKhunThot hospital, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted in 573 of teenage pregnant from charts reviewed from 1st October 2010-31st March, 2012. Data were analyzed by frequency distribution, mean and Standard Deviation. The results shown several problems and negatives outcomes of pregnancy in teenager such as not attended prenatal care, Low birth weight infants, death fetus in utero and other complications. The results of this study can be utilized in the development of prenatal, perinatal and post natal care services, especially in DanKhunthot Hospital contexts. Moreover, the results were present to the District Health Care committees in order to enhance health care service system for teenage pregnancy of DanKhunthot District in further.

Extracting Multiword Expressions in Machine Translation from English to Urdu using Relational Data Approach

Machine Translation, (hereafter in this document referred to as the "MT") faces a lot of complex problems from its origination. Extracting multiword expressions is also one of the complex problems in MT. Finding multiword expressions during translating a sentence from English into Urdu, through existing solutions, takes a lot of time and occupies system resources. We have designed a simple relational data approach, in which we simply set a bit in dictionary (database) for multiword, to find and handle multiword expression. This approach handles multiword efficiently.

Column Size for R.C. Frames with High Drift

A method to predict the column size for displacement based design of reinforced concrete frame buildings with higher target inter storey drift is reported here. The column depth derived from empirical relation as a function of given beam section, target inter-story drift, building plan features and common displacement based design parameters is used. Regarding the high drift requirement, a minimum column-beam moment capacity ratio is maintained during capacity design. The method is used in designing four, eight and twelve story frame buildings with displacement based design for three percent target inter storey drift. Non linear time history analysis of the designed buildings are performed under five artificial ground motions to show that the columns are found elastic enough to avoid column sway mechanism assuring that for the design the column size can be used with or without minor changes.

Aspects to Motivate users of a Design Engineering Wiki to Share their Knowledge

Industrial design engineering is an information and knowledge intensive job. Although Wikipedia offers a lot of this information, design engineers are better served with a wiki tailored to their job, offering information in a compact manner and functioning as a design tool. For that reason WikID has been developed. However for the viability of a wiki, an active user community is essential. The main subject of this paper is a study to the influence of the communication and the contents of WikID on the user-s willingness to contribute. At first the theory about a website-s first impression, general usability guidelines and user motivation in an online community is studied. Using this theory, the aspects of the current site are analyzed on their suitability. These results have been verified with a questionnaire amongst 66 industrial design engineers (or students industrial design engineering). The main conclusion is that design engineers are enchanted with the existence of WikID and its knowledge structure (taxonomy) but this structure has not become clear without any guidance. In other words, the knowledge structure is very helpful for inspiring and guiding design engineers through their tailored knowledge domain in WikID but this taxonomy has to be better communicated on the main page. Thereby the main page needs to be fitted more to the target group preferences.

Thermal Management of Space Power Electronics using TLM-3D

When designing satellites, one of the major issues aside for designing its primary subsystems is to devise its thermal. The thermal management of satellites requires solving different sets of issues with regards to modelling. If the satellite is well conditioned all other parts of the satellite will have higher temperature no matter what. The main issue of thermal modelling for satellite design is really making sure that all the other points of the satellite will be within the temperature limits they are designed. The insertion of power electronics in aerospace technologies is becoming widespread and the modern electronic systems used in space must be reliable and efficient with thermal management unaffected by outer space constraints. Many advanced thermal management techniques have been developed in recent years that have application in high power electronic systems. This paper presents a Three-Dimensional Modal Transmission Line Matrix (3D-TLM) implementation of transient heat flow in space power electronics. In such kind of components heat dissipation and good thermal management are essential. Simulation provides the cheapest tool to investigate all aspects of power handling. The 3DTLM has been successful in modeling heat diffusion problems and has proven to be efficient in terms of stability and complex geometry. The results show a three-dimensional visualisation of self-heating phenomena in the device affected by outer space constraints, and will presents possible approaches for increasing the heat dissipation capability of the power modules.

The Study of Chain Initiation Effect on the Direct Initiation of Detonation

In this research, effect of combustion reaction mechanism on direct initiation of detonation has been studied numerically. For this purpose, reaction mechanism has been simulated by using a three-step chemical kinetics model. The reaction scheme consists sequentially of a chain-initiation and chainbranching step, followed by a temperature -independent chaintermination. In a previous research, the effect of chain-branching on the direct initiation of detonation is studied. In this research effect of chain-initiation on direct initiation of detonation is investigated. For the investigation, first a characteristic time (τ) for each step of mechanism, which includes effect of different kinetics parameters, is defined. Then the effect of characteristic time of chain-initiation (τI) on critical initiation energy is studied. It is seen that increasing τI, causes critical initiation energy to be increased. Drawing detonation's shock pressure diagrams for different cases, shows that in small value of τI , kinetics has more important effect on the behavior of the wave.

Swarmed Discriminant Analysis for Multifunction Prosthesis Control

One of the approaches enabling people with amputated limbs to establish some sort of interface with the real world includes the utilization of the myoelectric signal (MES) from the remaining muscles of those limbs. The MES can be used as a control input to a multifunction prosthetic device. In this control scheme, known as the myoelectric control, a pattern recognition approach is usually utilized to discriminate between the MES signals that belong to different classes of the forearm movements. Since the MES is recorded using multiple channels, the feature vector size can become very large. In order to reduce the computational cost and enhance the generalization capability of the classifier, a dimensionality reduction method is needed to identify an informative yet moderate size feature set. This paper proposes a new fuzzy version of the well known Fisher-s Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) feature projection technique. Furthermore, based on the fact that certain muscles might contribute more to the discrimination process, a novel feature weighting scheme is also presented by employing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for estimating the weight of each feature. The new method, called PSOFLDA, is tested on real MES datasets and compared with other techniques to prove its superiority.

Applications of Support Vector Machines on Smart Phone Systems for Emotional Speech Recognition

An emotional speech recognition system for the applications on smart phones was proposed in this study to combine with 3G mobile communications and social networks to provide users and their groups with more interaction and care. This study developed a mechanism using the support vector machines (SVM) to recognize the emotions of speech such as happiness, anger, sadness and normal. The mechanism uses a hierarchical classifier to adjust the weights of acoustic features and divides various parameters into the categories of energy and frequency for training. In this study, 28 commonly used acoustic features including pitch and volume were proposed for training. In addition, a time-frequency parameter obtained by continuous wavelet transforms was also used to identify the accent and intonation in a sentence during the recognition process. The Berlin Database of Emotional Speech was used by dividing the speech into male and female data sets for training. According to the experimental results, the accuracies of male and female test sets were increased by 4.6% and 5.2% respectively after using the time-frequency parameter for classifying happy and angry emotions. For the classification of all emotions, the average accuracy, including male and female data, was 63.5% for the test set and 90.9% for the whole data set.

A Practical Distributed String Matching Algorithm Architecture and Implementation

Traditional parallel single string matching algorithms are always based on PRAM computation model. Those algorithms concentrate on the cost optimal design and the theoretical speed. Based on the distributed string matching algorithm proposed by CHEN, a practical distributed string matching algorithm architecture is proposed in this paper. And also an improved single string matching algorithm based on a variant Boyer-Moore algorithm is presented. We implement our algorithm on the above architecture and the experiments prove that it is really practical and efficient on distributed memory machine. Its computation complexity is O(n/p + m), where n is the length of the text, and m is the length of the pattern, and p is the number of the processors.

A Recommender Agent to Support Virtual Learning Activities

This article describes the implementation of an intelligent agent that provides recommendations for educational resources in a virtual learning environment (VLE). It aims to support pending (undeveloped) student learning activities. It begins by analyzing the proposed VLE data model entities in the recommender process. The pending student activities are then identified, which constitutes the input information for the agent. By using the attribute-based recommender technique, the information can be processed and resource recommendations can be obtained. These serve as support for pending activity development in the course. To integrate this technique, we used an ontology. This served as support for the semantic annotation of attributes and recommended files recovery.

Robust Position Control of an Electromechanical Actuator for Automotive Applications

In this paper, the position control of an electronic throttle actuator is outlined. The dynamic behavior of the actuator is described with the help of an uncertain plant model. This motivates the controller design based on the ideas of higher-order slidingmodes. As a consequence anti-chattering techniques can be omitted. It is shown that the same concept is applicable to estimate unmeasureable signals. The control law and the observer are implemented on an electronic control unit. Results achieved by numerical simulations and real world experiments are presented and discussed.

Is Cognitive Dissonance an Intrinsic Property of the Human Mind? An Experimental Solution to a Half-Century Debate

Cognitive Dissonance can be conceived both as a concept related to the tendency to avoid internal contradictions in certain situations, and as a higher order theory about information processing in the human mind. In the last decades, this last sense has been strongly surpassed by the former, as nearly all experiment on the matter discuss cognitive dissonance as an output of motivational contradictions. In that sense, the question remains: is cognitive dissonance a process intrinsically associated with the way that the mind processes information, or is it caused by such specific contradictions? Objective: To evaluate the effects of cognitive dissonance in the absence of rewards or any mechanisms to manipulate motivation. Method: To solve this question, we introduce a new task, the hypothetical social arrays paradigm, which was applied to 50 undergraduate students. Results: Our findings support the perspective that the human mind shows a tendency to avoid internal dissonance even when there are no rewards or punishment involved. Moreover, our findings also suggest that this principle works outside the conscious level.