7 research outputs found

    Indoor Positioning and Navigation

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    In recent years, rapid development in robotics, mobile, and communication technologies has encouraged many studies in the field of localization and navigation in indoor environments. An accurate localization system that can operate in an indoor environment has considerable practical value, because it can be built into autonomous mobile systems or a personal navigation system on a smartphone for guiding people through airports, shopping malls, museums and other public institutions, etc. Such a system would be particularly useful for blind people. Modern smartphones are equipped with numerous sensors (such as inertial sensors, cameras, and barometers) and communication modules (such as WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, LTE/5G, and UWB capabilities), which enable the implementation of various localization algorithms, namely, visual localization, inertial navigation system, and radio localization. For the mapping of indoor environments and localization of autonomous mobile sysems, LIDAR sensors are also frequently used in addition to smartphone sensors. Visual localization and inertial navigation systems are sensitive to external disturbances; therefore, sensor fusion approaches can be used for the implementation of robust localization algorithms. These have to be optimized in order to be computationally efficient, which is essential for real-time processing and low energy consumption on a smartphone or robot

    Digital Design Literacy in K-12 Education

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    This dissertation addresses the introduction, sustainment and articulation of digital design literacy in K-12 education. It is the result of my four years of research in the [email protected] research and development project. Within this project, I have researched the topic through constructive design research experiments on both students’ and teachers’ experiences and competencies with digital design as new subject matter in K-12. The contributions presented in this dissertation are positioned within the emerging research field of making in education. The contributions concern new possibilities that making in education creates for K–12 students to develop competencies to design and critique digital technologies. The point of departure for my work was to explore how the implementation of maker settings and technologies might provide novel ways to combine constructionism, design and digital technology with the intention of having students develop digital design literacy. Hence, this dissertation is a response to the question of how to educate K–12 students to understand, use, critically reflect on, and design digital technologies through the emerging educational possibilities enabled by maker activities, maker settings, and maker technologies. The dissertation is comprised of five research papers and two reports framed by an overview that sum up the arguments made in the papers and the contributions from these come together as a whole. The first contribution is a conceptual understanding of digital design literacy. I lay out a genealogy of traditional literacy toward new literacies to legitimize digital design as a new literacy in K–12 education. I contribute an understanding of how design and digital literacies are interrelated, can mutually benefit one another, and be synthesized and articulated holistically as integrated digital design literacy. The second contribution are quantitative measures of the state-of-the-actual in terms of students’ digital, design, and critical literacy and an assessment tool for quantitatively evaluating students’ stance towards inquiry, which I argue to be an important competence of digital design literacy. The third contribution is an understanding of three crucial aspects which must be considered when developing teachers’ capability to teach digital design literacy. I point to impediments for such teaching and to existing practicing teachers’ limited possibilities to meet demands presented by teaching digital design literacy. I contribute a framework for educating reflective design educators who can support students in developing digital design literacy. The accumulation of these three contributions has resulted in what is the main contribution of this dissertation overview: The Digital Design Literacy Framework. The framework contributes a legitmaziation, articulation and operational definitions of digital design as a new literacy and its underlying competencies

    Experimental Evaluation of Growing and Pruning Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks Trained with Extended Information Filter

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    In this paper we test Extended Information Filter (EIF) for sequential training of Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks with growing and pruning ability (HBF-GP). The HBF neuron allows different scaling of input dimensions to provide better generalization property when dealing with complex nonlinear problems in engineering practice. The main intuition behind HBF is in generalization of Gaussian type of neuron that applies Mahalanobis-like distance as a distance metrics between input training sample and prototype vector. We exploit concept of neuron’s significance and allow growing and pruning of HBF neurons during sequential learning process. From engineer’s perspective, EIF is attractive for training of neural networks because it allows a designer to have scarce initial knowledge of the system/problem. Extensive experimental study shows that HBF neural network trained with EIF achieves same prediction error and compactness of network topology when compared to EKF, but without the need to know initial state uncertainty, which is its main advantage over EKF

    Bioinspired metaheuristic algorithms for global optimization

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    This paper presents concise comparison study of newly developed bioinspired algorithms for global optimization problems. Three different metaheuristic techniques, namely Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are investigated and implemented in Matlab environment. These methods are compared on four unimodal and multimodal nonlinear functions in order to find global optimum values. Computational results indicate that GWO outperforms other intelligent techniques, and that all aforementioned algorithms can be successfully used for optimization of continuous functions

    From Bugs to Decision Support – Leveraging Historical Issue Reports in Software Evolution

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    Software developers in large projects work in complex information landscapes and staying on top of all relevant software artifacts is an acknowledged challenge. As software systems often evolve over many years, a large number of issue reports is typically managed during the lifetime of a system, representing the units of work needed for its improvement, e.g., defects to fix, requested features, or missing documentation. Efficient management of incoming issue reports requires the successful navigation of the information landscape of a project. In this thesis, we address two tasks involved in issue management: Issue Assignment (IA) and Change Impact Analysis (CIA). IA is the early task of allocating an issue report to a development team, and CIA is the subsequent activity of identifying how source code changes affect the existing software artifacts. While IA is fundamental in all large software projects, CIA is particularly important to safety-critical development. Our solution approach, grounded on surveys of industry practice as well as scientific literature, is to support navigation by combining information retrieval and machine learning into Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE). While the sheer number of incoming issue reports might challenge the overview of a human developer, our techniques instead benefit from the availability of ever-growing training data. We leverage the volume of issue reports to develop accurate decision support for software evolution. We evaluate our proposals both by deploying an RSSE in two development teams, and by simulation scenarios, i.e., we assess the correctness of the RSSEs' output when replaying the historical inflow of issue reports. In total, more than 60,000 historical issue reports are involved in our studies, originating from the evolution of five proprietary systems for two companies. Our results show that RSSEs for both IA and CIA can help developers navigate large software projects, in terms of locating development teams and software artifacts. Finally, we discuss how to support the transfer of our results to industry, focusing on addressing the context dependency of our tool support by systematically tuning parameters to a specific operational setting

    A feasibility study for the development of sustainable theoretical framework for smart water-energy bathroom unit

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    One of the major issues facing the world in the 21st century is climate change. However, sustainability has become a crucial concept to combat extreme consumption and utilization of environmental resources leading to climate change. The bathroom has been estimated to be the principal user of environmental resources in households in the consumption of water, electricity and gas. Therefore, the challenge that how a combined water and energy saving unit in the bathroom will contribute to the sustainability of the houses remain unresolved. This study challenges and extends existing knowledge on sustainability related to the smart bathroom systems from social, environmental, and economic standpoints to achieve a highly efficient water and energy consumption in the bathroom. This is with regards to the potential which the renewable-based options, advanced smart control techniques and profitability measures of bathroom reinforces the three pillars of sustainability. This study reveals that a range of technological challenges are based on the individual components and technologies in the bathroom and concludes that a holistic approach is required for an effective modelling in the bathroom. This allows the examination of energy and water flows in the complex systems, shaped by various social, economic and environmental forces. The method this thesis presented adopts a conceptual modelling approach that is based on holistic modelling to design and implement a bathroom unit that is sustainable and smart. The system components assume three flat plate solar collectors, a solar heat exchanger, a pre-heating storage tank, main hot storage tank with auxiliary boiler system, mixing devices and two circulators to collectively improve the overall system efficiency. Parametric analysis was also conducted to know how change in variable parameters like location, load and switch-on temperatures will affect the performance of the system designed. Furthermore, a smart control for the bathroom system is designed to use the fuzzy logic controller, it was used because of its easy adaptability to the bathroom users’ pattern. While the result shows that solar total annual energy supplied to the bathroom system is 4,878 kWh and the total annual energy consumed by the system is 8,675 kWh with average annual system performance of 0.95. The solar thermal systems are still able to save between 50% and 60% of the energy that would have been required annually to heat up the hot water using conventional energy sources. After optimizing the system, the bathroom system completely provided an overall annual CO2 savings of 1,398 kg. This study has shown the contribution of renewable energy source and smart control technologies in the bathroom and the significant contribution it makes to the water-energy nexus, levels of energy consumption and carbon emissions. The outcome of the fuzzy logic control design shows that the controller stabilizes and shows transient at the user desired temperature (20°C and 25°C) and flowrate (0.5 l/sec and 0.9 l/sec). The control has little overshoot, steady state error and stabilises quickly to the precise user desired flowrate and temperature hereby enhancing the efficiency of the reference system. This study has established a strong quantitative and qualitative links between three dimensions of sustainability. This has made a major contribution to the design of sustainable development and infrastructure by developing a sustainable bathroom framework that have been presented in this study

    The observer-based technique for requirements validation in embedded real-time systems

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