StrathSat-R : Deploying inflatable CubeSat structures in micro gravity

This paper presents the concepts, objectives and design of a student-led sounding rocket experiment which shall test novel inflatable devices in space conditions. This experiment is envisaged as the first step towards developing a CubeSat programme at the University of Strathclyde, which can exploit the novel concepts developed and the technical skills gained. The experiment itself aims to test novel, student developed, inflatable space structures in micro gravity and reduced pressure conditions. It consists of three distinct sections, the ejection housing on the rocket and the two ejectable modules that are based on CubeSat architecture. Shortly before reaching apogee, the two modules are ejected from the rocket and will deploy their own inflating structure during free flight. After landing, the ejectable modules recovery will rely upon a GPS position relayed to the team from the module by Globalstar transmission and a RF beacon for tracking with the recovery helicopter. The two modules carry two different structures resulting in distinct mission objectives: The aim of FRODO is to deploy an experimental passive de-orbiting system for high altitude spacecraft which will in the future utilise solar radiation pressure for orbit removal. The aim of SAM is to serve as a technology demonstrator for the residual air deployment method of a smart bio-inspired space structure. This paper contains details about the science objectives of the mission and how they will be achieved, its experimental design and the management of the student-led project

The Allen Telescope Array: The First Widefield, Panchromatic, Snapshot Radio Camera for Radio Astronomy and SETI

The first 42 elements of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA-42) are beginning to deliver data at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California. Scientists and engineers are actively exploiting all of the flexibility designed into this innovative instrument for simultaneously conducting surveys of the astrophysical sky and conducting searches for distant technological civilizations. This paper summarizes the design elements of the ATA, the cost savings made possible by the use of COTS components, and the cost/performance trades that eventually enabled this first snapshot radio camera. The fundamental scientific program of this new telescope is varied and exciting; some of the first astronomical results will be discussed.Comment: Special Issue of Proceedings of the IEEE: "Advances in Radio Telescopes", Baars,J. Thompson,R., D'Addario, L., eds, 2009, in pres

Development of FPGA based Standalone Tunable Fuzzy Logic Controllers

Soft computing techniques differ from conventional (hard) computing, in that unlike hard computing, it is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. In effect, the role model for soft computing is the human mind and its ability to address day-to-day problems. The principal constituents of Soft Computing (SC) are Fuzzy Logic (FL), Evolutionary Computation (EC), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This thesis presents a generic hardware architecture for type-I and type-II standalone tunable Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The designed FLC system can be remotely configured or tuned according to expert operated knowledge and deployed in different applications to replace traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controllers. This re-configurability is added as a feature to existing FLCs in literature. The FLC parameters which are needed for tuning purpose are mainly input range, output range, number of inputs, number of outputs, the parameters of the membership functions like slope and center points, and an If-Else rule base for the fuzzy inference process. Online tuning enables users to change these FLC parameters in real-time and eliminate repeated hardware programming whenever there is a need to change. Realization of these systems in real-time is difficult as the computational complexity increases exponentially with an increase in the number of inputs. Hence, the challenge lies in reducing the rule base significantly such that the inference time and the throughput time is perceivable for real-time applications. To achieve these objectives, Modified Rule Active 2 Overlap Membership Function (MRA2-OMF), Modified Rule Active 3 Overlap Membership Function (MRA3-OMF), Modified Rule Active 4 Overlap Membership Function (MRA4-OMF), and Genetic Algorithm (GA) base rule optimization methods are proposed and implemented. These methods reduce the effective rules without compromising system accuracy and improve the cycle time in terms of Fuzzy Logic Inferences Per Second (FLIPS). In the proposed system architecture, the FLC is segmented into three independent modules, fuzzifier, inference engine with rule base, and defuzzifier. Fuzzy systems employ fuzzifier to convert the real world crisp input into the fuzzy output. In type 2 fuzzy systems there are two fuzzifications happen simultaneously from upper and lower membership functions (UMF and LMF) with subtractions and divisions. Non-restoring, very high radix, and newton raphson approximation are most widely used division algorithms in hardware implementations. However, these prevalent methods have a cost of more latency. In order to overcome this problem, a successive approximation division algorithm based type 2 fuzzifier is introduced. It has been observed that successive approximation based fuzzifier computation is faster than the other type 2 fuzzifier. A hardware-software co-design is established on Virtex 5 LX110T FPGA board. The MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) acquires the fuzzy (type 1 or type 2) parameters from users and a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) is dedicated to data communication between the hardware and the fuzzy toolbox. This GUI is provided to initiate control, input, rule transfer, and then to observe the crisp output on the computer. A proposed method which can support canonical fuzzy IF-THEN rules, which includes special cases of the fuzzy rule base is included in Digital Fuzzy Logic Controller (DFLC) architecture. For this purpose, a mealy state machine is incorporated into the design. The proposed FLCs are implemented on Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T. DFLC peripheral integration with Micro-Blaze (MB) processor through Processor Logic Bus (PLB) is established for Intellectual Property (IP) core validation. The performance of the proposed systems are compared to Fuzzy Toolbox of MATLAB. Analysis of these designs is carried out by using Hardware-In-Loop (HIL) test to control various plant models in MATLAB/Simulink environments

Applications of MATLAB in Science and Engineering

The book consists of 24 chapters illustrating a wide range of areas where MATLAB tools are applied. These areas include mathematics, physics, chemistry and chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological (molecular biology) and medical sciences, communication and control systems, digital signal, image and video processing, system modeling and simulation. Many interesting problems have been included throughout the book, and its contents will be beneficial for students and professionals in wide areas of interest

Intelligent Embedded Software: New Perspectives and Challenges

Intelligent embedded systems (IES) represent a novel and promising generation of embedded systems (ES). IES have the capacity of reasoning about their external environments and adapt their behavior accordingly. Such systems are situated in the intersection of two different branches that are the embedded computing and the intelligent computing. On the other hand, intelligent embedded software (IESo) is becoming a large part of the engineering cost of intelligent embedded systems. IESo can include some artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems such as expert systems, neural networks and other sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) models to guarantee some important characteristics such as self-learning, self-optimizing and self-repairing. Despite the widespread of such systems, some design challenging issues are arising. Designing a resource-constrained software and at the same time intelligent is not a trivial task especially in a real-time context. To deal with this dilemma, embedded system researchers have profited from the progress in semiconductor technology to develop specific hardware to support well AI models and render the integration of AI with the embedded world a reality

Real-time multi-camera video acquisition and processing platform for ADAS

The paper presents the design of a real-time and low-cost embedded system for image acquisition and processing in Advanced Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS). The system adopts a multi-camera architecture to provide a panoramic view of the objects surrounding the vehicle. Fish-eye lenses are used to achieve a large Field of View (FOV). Since they introduce radial distortion of the images projected on the sensors, a real-time algorithm for their correction is also implemented in a pre-processor. An FPGA-based hardware implementation, re-using IP macrocells for several ADAS algorithms, allows for real-time processing of input streams from VGA automotive CMOS cameras

A FPGA/DSP based ultrasound system for tumor detection

This work presents a method of detection of size and location of tumor using ultrasound transmission. The system utilizes Quantitative Ultrasound (QUS) which means sending an ultrasound signal from a transmitter and receiving it at multiple receivers. This received signal is analyzed for echogenic as well as echolucent tumors to differentiate between the two along with non-tumorous sample and also for delay, signal distortion to determine the size/location of the tumor. This analysis is further implemented using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technologies. The proposed detection system utilizes Low Transient Pulse (LTP) technique. In this co-design architecture, the DSP carries out analysis of received demodulated signal at a lower speed while the FPGA runs at 62.5MHz for the generation of LTP signal and to demodulate bandpass ultrasonic signal sampled at 1MHz which interrupts DSP at every 1µS. This work elaborates the implementation of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) receiver on FPGA for received signal from ultrasound detector. LTP is applied to the tumor samples through the transmitter and the received signal at ultrasonic receiver is passed through QAM to get different maxima (peaks) which are then further used for calculation of the location and subsequently, the size of the tumor using DSP. This dual platform co-design demonstrates application of a FPGA/DSP platform for the generation of low transient pulse as well as processing of the received signal

Design and Implementation of a High-Speed Readout and Control System for a Digital Tracking Calorimeter for proton CT

Particle therapy, a non-invasive technique for treating cancer using protons and light ions, has become more and more common. For example, a particle treatment facility is currently being built, in Bergen, Norway. Proton beams deposit a large fraction of their energy at the end of their paths, i.e., the delivered dose can be focused on the tumor, sparing nearby tissue with a low entry and almost no exit dose. A novel imaging modality using protons promises to overcome some limitations of particle therapy and allowing to fully exploit its potential. Being able to position the so-called Bragg peak accurately inside the tumor is a major advantage of charged particles, but incomplete knowledge about a crucial tissue property, the stopping power, limits its precision. A proton CT scanner provides direct information about the stopping power. It has the potential to reduce range uncertainties significantly, but no proton CT system has yet been shown to be suitable for clinical use. The aim of the Bergen proton CT project is to design and build a proton CT scanner that overcomes most of the critical limitations of the currently existing prototypes and which can be operated in clinical settings. A proton CT prototype, the Digital Tracking Calorimeter, is being developed as a range telescope consisting of high-granularity pixel sensors. The prototype is a combined position-sensitive detector and residual energy-range detector which will allow a substantial rate of protons, speeding up the imaging process. The detector is single-sided, meaning that it employs information from the beam delivery system to omit tracker layers in front of the phantom. The detector operates by tracking the charged particles traversing through the detector material behind the phantom. The proton CT prototype will be used to determine the feasibility of using proton CT to increase the dose planning accuracy for particle treatment of cancer cells. The detector is designed as a telescope of 43 layers of sensors, where the two front layers act as the position-sensitive detector providing an accurate vector of each incoming particle. The remaining layers are used to measure the residual energy of each particle by observing in which layer they stop and by using the cluster size in each layer. The Digital Tracking Calorimeter employs the ALPIDE sensor, a monolithic active pixel sensor, each utilizing a 1.2Gb/s data link. Each layer of 18×27 cm consists of 108 ALPIDE sensors, roughly corresponding to the width and height of the head of a grown person. The sensors are connected to intermediary transition boards that route the data and control links to dedicated readout electronics and supply the sensors with power. The readout unit is the main component of both the data acquisition and the detector control system. The power control unit controls the power supply and monitors the current usage of the sensors. Both of these devices are mainly implemented in FPGAs. The main purpose of this work has been to explore and implement possible design solutions for the proton CT electronics, including the front-end, as well as the readout electronics architecture. The resulting architecture is modular, allowing the further scale-up of the system in the future. A major obstacle to the design is the high amount of sensors and the corresponding high-speed data links. Thus, a large emphasis has been on the signal integrity of the front-end electronics and a dynamic phase alignment sampling method of the readout electronics firmware. The readout FPGA employs regular I/O pins for the high-speed data interface, instead of high-speed transceiver pins, which significantly reduces the magnitude of the data acquisition system. A consistent design approach with detailed and systematic verification of the FPGA firmware modules, along with a continuous integration build system, has resulted in a stable and highly adaptive system. Significant effort has been put into the testing of the various system components. This also includes the design and implementation of a set of production test tools for use during the manufacturing of the detector front-end.Doktorgradsavhandlin

NASA Tech Briefs, September 2012

Topics covered include: Beat-to-Beat Blood Pressure Monitor; Measurement Techniques for Clock Jitter; Lightweight, Miniature Inertial Measurement System; Optical Density Analysis of X-Rays Utilizing Calibration Tooling to Estimate Thickness of Parts; Fuel Cell/Electrochemical Cell Voltage Monitor; Anomaly Detection Techniques with Real Test Data from a Spinning Turbine Engine-Like Rotor; Measuring Air Leaks into the Vacuum Space of Large Liquid Hydrogen Tanks; Antenna Calibration and Measurement Equipment; Glass Solder Approach for Robust, Low-Loss, Fiber-to-Waveguide Coupling; Lightweight Metal Matrix Composite Segmented for Manufacturing High-Precision Mirrors; Plasma Treatment to Remove Carbon from Indium UV Filters; Telerobotics Workstation (TRWS) for Deep Space Habitats; Single-Pole Double-Throw MMIC Switches for a Microwave Radiometer; On Shaft Data Acquisition System (OSDAS); ASIC Readout Circuit Architecture for Large Geiger Photodiode Arrays; Flexible Architecture for FPGAs in Embedded Systems; Polyurea-Based Aerogel Monoliths and Composites; Resin-Impregnated Carbon Ablator: A New Ablative Material for Hyperbolic Entry Speeds; Self-Cleaning Particulate Prefilter Media; Modular, Rapid Propellant Loading System/Cryogenic Testbed; Compact, Low-Force, Low-Noise Linear Actuator; Loop Heat Pipe with Thermal Control Valve as a Variable Thermal Link; Process for Measuring Over-Center Distances; Hands-Free Transcranial Color Doppler Probe; Improving Balance Function Using Low Levels of Electrical Stimulation of the Balance Organs; Developing Physiologic Models for Emergency Medical Procedures Under Microgravity; PMA-Linked Fluorescence for Rapid Detection of Viable Bacterial Endospores; Portable Intravenous Fluid Production Device for Ground Use; Adaptation of a Filter Assembly to Assess Microbial Bioburden of Pressurant Within a Propulsion System; Multiplexed Force and Deflection Sensing Shell Membranes for Robotic Manipulators; Whispering Gallery Mode Optomechanical Resonator; Vision-Aided Autonomous Landing and Ingress of Micro Aerial Vehicles; Self-Sealing Wet Chemistry Cell for Field Analysis; General MACOS Interface for Modeling and Analysis for Controlled Optical Systems; Mars Technology Rover with Arm-Mounted Percussive Coring Tool, Microimager, and Sample-Handling Encapsulation Containerization Subsystem; Fault-Tolerant, Real-Time, Multi-Core Computer System; Water Detection Based on Object Reflections; SATPLOT for Analysis of SECCHI Heliospheric Imager Data; Plug-in Plan Tool v3.0.3.1; Frequency Correction for MIRO Chirp Transformation Spectroscopy Spectrum; Nonlinear Estimation Approach to Real-Time Georegistration from Aerial Images; Optimal Force Control of Vibro-Impact Systems for Autonomous Drilling Applications; Low-Cost Telemetry System for Small/Micro Satellites; Operator Interface and Control Software for the Reconfigurable Surface System Tri-ATHLETE; and Algorithms for Determining Physical Responses of Structures Under Load