Neurofuzzy controller based full vehicle nonlinear active suspension systems

To design a robust controller for active suspension systems is very important for guaranteeing the riding comfort for passengers and road handling quality for a vehicle. In this thesis, the mathematical model of full vehicle nonlinear active suspension systems with hydraulic actuators is derived to take into account all the motions of the vehicle and the nonlinearity behaviours of the active suspension system and hydraulic actuators. Four robust control types are designed and the comparisons among the robustness of those controllers against different disturbance types are investigated to select the best controller among them. The MATLAB SIMULINK toolboxes are used to simulate the proposed controllers with the controlled model and to display the responses of the controlled model under different types of disturbance. The results show that the neurofuzzy controller is more effective and robust than the other controller types. The implementation of the neurofuzzy controller using FPGA boards has been investigated in this work. The Xilinx ISE program is employed to synthesis the VHDL codes that describe the operation of the neurofuzzy controller and to generate the configuration file used to program the FPGA. The ModelSim program is used to simulate the operation of the VHDL codes and to obtain the expected output data of the FPGA boards. To confirm that FPGA the board used as the neurofuzzy controller system operated as expected, a MATLAB script file is used to compare the set of data obtained from the ModelSim program and the set of data obtained from the MATLAB SIMULINK model. The results show that the FPGA board is effective to be used as a neurofuzzy controller for full vehicle nonlinear active suspension systems. The active suspension system has a great performance for vibration isolation. However the main drawback of the active suspension is that it is high energy consumptive. Therefore, to use this suspension system in the proposed model, this drawback should be solved. Electromagnetic actuators are used to convert the vibration energy that arises from the rough road to useful electrical energy to reduce the energy consumption by the active suspension systems. The results show that the electromagnetic devices act as a power generator, i.e. the vibration energy excited by the rough road surface has been converted to a useful electrical energy supply for the actuators. Furthermore, when the nonlinear damper models are replaced by the electromagnetic actuators, riding comfort and the road handling quality are improved. As a result, two targets have been achieved by using hydraulic actuators with electromagnetic suspension systems: increasing fuel economy and improving the vehicle performance

A Case for Leveraging 802.11p for Direct Phone-to-Phone Communications

WiFi cannot effectively handle the demands of device-to-device communication between phones, due to insufficient range and poor reliability. We make the case for using IEEE 802.11p DSRC instead, which has been adopted for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, providing lower latency and longer range. We demonstrate a prototype motivated by a novel fabrication process that deposits both III-V and CMOS devices on the same die. In our system prototype, the designed RF front-end is interfaced with a baseband processor on an FPGA, connected to Android phones. It consumes 0.02uJ/bit across 100m assuming free space. Application-level power control dramatically reduces power consumption by 47-56%.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and TechnologyAmerican Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowshi

Towards a Common Software/Hardware Methodology for Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The European research project DESERVE (DEvelopment platform for Safe and Efficient dRiVE, 2012-2015) had the aim of designing and developing a platform tool to cope with the continuously increasing complexity and the simultaneous need to reduce cost for future embedded Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). For this purpose, the DESERVE platform profits from cross-domain software reuse, standardization of automotive software component interfaces, and easy but safety-compliant integration of heterogeneous modules. This enables the development of a new generation of ADAS applications, which challengingly combine different functions, sensors, actuators, hardware platforms, and Human Machine Interfaces (HMI). This book presents the different results of the DESERVE project concerning the ADAS development platform, test case functions, and validation and evaluation of different approaches. The reader is invited to substantiate the content of this book with the deliverables published during the DESERVE project. Technical topics discussed in this book include:Modern ADAS development platforms;Design space exploration;Driving modelling;Video-based and Radar-based ADAS functions;HMI for ADAS;Vehicle-hardware-in-the-loop validation system

A review of aerial manipulation of small-scale rotorcraft unmanned robotic systems

Small-scale rotorcraft unmanned robotic systems (SRURSs) are a kind of unmanned rotorcraft with manipulating devices. This review aims to provide an overview on aerial manipulation of SRURSs nowadays and promote relative research in the future. In the past decade, aerial manipulation of SRURSs has attracted the interest of researchers globally. This paper provides a literature review of the last 10 years (2008–2017) on SRURSs, and details achievements and challenges. Firstly, the definition, current state, development, classification, and challenges of SRURSs are introduced. Then, related papers are organized into two topical categories: mechanical structure design, and modeling and control. Following this, research groups involved in SRURS research and their major achievements are summarized and classified in the form of tables. The research groups are introduced in detail from seven parts. Finally, trends and challenges are compiled and presented to serve as a resource for researchers interested in aerial manipulation of SRURSs. The problem, trends, and challenges are described from three aspects. Conclusions of the paper are presented, and the future of SRURSs is discussed to enable further research interests

Design and Development of Magneto-Rheological Actuators with Application in Mobile Robotics

In recent years, Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluids devices are widely studied and used for various purposes. Among these MR fluids devices, the MR actuator has attracted increasing attention for last two decades. An MR actuator is usually made of an active component (motor) and MR clutches. Compared with the regular actuators, the MR actuator features compliance due to the existence of MR fluids, which is commonly consider as benefits at the aspect of safety. On the other hand, the MR actuator has advantages on controllable bandwidth, torque-mass and torque-inertia ratios compared with the other compliant actuators. In this study, a new closed-loop, Field-Programable-Gate-Array (FPGA) based control scheme to linearize an MR clutch\u27s input-output relationship is presented. The feedback signal used in this control scheme is the magnetic field acquired from hall sensors within the MR clutch. The FPGA board uses this feedback signal to compensate for the nonlinear behavior of the MR clutch using an estimated model of the clutch magnetic field. The local use of an FPGA board will dramatically simplify the use of MR clutches for torque actuation. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is validated using an experimental platform that includes an MR clutch as part of a compliant actuation mechanism. The results clearly demonstrate that the use of the FPGA based closed-loop control scheme can effectively eliminate hysteretic behaviors of the MR clutch, allowing to have linear actuators with predictable behaviors. Moreover, a novel optimization design of MR clutches is proposed. Based on the optimization, the characteristics of MR clutches in three common configurations are discussed and compared. People can select suitable configuration of MR clutch before design. Lastly, a lightweight mobile robot is developed by using MR actuators. This mobile robot also has large driving force and can stop at any positions without running the motor

Spatial Augmented Reality Using Structured Light Illumination

Spatial augmented reality is a particular kind of augmented reality technique that uses projector to blend the real objects with virtual contents. Coincidentally, as a means of 3D shape measurement, structured light illumination makes use of projector as part of its system as well. It uses the projector to generate important clues to establish the correspondence between the 2D image coordinate system and the 3D world coordinate system. So it is appealing to build a system that can carry out the functionalities of both spatial augmented reality and structured light illumination. In this dissertation, we present all the hardware platforms we developed and their related applications in spatial augmented reality and structured light illumination. Firstly, it is a dual-projector structured light 3D scanning system that has two synchronized projectors operate simultaneously, consequently it outperforms the traditional structured light 3D scanning system which only include one projector in terms of the quality of 3D reconstructions. Secondly, we introduce a modified dual-projector structured light 3D scanning system aiming at detecting and solving the multi-path interference. Thirdly, we propose an augmented reality face paint system which detects human face in a scene and paints the face with any favorite colors by projection. Additionally, the system incorporates a second camera to realize the 3D space position tracking by exploiting the principle of structured light illumination. At last, a structured light 3D scanning system with its own built-in machine vision camera is presented as the future work. So far the standalone camera has been completed from the a bare CMOS sensor. With this customized camera, we can achieve high dynamic range imaging and better synchronization between the camera and projector. But the full-blown system that includes HDMI transmitter, structured light pattern generator and synchronization logic has yet to be done due to the lack of a well designed high speed PCB