Advances in Sonar Technology

The demand to explore the largest and also one of the richest parts of our planet, the advances in signal processing promoted by an exponential growth in computation power and a thorough study of sound propagation in the underwater realm, have lead to remarkable advances in sonar technology in the last years.The work on hand is a sum of knowledge of several authors who contributed in various aspects of sonar technology. This book intends to give a broad overview of the advances in sonar technology of the last years that resulted from the research effort of the authors in both sonar systems and their applications. It is intended for scientist and engineers from a variety of backgrounds and even those that never had contact with sonar technology before will find an easy introduction with the topics and principles exposed here

Circles within spirals, wheels within wheels; Body rotation facilitates critical insights into animal behavioural ecology

How animals behave is fundamental to enhancing their lifetime fitness, so defining how animals move in space and time relates to many ecological questions, including resource selection, activity budgets and animal movement networks. Historically, animal behaviour and movement has been defined by direct observation, however recent advancements in biotelemetry have revolutionised how we now assess behaviour, particularly allowing animals to be monitored when they cannot be seen. Studies now pair ‘convectional’ radio telemetries with motion sensors to facilitate more detailed investigations of animal space-use. Motion sensitive tags (containing e.g., accelerometers and magnetometers) provide precise data on body movements which characterise behaviour, and this has been exemplified in extensive studies using accelerometery data, which has been linked to space-use defined by GPS. Conversely, consideration of body rotation (particularly change in yaw) is virtually absent within the biologging literature, even though various scales of yaw rotation can reveal important patterns in behaviour and movement, with animal heading being a fundamental component characterising space-use. This thesis explores animal body angles, particularly about the yaw axis, for elucidating animal movement ecology. I used five model species (a reptile, a mammal and three birds) to demonstrate the value of assessing body rotation for investigating fine-scale movement-specific behaviours. As part of this, I advanced the ‘dead-reckoning’ method, where fine-scale animal movement between temporally poorly resolved GPS fixes can be deduced using heading vectors and speed. I addressed many issues with this protocol, highlighting errors and potential solutions but was able to show how this approach leads to insights into many difficult-to-study animal behaviours. These ranged from elucidating how and where lions cross supposedly impermeable man-made barriers to examining how penguins react to tidal currents and then navigate their way to their nests far from the sea in colonies enclosed within thick vegetation

Improvement Schemes for Indoor Mobile Location Estimation: A Survey

Location estimation is significant in mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. The complexity and smaller scale of the indoor environment impose a great impact on location estimation. The key of location estimation lies in the representation and fusion of uncertain information from multiple sources. The improvement of location estimation is a complicated and comprehensive issue. A lot of research has been done to address this issue. However, existing research typically focuses on certain aspects of the problem and specific methods. This paper reviews mainstream schemes on improving indoor location estimation from multiple levels and perspectives by combining existing works and our own working experiences. Initially, we analyze the error sources of common indoor localization techniques and provide a multilayered conceptual framework of improvement schemes for location estimation. This is followed by a discussion of probabilistic methods for location estimation, including Bayes filters, Kalman filters, extended Kalman filters, sigma-point Kalman filters, particle filters, and hidden Markov models. Then, we investigate the hybrid localization methods, including multimodal fingerprinting, triangulation fusing multiple measurements, combination of wireless positioning with pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), and cooperative localization. Next, we focus on the location determination approaches that fuse spatial contexts, namely, map matching, landmark fusion, and spatial model-aided methods. Finally, we present the directions for future research

Indoor Positioning and Navigation

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

Symmetry in Structural Health Monitoring

In this Special Issue on symmetry, we mainly discuss the application of symmetry in various structural health monitoring. For example, considering the health monitoring of a known structure, by obtaining the static or dynamic response of the structure, using different signal processing methods, including some advanced filtering methods, to remove the influence of environmental noise, and extract structural feature parameters to determine the safety of the structure. These damage diagnosis methods can also be effectively applied to various types of infrastructure and mechanical equipment. For this reason, the vibration control of various structures and the knowledge of random structure dynamics should be considered, which will promote the rapid development of the structural health monitoring. Among them, signal extraction and evaluation methods are also worthy of study. The improvement of signal acquisition instruments and acquisition methods improves the accuracy of data. A good evaluation method will help to correctly understand the performance with different types of infrastructure and mechanical equipment

Modern Telemetry

Telemetry is based on knowledge of various disciplines like Electronics, Measurement, Control and Communication along with their combination. This fact leads to a need of studying and understanding of these principles before the usage of Telemetry on selected problem solving. Spending time is however many times returned in form of obtained data or knowledge which telemetry system can provide. Usage of telemetry can be found in many areas from military through biomedical to real medical applications. Modern way to create a wireless sensors remotely connected to central system with artificial intelligence provide many new, sometimes unusual ways to get a knowledge about remote objects behaviour. This book is intended to present some new up to date accesses to telemetry problems solving by use of new sensors conceptions, new wireless transfer or communication techniques, data collection or processing techniques as well as several real use case scenarios describing model examples. Most of book chapters deals with many real cases of telemetry issues which can be used as a cookbooks for your own telemetry related problems

Twentieth Annual Conference on Manual Control, Volume 1

The 48 papers presented were devoted to humanopeator modeling, application of models to simulation and operational environments, aircraft handling qualities, teleopertors, fault diagnosis, and biodynamics

Medical Robotics

The first generation of surgical robots are already being installed in a number of operating rooms around the world. Robotics is being introduced to medicine because it allows for unprecedented control and precision of surgical instruments in minimally invasive procedures. So far, robots have been used to position an endoscope, perform gallbladder surgery and correct gastroesophogeal reflux and heartburn. The ultimate goal of the robotic surgery field is to design a robot that can be used to perform closed-chest, beating-heart surgery. The use of robotics in surgery will expand over the next decades without any doubt. Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a revolutionary approach in surgery. In MIS, the operation is performed with instruments and viewing equipment inserted into the body through small incisions created by the surgeon, in contrast to open surgery with large incisions. This minimizes surgical trauma and damage to healthy tissue, resulting in shorter patient recovery time. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the state-of-art, to present new ideas, original results and practical experiences in this expanding area. Nevertheless, many chapters in the book concern advanced research on this growing area. The book provides critical analysis of clinical trials, assessment of the benefits and risks of the application of these technologies. This book is certainly a small sample of the research activity on Medical Robotics going on around the globe as you read it, but it surely covers a good deal of what has been done in the field recently, and as such it works as a valuable source for researchers interested in the involved subjects, whether they are currently “medical roboticists” or not