Fuzzy tuned PID controller for envisioned agricultural manipulator

The implementation of image-based phenotyping systems has become an important aspect of crop and plant science research which has shown tremendous growth over the years. Accurate determination of features using images requires stable imaging and very precise processing. By installing a camera on a mechanical arm driven by motor, the maintenance of accuracy and stability becomes non-trivial. As per the state-of-the-art, the issue of external camera shake incurred due to vibration is a great concern in capturing accurate images, which may be induced by the driving motor of the manipulator. So, there is a requirement for a stable active controller for sufficient vibration attenuation of the manipulator. However, there are very few reports in agricultural practices which use control algorithms. Although, many control strategies have been utilized to control the vibration in manipulators associated to various applications, no control strategy with validated stability has been provided to control the vibration in such envisioned agricultural manipulator with simple low-cost hardware devices with the compensation of non-linearities. So, in this work, the combination of proportional-integral-differential (PID) control with type-2 fuzzy logic (T2-F-PID) is implemented for vibration control. The validation of the controller stability using Lyapunov analysis is established. A torsional actuator (TA) is applied for mitigating torsional vibration, which is a new contribution in the area of agricultural manipulators. Also, to prove the effectiveness of the controller, the vibration attenuation results with T2-F-PID is compared with conventional PD/PID controllers, and a type-1 fuzzy PID (T1-F-PID) controller

Mathematical models for selling process optimization

The work of the Thesis has been pursued in collaboration with an important company operating in the tourist sector. The followed projects in the work can be seen as belonging to the Destination Management branch, that is the study and the implementation of actions aimed at better managing the company offer related to touristic experiences broadly. In particular, the first project has been related to Revenue Forecasting and has dealt with the definition of a methodology, based on mathematical and statistical techniques, aimed at forecasting the revenue streams linked to specific items of a company; the second project, Destination Discovery, instead aimed at the high-level analysis of tourism opportunities in different geographical areas, researching and evaluating new possibilities for the company related to tourist interest. In the work, some preliminaries about what a forecast is will be provided and the many techniques aimed at accomplishing the task, giving a general theoretical framework for the topic will be discussed. Then some details about data and the set of more practical operations needed in order to extract information from them in a numerical manner, eventually building a forecasting model on it will be discussed. Later the application of the techniques previously introduced to the different projects will be discussed; for each one of them, the methodologies followed and the analyzes carried out will be provided, as well as the obtained results. Finally an analysis of what has globally been done in the work along with different comments, the obtained results and some possible future work and improvements will conclude the work