REAL-TIME ERROR DETECTION AND CORRECTION FOR ROBUST OPERATION OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS USING ENCODED STATE CHECKS

The objective of the proposed research is to develop methodologies, support algorithms and software-hardware infrastructure for detection, diagnosis, and correction of failures for actuators, sensors and control software in linear and nonlinear state variable systems with the help of multiple checks employed in the system. This objective is motivated by the proliferation of autonomous sense-and-control real-time systems, such as intelligent robots and self-driven cars which must maintain a minimum level of performance in the presence of electro-mechanical degradation of system-level components in the field as well as external attacks in the form of transient errors. A key focus is on rapid recovery from the effects of such anomalies and impairments with minimal impact on system performance while maintaining low implementation overhead as opposed to traditional schemes for recovery that rely on duplication or triplication. On-line detection, diagnosis and correction techniques are investigated and rely on analysis of system under test response signatures to real-time stimulus. For on-line error detection and diagnosis, linear and nonlinear state space encodings of the system under test are used and specific properties of the codes, as well as machine learning model based approaches were used are analyzed in real-time. Recovery is initiated by copying check model values to correct error for sensor and control software malfunction, and by redesigning the controller parameter on-the-fly for actuators to restore system performance. Future challenges that need to be addressed include viability studies of the proposed techniques on mobile autonomous system in distributed setting as well as application to systems with soft as well as hard real-time performance constraints.Ph.D

Formal Verification and Fault Mitigation for Small Avionics Platforms using Programmable Logic

As commercial and personal unmanned aircraft gain popularity and begin to account for more traffic in the sky, the reliability and integrity of their flight controllers becomes increasingly important. As these aircraft get larger and start operating over longer distances and at higher altitude they will start to interact with other controlled air traffic and the risk of a failure in the control system becomes much more severe. As any engineer who has investigated any space bound technology will know, digital systems do not always behave exactly as they are supposed to. This can be attributed to the effects of high energy particles in the atmosphere that can deposit energy randomly throughout a digital circuit. These single event effects are capable of producing transient logic levels and altering the state of registers in a circuit, corrupting data and possibly leading to a failure of the flight controller. These effects become more common as altitude increases, as well as with the increase of registers in a digital system. High integrity flight controllers also require more development effort to show that they meet the required standard. Formal methods can be used to verify digital systems and prove that they meet certain specifications. For traditional software systems that perform many tasks on shared computational resources, formal methods can be quite difficult if not impossible to implement. The use of discrete logic controllers in the form of FPGAs greatly simplifies multitasking by removing the need for shared resources. This simplicity allows formal methods to be applied during the development of the flight control algorithms & device drivers. In this thesis we propose and demonstrate a flight controller implemented entirely within an FPGA to investigate the differences and difficulties when compared with traditional CPU software implementations. We go further to provide examples of formal verifications of specific parts of the flight control firmware to demonstrate the ease with which this can be achieved. We also make efforts to protect the flight controller from the effects of radiation at higher altitudes using both passive hardware design and active register transfer level algorithms

Biosensors

A biosensor is defined as a detecting device that combines a transducer with a biologically sensitive and selective component. When a specific target molecule interacts with the biological component, a signal is produced, at transducer level, proportional to the concentration of the substance. Therefore biosensors can measure compounds present in the environment, chemical processes, food and human body at low cost if compared with traditional analytical techniques. This book covers a wide range of aspects and issues related to biosensor technology, bringing together researchers from 11 different countries. The book consists of 16 chapters written by 53 authors. The first four chapters describe several aspects of nanotechnology applied to biosensors. The subsequent section, including three chapters, is devoted to biosensor applications in the fields of drug discovery, diagnostics and bacteria detection. The principles behind optical biosensors and some of their application are discussed in chapters from 8 to 11. The last five chapters treat of microelectronics, interfacing circuits, signal transmission, biotelemetry and algorithms applied to biosensing

Software-Defined Lighting.

For much of the past century, indoor lighting has been based on incandescent or gas-discharge technology. But, with LED lighting experiencing a 20x/decade increase in flux density, 10x/decade decrease in cost, and linear improvements in luminous efficiency, solid-state lighting is finally cost-competitive with the status quo. As a result, LED lighting is projected to reach over 70% market penetration by 2030. This dissertation claims that solid-state lighting’s real potential has been barely explored, that now is the time to explore it, and that new lighting platforms and applications can drive lighting far beyond its roots as an illumination technology. Scaling laws make solid-state lighting competitive with conventional lighting, but two key features make solid-state lighting an enabler for many new applications: the high switching speeds possible using LEDs and the color palettes realizable with Red-Green-Blue-White (RGBW) multi-chip assemblies. For this dissertation, we have explored the post-illumination potential of LED lighting in applications as diverse as visible light communications, indoor positioning, smart dust time synchronization, and embedded device configuration, with an eventual eye toward supporting all of them using a shared lighting infrastructure under a unified system architecture that provides software-control over lighting. To explore the space of software-defined lighting (SDL), we design a compact, flexible, and networked SDL platform to allow researchers to rapidly test new ideas. Using this platform, we demonstrate the viability of several applications, including multi-luminaire synchronized communication to a photodiode receiver, communication to mobile phone cameras, and indoor positioning using unmodified mobile phones. We show that all these applications and many other potential applications can be simultaneously supported by a single lighting infrastructure under software control.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111482/1/samkuo_1.pd

General Design Specification Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer

This specification establishes the general requirements for the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and its major components, and is the main systems-engineering tool for the TOMS program. This document shall be the primary technical specification for the TOMS FM-3 and later instruments, not including ground support equipment

Electromechanical Systems

This eBook was written as the third installment in the series that coincide with three engineering courses taught at the University of Oklahoma (ENGR 2431, ENGR 2531, and ENGR 3431). These courses were designed to provide non-major students – those not majoring in electrical or computer engineering (ECE) – a foundation in various ECE topics. ENGR 2431 is a prerequisite for both ENGR 2531 and ENGR 3431 and it is recommended that the DC Circuits book be studied prior to beginning the eBooks created for the other two courses. The following topics are covered in this book: LabVIEW Overview Module 1 – Number Systems and Character Encoding Module 2 – Digital Logic Module 3 – Measurement and Instrumentation Overview Module 4 – Sensors Module 5 – Power Systems Module 6 – Electric Machines Module 7 – Computer Communications Appendix A – Step by Step Guide to Digital, Analog, and Counter IOs in a DAQThis item has been updated. For a full errata go to this link:https://www.dropbox.com/s/49s6jhjrp22j1qk/Electromechanical%20Systems%201st%20Edition%20Eratta.docx?dl=0Fully updated files are accessible at the two following links:https://www.dropbox.com/s/tgo61d92mas7cex/Electromechanical%20Systems%2C%201st%20Edition%20-%20Davis%2C%202018.docx?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehdr231hwc7fk9x/Electromechanical%20Systems%2C%201st%20Edition%20-%20Davis%2C%202018.pdf?dl=

NASA Tech Briefs, January 2008

Topics covered include: Induction Charge Detector with Multiple Sensing Stages; Generic Helicopter-Based Testbed for Surface Terrain Imaging Sensors; Robot Electronics Architecture; Optimized Geometry for Superconducting Sensing Coils; Sensing a Changing Chemical Mixture Using an Electronic Nose; Inertial Orientation Trackers with Drift Compensation; Microstrip Yagi Antenna with Dual Aperture-Coupled Feed; Patterned Ferroelectric Films for Tunable Microwave Devices; Micron-Accurate Laser Fresnel-Diffraction Ranging System; Efficient G(sup 4)FET-Based Logic Circuits; Web-Enabled Optoelectronic Particle-Fallout Monitor; SiO2/TiO2 Composite for Removing Hg from Combustion Exhaust; Lightweight Tanks for Storing Liquefied Natural Gas; Hybrid Wound Filaments for Greater Resistance to Impacts; Making High-Tensile-Strength Amalgam Components; Bonding by Hydroxide-Catalyzed Hydration and Dehydration; Balanced Flow Meters without Moving Parts; Deflection-Compensating Beam for Use inside a Cylinder; Four-Point-Latching Microactuator; Curved Piezoelectric Actuators for Stretching Optical Fibers; Tunable Optical Assembly with Vibration Dampening; Passive Porous Treatment for Reducing Flap Side-Edge Noise; Cylindrical Piezoelectric Fiber Composite Actuators; Patterning of Indium Tin Oxide Films; Gimballed Shoulders for Friction Stir Welding; Improved Thermal Modulator for Gas Chromatography; Nuclear-Spin Gyroscope Based on an Atomic Co-Magnetometer; Utilizing Ion-Mobility Data to Estimate Molecular Masses; Optical Displacement Sensor for Sub-Hertz Applications; Polarization/Spatial Combining of Laser-Diode Pump Beams; Spatial Combining of Laser-Diode Beams for Pumping an NPRO; Algorithm Optimally Orders Forward-Chaining Inference Rules; Project Integration Architecture; High Power Amplifier and Power Supply; Estimating Mixing Heights Using Microwave Temperature Profiler; and Multiple-Cone Sunshade for a Spaceborne Telescope

Opinions and Outlooks on Morphological Computation

Morphological Computation is based on the observation that biological systems seem to carry out relevant computations with their morphology (physical body) in order to successfully interact with their environments. This can be observed in a whole range of systems and at many different scales. It has been studied in animals – e.g., while running, the functionality of coping with impact and slight unevenness in the ground is "delivered" by the shape of the legs and the damped elasticity of the muscle-tendon system – and plants, but it has also been observed at the cellular and even at the molecular level – as seen, for example, in spontaneous self-assembly. The concept of morphological computation has served as an inspirational resource to build bio-inspired robots, design novel approaches for support systems in health care, implement computation with natural systems, but also in art and architecture. As a consequence, the field is highly interdisciplinary, which is also nicely reflected in the wide range of authors that are featured in this e-book. We have contributions from robotics, mechanical engineering, health, architecture, biology, philosophy, and others