The 1991 research and technology report, Goddard Space Flight Center

The 1991 Research and Technology Report for Goddard Space Flight Center is presented. Research covered areas such as (1) earth sciences including upper atmosphere, lower atmosphere, oceans, hydrology, and global studies; (2) space sciences including solar studies, planetary studies, Astro-1, gamma ray investigations, and astrophysics; (3) flight projects; (4) engineering including robotics, mechanical engineering, electronics, imaging and optics, thermal and cryogenic studies, and balloons; and (5) ground systems, networks, and communications including data and networks, TDRSS, mission planning and scheduling, and software development and test

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

Relating geometry descriptions to its derivatives on the web

Sharing building information over the Web is becoming more popular, leading to advances in describing building models in a Semantic Web context. However, those descriptions lack unified approaches for linking geometry descriptions to building elements, derived properties and derived other geometry descriptions. To bridge this gap, we analyse the basic characteristics of geometric dependencies and propose the Ontology for Managing Geometry (OMG) based on this analysis. In this paper, we present our results and show how the OMG provides means to link geometric and non-geometric data in meaningful ways. Thus, exchanging building data, including geometry, on the Web becomes more efficient

How to Become a Manufacturing Cell Fully-Automated Without Robots: Case-Study in the Automotive Components Industry

Productivity is a key factor for companies manufacturing parts and sets to the automotive industry. Automation plays an important role in this matter, allowing development of entire manufacturing cells without the direct need of workers. Even in countries where the labour cost is relatively low, it becomes necessary to improve the level of automation applied to manufacture cells and reduce the dependence of the human labour unpredictability, also increasing the quality and reducing the costs. This case study was developed based on an industrial request in order to improve a semi-automatic cell devoted to seat suspension mat manufacturing. The original cell allows several automatic operations but it needs two workers for two specific operations not considered in the initial design. Thus, new concepts of wire feeding and manipulation were developed in order to allow a better material flow throughout the cell. The new cell was designed and built with success, allowing obtain a fully-automated system, which leads to a better productivity and reliability of the manufacturing process.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Data-driven Bayesian Control of Port-Hamiltonian Systems

Port-Hamiltonian theory is an established way to describe nonlinear physical systems widely used in various fields such as robotics, energy management, and mechanical engineering. This has led to considerable research interest in the control of Port-Hamiltonian systems, resulting in numerous model-based control techniques. However, the performance and stability of the closed-loop typically depend on the quality of the PH model, which is often difficult to obtain using first principles. We propose a Gaussian Processes (GP) based control approach for Port-Hamiltonian systems (GPC-PHS) by leveraging gathered data. The Bayesian characteristics of GPs enable the creation of a distribution encompassing all potential Hamiltonians instead of providing a singular point estimate. Using this uncertainty quantification, the proposed approach takes advantage of passivity-based robust control with interconnection and damping assignment to establish probabilistic stability guarantees

An algebraic study of linkages with helical joints

Methods from algebra and algebraic geometry have been used in various ways to study linkages in kinematics. These methods have failed so far for the study of linkages with helical joints (joints with screw motion), because of the presence of some non-algebraic relations. In this article, we explore a delicate reduction of some analytic equations in kinematics to algebraic questions via a theorem of Ax. As an application, we give a classification of mobile closed 5-linkages with revolute, prismatic, and helical joints