Tigger paper : integration

The process of architecture will always be holistic. As long as it is taught in segments, its educational structure will always run the risk of failing to meet this primary educational aim, and be continually shooting itself in the foot. The pedagogical and professional advantage to breaking the perceived lack of integration between studio and subject classes is I believe a fundamental imperative, to recognise that every part of the architectural process is not in contradiction but has equal value, and to realise the added value that integration would bring to all parts of the educational process, to staff and student alike

Inverse Dynamics Control Of A Humanoid Robot Arm

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2017Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2017Günümüzde insansı robot teknolojisi dünyada yaygın olarak çalışılmaktadır. Bu insansı robotlar tekerlekli robotların ulaşamayacağı yerlere ulaşabilmekte ve iki kolları ile karmaşık görevleri yerine getirebilmektedir. Bu özellikleri, onları arama kurtarma ve insanlarla birlikte çalışma gibi senaryolarda vazgeçilmez kılar. İnsansı robotlar ile ilgili kapsamlı deneysel çalışmalar yapılmaktadır. Çevre ile etkileşime girmek, insanlarla iş birliği ve insansı hareketler yapmak, bu çalışmaların ana hedeflerindendir. Uzuv kontrolü, robota hızlı harekete imkan sağlamak için dinamik model tabanlı bir kontrol gerektirmektedir. Kol, engeller içeren bir çevrede çalışacağı için görev uzayında ters dinamik kontrol, bu senaryo için uygun görülmüştür. Ters dinamik kontrolünde, kontrol sinyali olarak robotun karar verilmiş ivmesi kullanılır. Bu ivme, ters dinamik modeline beslenerek eklemler için gereken kuvvetler bulunur. Görev uzayında yörünge takibinde hatalar, yine kartezyen koordinat sisteminde tanımlanır. Bu sayede eyleyicideki toplam hata, eklem uzayındaki kontrole göre daha düşük olur. Ayrıca bu yöntemde uç eyleyicinin yörünge boyunca hareketi tahmin edilebilmektedir, böylece engeller içeren çevrede hareket planlaması kolaylaşır. Görev uzayında yapılan bu kontrolde ters kinematik hesaplanması için sözde ters jakobiyen kullanılmıştır. İnsansı robotlar bir çok eyleyici ve sensörden oluşur. Robotu kontrol etmek için aynı anda sensor bilgilerini değerlendirmek, hareketi planlamak ve eyleyicileri denetlemek gerekmektedir. Bu yüzden bu robotların yazılımlarında çoklu işlemler ve zamanlayıcılar kullanılır. ROS (Robot İşletim Sistemi), bahsedilen uygulamalarda kullanılabilecek kütüphane ve araçları barındıran bir açık kaynaklı işletim sistemidir. Simulasyon ve donanım arayüzünün yanında gelişmiş algoritmalar sunar. ROS üzerinde koşan bir yazılım, nod adı verilen bir çok işlemden oluşur. Her bir nod, belirli frekanslarda farklı görevleri yerine getirir ve diğer nodlarla iletişime geçer. Bu yapı programlamayı kolaylaştırır ve açık kaynak kütüphaneleri nod olarak eklenmesini sağlayarak sisteme hızlı kuruylan modüler bir yapı kazandırır. ROS, şimdiden bir çok endüstriyel ve enstitü robotunu desteklemekte ve artık robotikte bir standart olarak görülmektedir. Yazılımında C++ ve Python kullanılabilmekte ve bu iki dilde yazılan kod parçaları, aynı anda birbiriyle haberleşerek koşabilmektedir. Gazebo, dört pervaneli helikopter, manipülatör, sürü robotiği ve tam-vücut insansı robotlar gibi bir çok robotu, çeşitli sensörler ve çevresel etkileşimle birlikte simüle edebilen bir açık kaynaklı dinamik simülasyon ortamıdır. Gazebo, ROS da dahil olmak üzere çeşitli platformlarla arayüze sahiptir. İçinde çok sayıda eklenebilir obje barındırır ve SDF formatında hazırlanan bütün objeler eklenebilir. Gerekli eklenti programları kullanılarak, ROS’un desteklediği URDF formatını SDF’ye çevirerek çalıştırabilir. Henüz ROS ortamında desteklenmese de birden fazla dinamik motoru ve aktarım elemanı sunar. ITECH Kolu, İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Makina Mühendisliği Otomatik Kontrol Laboratuarı’nda üretilmiş altı serbestlik dereceli bir insansı robot koludur. Robot, Maxon firmasına ait fırçasız doğru akım motorlarla tahrik edilmekte ve aktarım elemanı olarak harmonik dişliler kullanılmaktadır. Bu tezin amacı, Otomatik Kontrol laboratuarı için kapsamlı bir kinematik ve dinamik kütüphanesi yaratmak, bu kütüphanenin ROS ile kullanılabilmesi için gerekli yazılım paketlerini yasmak ve sonunda ITECH kolunun görev uzayında ters dinamik kontrolünü Gazebo simulasyon ortamında uygulamaktır. Bu tez altı bölümden oluşmaktadır. İlk bölümde tezin amacı, literatür taraması ve ITECH Robot Kolu’nun koşacağı işletim sistemi, motor güç ve limitleri, aktarım elemanları gibi mekanik-yazılımsal özelliklerinden bahsedilmiştir. İkinci bölümde bir robot kolun geometrik, kinematik ve dinamik modellenmesi anlatılmıştır. Seçilen mevcut kinematik ve dinamik çözümlerin, alternatiflerine göre yapılan işlem sayısı bakımından üstünlüklerinden bahsedilmiştir. ITECH Robot Kolu’nun geometrik, kinematik ve dinamik modeli türetilmiştir. Üçüncü bölümde Robot İşletim Sistemi tanıtılmıştır. ROS’un yazılım mimarisinden ve imkanlarından bahsedilmiştir. ROS’un ve Gazebo’nun neden tercih edildiği ve ilerideki çalışmalarda, bu çalışmada hazırlanan yazılımların gerçek robotta nasıl kullanılabileceği anlatılmıştur. ITECH Kolu’nun ROS ortamına entegrasyonu ve ROS ile Gazebo dinamik simulasyon ortamının arayüzünün oluşturulma basamakları tarif edilmiştir. Dördüncü bölümde robot kollarında yörünge oluşturulmasından ve bu yörüngeye ait zamanlama fonksiyonlarından bahsedilmiştir. Robot kollarının kontrol metodları tartışılmıştır. Merkezi olmayan ve merkezi kontrol algoritmalarına değinilmiştir. Görev uzayında yörünge takibi ve ITECH Kolu’nda ters dinamik kontrol algoritmasının uygulanması anlatılmıştır. Beşinci bölümde noktadan noktaya ve çember yörüngeye ait yüklü ve yüksüz durumlarda, çeşitli kazanç ve kontrolcü frekanslarında simülasyon sonuçları verilmiştir. Kontrolcünün performansını test etmek amacıyla bu simulasyonlar 1m/s hızında yapılmıştır. Yüklü durumda robot yükten habersiz olduğu ve bu ek kütle modele dahil edilmediği için sisteme bir bozucu olarak etki etmiştir.Ayrıca örnek bir görev olarak al-yerleştir senaryosu sonuçları eklenmiştir. Simülasyon sonuçları irdelenmiştir. Altıncı ve son bölümde tez boyunca yapılan çalışmalar özetlenmiştir. İleride dinamik algoritmaların geliştirilmesi için simulasyon ortamı seçimi ve gerçek robot üzerinde yapılacak çalışmalarda kullanılabilecek haberleşme teknolojileri için tavsiyelerde bulunulmuştur. Ekler bölümünde robotun geometrik ve kütle özelliklerinin yanı sıra, bu tez için yazılan nesne tabanlı Python kütüphanesinin sınıfları ve bu sınıflara ait fonksiyonların kullanımı verilmiştir. Bu kütüphane, bütün tek zincir seri robot kollarına uygun olduğu için ITECH Kolu’nda yapılacak serbestlik derecesi, eksen değişikliği gibi mekanik değişimler, birkaç satır kod ile bu tezdeki kodu kullanarak yeni robot koluna uygulanabilir. Ayrıca, tezde sözde ters jakobiyen yöntemi ile ters kinematik kullanıldığı için, serbestlik derecesi altıdan farklı olan robot kolları da bu kütüphaneyle yaratılacak kodla kontrol edilebilir. İnsan kolu gibi serbestlik derecesi altıdan büyük robotlar için fazlalık çözünürlüğünün eklenmesi gerekmektedir.Nowadays, humanoid robot technology is studied extensively around the world. These humanoid robots can reach the places that wheeled robots cannot and can perform complicated tasks with their two arm manipulators. Experimental studies are being conducted for humanoid robots. Interacting with environment, cooperation with humans and executing human-like motions for various tasks are the key objectives of these studies. Control of the manipulators of humanoid robots require a dynamic model based control for fast movement cases. As the manipulator is supposed to move in a cluttered environment, task space control inverse dynamics control is a suitable control policy for this scenario, where the motion of the end-effector can be predicted during the execution of the desired trajectory. The humanoid robots consist of a high number of actuators and sensors. To control the robot, sensor processing, motion planning and actuator control need to be done simultaneously. Thus, the software of these robots consist of multi-processes and scheduling to handle this problem. ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source operating system that has software libraries and tools for such robotic applications. It offers both simulator and hardware interface, alongside state-of-art algorithms. A software that runs on ROS consists of multiple processes called ‘nodes’. Each node handles a different task, runs at a specified frequency and communicate with each other. This architecture eases the programming and enables use of open-source libraries in separate nodes in a plug-and-play way. Gazebo is an open-source dynamic simulation environment that enables the simulation of many type of robots such as full body humanoids with various sensors and environment interaction. Gazebo has interface with several platforms, including ROS and it offers several dynamic engines and number of transmissions, but not all of them are supported by ROS at the moment. ITECH Arm is a six degrees of freedom humanoid robot arm built in Mechanical Engineering Automatic Control Laboratory of İstanbul Technical University. The purpose of this thesis is creating a generic kinematics and dynamics library for the Automatic Control Laboratory, writing the software packages using this library for the ROS integration of the robot arm and finally implementing task space inverse dynamics control of ITECH Arm in Gazebo simulation environment. This thesis consists of six chapters. In the first chapter, purpose of the thesis, literature review and mechanical-software properties of ITECH Arm manipulator will be mentioned. In second chapter, kinematic and dynamic modelling of a robot manipulator is presented. The geometric, kinematic and dynamic models of ITECH Arm manipulator are derived. In chapter three, Robot Operating System is introduced. The software architecture and capabilities of ROS are mentioned. Integration steps of ITECH Arm to ROS environment and interfacing ROS and Gazebo simulation environment are described. In fourth chapter, trajectory generation for robot manipulators is mentioned. Several robot control methods are discussed. Implementation of task space trajectory tracking with inverse dynamics control algorithm on ITECH Arm is described. In chapter five, simulation results of circular trajectory for with and without payload cases using various gain sets and controller frequencies are presented. Also, as an example task, a pick and place scenario results are appended. The simulation results are discussed. In sixth and the last chapter, all the work done in the thesis is summarized and suggestions for future works are presented.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

Efficient Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

With the increasing digitization of different components of Smart Grid by incorporating smart(er) devices, there is an ongoing effort to deploy them for various applications. However, if these devices are compromised, they can reveal sensitive information from such systems. Therefore, securing them against cyber-attacks may represent the first step towards the protection of the critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, realization of the desirable security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication relies entirely on cryptographic keys that can be either symmetric or asymmetric. A major need, along with this, is to deal with managing these keys for a large number of devices in Smart Grid. While such key management can be easily addressed by transferring the existing protocols to Smart Grid domain, this is not an easy task, as one needs to deal with the limitations of the current communication infrastructures and resource-constrained devices in Smart Grid. In general, effective mechanisms for Smart Grid security must guarantee the security of the applications by managing (1) key revocation; and (2) key exchange. Moreover, such management should be provided without compromising the general performance of the Smart Grid applications and thus needs to incur minimal overhead to Smart Grid systems. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by proposing specialized key management techniques for resource and communication constrained Smart Grid environments. Specifically, motivated by the need of reducing the revocation management overhead, we first present a distributed public key revocation management scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) by utilizing distributed hash trees (DHTs). The basic idea is to enable sharing of the burden among smart meters to reduce the overall overhead. Second, we propose another revocation management scheme by utilizing cryptographic accumulators, which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly. Finally, we turn our attention to symmetric key exchange problem and propose a 0-Round Trip Time (RTT) message exchange scheme to minimize the message exchanges. This scheme enables a lightweight yet secure symmetric key-exchange between field devices and the control center in Smart Gird by utilizing a dynamic hash chain mechanism. The evaluation of the proposed approaches show that they significantly out-perform existing conventional approaches

Cleansing among Czech Journalists after World War II and a Comparison with the Situation in France and the Netherlands

After the end of World War II Czechoslovakia was faced with the task of punishing its Nazi collaborators. Besides sentencing traitors by the special people’s courts, Czech journalists themselves also started the cleansing among their own ranks. The cleansing committee of the Czech Journalists’ Union investigated some 400 journalists and imposed some sort of penalties on more than 200 people. The article also presents a brief a comparison with the situation in France and the Netherlands. The cleansing among Czech journalists was very rigorous, even in comparison to other European countries. In contrast to Western countries, and due to the subsequent political developments, the journalists punished were often prohibited from resuming their profession

Poly(pyridinium salt)s exhibiting liquid-crystalline and light-emitting properties

The research presented in this thesis is based on the synthesis and characterization of poly(pyridinium salt)s containing tosylate and triflimide counterions that possess both liquid-crystalline properties as well as light emitting properties. Both the solution-state and solid-state emission behavior of these synthesized materials were investigated. They possessed several emission peaks in their spectra ranging from 280 nm to about 550 nm. Some of these polymers were found to form liquid-crystalline properties in common organic solvents such as methanol and dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), while others were found to exhibit a liquid-crystalline phase upon melting, and are so-called thermotropic liquid crystals. The polymers in solution formed a full-grown lyotropic liquid-crystalline phase at concentrations as low as 5 wt % in methanol and 19 wt % in DMSO. The thermotropic liquid-crystalline polymers containing triflimide counterions had much lower melting transitions than those containing tosylate counterions

Qualitative test-cost sensitive classification

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2008.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2008.Includes bibliographical references leaves 69-72.Decision making is a procedure for selecting the best action among several alternatives. In many real-world problems, decision has to be taken under the circumstances in which one has to pay to acquire information. In this thesis, we propose a new framework for test-cost sensitive classification that considers the misclassification cost together with the cost of feature extraction, which arises from the effort of acquiring features. This proposed framework introduces two new concepts to test-cost sensitive learning for better modeling the real-world problems: qualitativeness and consistency. First, this framework introduces the incorporation of qualitative costs into the problem formulation. This incorporation becomes important for many real world problems, from finance to medical diagnosis, since the relation between the misclassification cost and the cost of feature extraction could be expressed only roughly and typically in terms of ordinal relations for these problems. For example, in cancer diagnosis, it could be expressed that the cost of misdiagnosis is larger than the cost of a medical test. However, in the test-cost sensitive classification literature, the misclassification cost and the cost of feature extraction are combined quantitatively to obtain a single loss/utility value, which requires expressing the relation between these costs as a precise quantitative number. Second, the proposed framework considers the consistency between the current information and the information after feature extraction to decide which features to extract. For example, it does not extract a new feature if it brings no new information but just confirms the current one; in other words, if the new feature is totally consistent with the current information. By doing so, the proposed framework could significantly decrease the cost of feature extraction, and hence, the overall cost without decreasing the classification accuracy. Such consistency behavior has not been considered in the previous test-cost sensitive literature. We conduct our experiments on three medical data sets and the results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly decreases the feature extraction cost without decreasing the classification accuracy.Cebe, MüminM.S

A Model-based Hierarchical Controller for Legged Systems subject to External Disturbances

Xin G, Lin H-C, Smith J, Cebe O, Mistry M. A Model-based Hierarchical Controller for Legged Systems subject to External Disturbances. In: IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation. 2018.Legged robots have many potential applications in real-world scenarios where the tasks are too dangerous for humans, and compliance is needed to protect the system against external disturbances and impacts. In this paper, we propose a model-based controller for hierarchical tasks of legged systems subject to external disturbance. The control framework is based on projected inverse dynamics controller, such that the control law is decomposed into two orthogonal subspaces, i.e., the constrained and the unconstrained subspaces. The unconstrained component controls multiple desired tasks with impedance responses. The constrained space controller maintains the contact subject to unknown external disturbances, without the use of any force/torque sensing at the contact points. By explicitly modelling the external force, our controller is robust to external disturbances and errors arising from incorrect dynamic model information. The main contributions of this paper include (1) incorporating an impedance controller to control external disturbances and allow impedance shaping to adjust the behaviour of the motion under external disturbances, (2) optimising contact forces within the constrained subspace that also takes into account the external disturbances without using force/torque sensors at the contact locations. The techniques are evaluated on the ANYmal quadruped platform under a variety of scenarios

A Cost-efficient IoT Forensics Framework with Blockchain

IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incident and prove it in legal cases if there is a dispute with the involved parties. To address these issues, blockchain provides excellent opportunities since it can protect the integrity of the data thanks to its distributed structure. However, it comes with certain costs as storing huge amount of data in a public blockchain will come with significant transaction fees. In this paper, we propose a highly cost effective and reliable digital forensics framework by exploiting multiple inexpensive blockchain networks as a temporary storage before the data is committed to Ethereum. To reduce Ethereum costs,we utilize Merkle trees which hierarchically stores hashes of the collected event data from IoT devices. We evaluated the approach on popular blockchains such as EOS, Stellar, and Ethereum by presenting a cost and security analysis. The results indicate that we can achieve significant cost savings without compromising the integrity of the data