Energy-based trajectory tracking and vibration control for multilink highly flexible manipulators

In this paper, a discrete model is adopted, as proposed by Hencky for elastica based on rigid bars and lumped rotational springs, to design the control of a lightweight planar manipulator with multiple highly flexible links. This model is particularly suited to deal with nonlinear equations of motion as those associated with multilink robot arms, because it does not include any simplification due to linearization, as in the assumed modes method. The aim of the control is to track a trajectory of the end effector of the robot arm, without the onset of vibrations. To this end, an energy-based method is proposed. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the presented approach

Drag cancellation by added-mass pumping

A submerged body subject to a sudden shape-change experiences large forces due to the variation of added-mass energy. While this phenomenon has been studied for single actuation events, application to sustained propulsion requires studying \textit{periodic} shape-change. We do so in this work by investigating a spring-mass oscillator submerged in quiescent fluid subject to periodic changes in its volume. We develop an analytical model to investigate the relationship between added-mass variation and viscous damping and demonstrate its range of application with fully coupled fluid-solid Navier-Stokes simulations at large Stokes number. Our results demonstrate that the recovery of added-mass kinetic energy can be used to completely cancel the viscous damping of the fluid, driving the onset of sustained oscillations with amplitudes as large as four times the average body radius $r_0$. A quasi-linear relationship is found to link the terminal amplitude of the oscillations $X$, to the extent of size change $a$, with $X/a$ peaking at values from 4 to 4.75 depending on the details of the shape-change kinematics. In addition, it is found that pumping in the frequency range of $1-\frac{a}{2r_0}<\omega^2/\omega_n^2<1+\frac{a}{2r_0}$ is required for sustained oscillations. The results of this analysis shed light on the role of added-mass recovery in the context of shape-changing bodies and biologically-inspired underwater vehicles.Comment: 10 pages, 6 Figures, under review in JFM Rapid

Conservative effects in spin-transfer-driven magnetization dynamics

It is shown that under appropriate conditions spin-transfer-driven magnetization dynamics in a single-domain nanomagnet is conservative in nature and admits a specific integral of motion, which is reduced to the usual magnetic energy when the spin current goes to zero. The existence of this conservation law is connected to the symmetry properties of the dynamics under simultaneous inversion of magnetisation and time. When one applies an external magnetic field parallel to the spin polarization, the dynamics is transformed from conservative into dissipative. More precisely, it is demonstrated that there exists a state function such that the field induces a monotone relaxation of this function toward its minima or maxima, depending on the field orientation. These results hold in the absence of intrinsic damping effects. When intrinsic damping is included in the description, a competition arises between field-induced and damping-induced relaxations, which leads to the appearance of limit cycles, that is, of magnetization self-oscillations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Performance evaluation of an open distributed platform for realistic traffic generation

Network researchers have dedicated a notable part of their efforts to the area of modeling traffic and to the implementation of efficient traffic generators. We feel that there is a strong demand for traffic generators capable to reproduce realistic traffic patterns according to theoretical models and at the same time with high performance. This work presents an open distributed platform for traffic generation that we called distributed internet traffic generator (D-ITG), capable of producing traffic (network, transport and application layer) at packet level and of accurately replicating appropriate stochastic processes for both inter departure time (IDT) and packet size (PS) random variables. We implemented two different versions of our distributed generator. In the first one, a log server is in charge of recording the information transmitted by senders and receivers and these communications are based either on TCP or UDP. In the other one, senders and receivers make use of the MPI library. In this work a complete performance comparison among the centralized version and the two distributed versions of D-ITG is presented

Anomalous vortex ring velocities induced by thermally-excited Kelvin waves and counterflow effects in superfluids

Dynamical counterflow effects on vortex evolution under the truncated Gross-Pitaevskii equation are investigated. Standard longitudinal mutual friction effects are produced and a dilatation of vortex rings is obtained at large counterflow. A strong temperature-dependent anomalous slowdown of vortex rings is observed and attributed to the presence of thermally exited Kelvin waves. This generic effect of finite-temperature superfluids is estimated using energy equipartition and orders of magnitude are given for weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates and superfluid $^4{\rm He}$