99,226 research outputs found
Experimental study of contact transition control incorporating joint acceleration feedback
Joint acceleration and velocity feedbacks are incorporated into a classical internal force control of a robot in contact with the environment. This is intended to achieve a robust contact transition and force tracking performance for varying unknown environments, without any need of adjusting the controller parameters, A unified control structure is proposed for free motion, contact transition, and constrained motion in view of the consumption of the initial kinetic energy generated by a nonzero impact velocity. The influence of the velocity and acceleration feedbacks, which are introduced especially for suppressing the transition oscillation, on the postcontact tracking performance is discussed. Extensive experiments are conducted on the third joint of a three-link direct-drive robot to verify the proposed scheme for environments of various stiffnesses, including elastic (sponge), less elastic (cardboard), and hard (steel plate) surfaces. Results are compared with those obtained by the transition control scheme without the acceleration feedback. The ability of the proposed control scheme in resisting the force disturbance during the postcontact period is also experimentally investigated
Adaptive Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources in Lossy Power Distribution Systems
This paper is concerned with the problem of coordinating a set of distributed
energy resources (DERs) in a lossy power distribution system to provide
frequency regulation services to a bulk power grid with the explicit
consideration of system losses. To this end, we formulate the problem as an
optimization problem, the objective of which is to minimize some cost function
subject to a set of constraints. The formulation requires knowledge of
incremental total system losses, which we approximate using the so-called loss
factors (LFs) that explicitly capture the impacts of both active and reactive
power injections on system losses. The LFs are estimated recursively using
power injection measurements; thus, they are adaptive to various phenomena that
impact the power system operation. Numerical simulation on a 33-bus
distribution test feeder validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework
Automatic Classification of Text Databases through Query Probing
Many text databases on the web are "hidden" behind search interfaces, and
their documents are only accessible through querying. Search engines typically
ignore the contents of such search-only databases. Recently, Yahoo-like
directories have started to manually organize these databases into categories
that users can browse to find these valuable resources. We propose a novel
strategy to automate the classification of search-only text databases. Our
technique starts by training a rule-based document classifier, and then uses
the classifier's rules to generate probing queries. The queries are sent to the
text databases, which are then classified based on the number of matches that
they produce for each query. We report some initial exploratory experiments
that show that our approach is promising to automatically characterize the
contents of text databases accessible on the web.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur
Control Barrier Function Based Quadratic Programs for Safety Critical Systems
Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially
conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a
formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward
automotive applications, this paper develops a methodology that allows safety
conditions -- expressed as control barrier functions -- to be unified with
performance objectives -- expressed as control Lyapunov functions -- in the
context of real-time optimization-based controllers. Safety conditions are
specified in terms of forward invariance of a set, and are verified via two
novel generalizations of barrier functions; in each case, the existence of a
barrier function satisfying Lyapunov-like conditions implies forward invariance
of the set, and the relationship between these two classes of barrier functions
is characterized. In addition, each of these formulations yields a notion of
control barrier function (CBF), providing inequality constraints in the control
input that, when satisfied, again imply forward invariance of the set. Through
these constructions, CBFs can naturally be unified with control Lyapunov
functions (CLFs) in the context of a quadratic program (QP); this allows for
the achievement of control objectives (represented by CLFs) subject to
conditions on the admissible states of the system (represented by CBFs). The
mediation of safety and performance through a QP is demonstrated on adaptive
cruise control and lane keeping, two automotive control problems that present
both safety and performance considerations coupled with actuator bounds
Electronic properties of bilayer phosphorene quantum dots in the presence of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields
Using the tight-binding approach, we investigate the electronic properties of
bilayer phosphorene (BLP) quantum dots (QDs) in the presence of perpendicular
electric and magnetic fields. Since BLP consists of two coupled phosphorene
layers, it is of interest to examine the layer-dependent electronic properties
of BLP QDs, such as the electronic distributions over the two layers and the
so-produced layer-polarization features, and to see how these properties are
affected by the magnetic field and the bias potential. We find that in the
absence of a bias potential only edge states are layer-polarized while the bulk
states are not, and the layer-polarization degree (LPD) of the unbiased edge
states increases with increasing magnetic field. However, in the presence of a
bias potential both the edge and bulk states are layer-polarized, and the LPD
of the bulk (edge) states depends strongly (weakly) on the interplay of the
bias potential and the interlayer coupling. At high magnetic fields, applying a
bias potential renders the bulk electrons in a BLP QD to be mainly distributed
over the top or bottom layer, resulting in layer-polarized bulk Landau levels
(LLs). In the presence of a large bias potential that can drive a
semiconductor-to-semimetal transition in BLP, these bulk LLs exhibit different
magnetic-field dependences, i.e., the zeroth LLs exhibit a linear-like
dependence on the magnetic field while the other LLs exhibit a square-root-like
dependence.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
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