Pseudo-classical theory for fidelity of nearly resonant quantum rotors

Using a semiclassical ansatz we analytically predict for the fidelity of delta-kicked rotors the occurrence of revivals and the disappearance of intermediate revival peaks arising from the breaking of a symmetry in the initial conditions. A numerical verification of the predicted effects is given and experimental ramifications are discussed.Comment: Shortened and improved versio

Spatial Modulation Microscopy for Real-Time Imaging of Plasmonic Nanoparticles and Cells

Spatial modulation microscopy is a technique originally developed for quantitative spectroscopy of individual nano-objects. Here, a parallel implementation of the spatial modulation microscopy technique is demonstrated based on a line detector capable of demodulation at kHz frequencies. The capabilities of the imaging system are shown using an array of plasmonic nanoantennas and dendritic cells incubated with gold nanoparticles.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

Challenges for industrial robot applications in food manufacturing

The global food industry is facing many challenges due to the impact of climate change, ever-changing demands by consumers, and increasing legislative pressures by the government, which have resulted in several drivers for changes. Current large scale rigid manufacturing systems are increasingly seen as incapable of supporting the underlining requirements for implementation of such changes. In this context, one of the key requirements is the need for improved flexibility and reconfigurability of production facilities, often provided by adoption of Industrial Robots in other manufacturing sectors. However, despite their recent technological advancements, in particular the advent of the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), and significant reduction in overall implementation cost over the last two decades, the uptake of industrial robots in food processing has been slow. This paper explores the application of industrial robots in food manufacturing, the benefits of their use and the challenges currently hindering their uptake

Industrial Robot Programming and UPnP Services Orchestration for the Automation of Factories

The integration of equipment and other devices built into industrial robot cells with modern Ethernet interface technologies and low‐cost mass produced devices (such as vision systems, laser scanners, force torque‐sensors, PLCs and PDAs etc.) enables integrators to offer more powerful and smarter solutions. Nevertheless, the programming of all these devices efficiently requires very specific knowledge about them, such as their hardware architectures and specific programming languages as well as details about the system¿s low level communication protocols. To address these issues, this paper describes and analyses the Plug‐and‐Play architecture. This is one of the most interesting service‐oriented architectures (SOAs) available, which exhibits characteristics that are well adapted to industrial robotics cells. To validate their programming features and applicability, a test bed was specially designed. This provides a new graphical service orchestration which was implemented using Workflow Foundation 4 of .NET. The obtained results allowed us to verify that the use of integration schemes based on SOAs reduces the system integration time and is better adapted to industrial robotic cell system integrators.The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Plan Nacional de I+D (FEDER-CICYT, Spanish Government) and to the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain) for the financing of this work, which was made under the research projects DPI2010-20814-C02-02, DPI2011-28507-C02-01 and PAID/2011/039. In addition, they also want to acknowledge the assistance of Elena Ruiz Gomez for her help in the translation of the article.Valera Fernández, Á.; Gómez Moreno, J.; Sánchez Salmerón, AJ.; Ricolfe Viala, C.; Zotovic Stanisic, R.; Vallés Miquel, M. (2012). Industrial Robot Programming and UPnP Services Orchestration for the Automation of Factories. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. 9:1-11. doi:10.5772/51373S1119Ahn, S., Lee, J., Lim, K., Ko, H., Kwon, Y., & Kim, H. (2006). UPnP SDK for Robot Development. 2006 SICE-ICASE International Joint Conference. doi:10.1109/sice.2006.315791Ahn, S., Lee, J., Lim, K., Ko, H., Kwon, Y., & Kim, H. (2006). Requirements to UPnP for Robot Middleware. 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. doi:10.1109/iros.2006.282262Kelleher, C., & Pausch, R. (2005). Lowering the barriers to programming. ACM Computing Surveys, 37(2), 83-137. doi:10.1145/1089733.1089734Candido, G., Colombo, A. W., Barata, J., & Jammes, F. (2011). Service-Oriented Infrastructure to Support the Deployment of Evolvable Production Systems. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 7(4), 759-767. doi:10.1109/tii.2011.2166779Crnkovic, I., Stafford, J., & Szyperski, C. (2011). Software Components beyond Programming: From Routines to Services. IEEE Software, 28(3), 22-26. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.62Cucinotta, T., Mancina, A., Anastasi, G. F., Lipari, G., Mangeruca, L., Checcozzo, R., & Rusina, F. (2009). A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 5(3), 267-277. doi:10.1109/tii.2009.2027013Delamer, I. M., & Lastra, J. L. M. (2006). Service-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Electronics Production. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2(4), 281-294. doi:10.1109/tii.2006.885188Estevez-Ayres, I., Basanta-Val, P., Garcia-Valls, M., Fisteus, J. A., & Almeida, L. (2009). QoS-Aware Real-Time Composition Algorithms for Service-Based Applications. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 5(3), 278-288. doi:10.1109/tii.2009.2026422Foster, H., Uchitel, S., Magee, J., & Kramer, J. (2010). An Integrated Workbench for Model-Based Engineering of Service Compositions. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 3(2), 131-144. doi:10.1109/tsc.2010.19Chen, H.-M., Kazman, R., & Perry, O. (2010). From Software Architecture Analysis to Service Engineering: An Empirical Study of Methodology Development for Enterprise SOA Implementation. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 3(2), 145-160. doi:10.1109/tsc.2010.21Jaejoon Lee, & Kotonya, G. (2010). Combining Service-Orientation with Product Line Engineering. IEEE Software, 27(3), 35-41. doi:10.1109/ms.2010.30Jammes, F., & Smit, H. (2005). Service-Oriented Paradigms in Industrial Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 1(1), 62-70. doi:10.1109/tii.2005.844419Juric, M. B., Kezmah, B., Hericko, M., Rozman, I., & Vezocnik, I. (2004). Java RMI, RMI tunneling and Web services comparison and performance analysis. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 39(5), 58. doi:10.1145/997140.997146Lewis, G., Morris, E., Simanta, S., & Smith, D. (2011). Service Orientation and Systems of Systems. IEEE Software, 28(1), 58-63. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.15Martin M., Grounds N.G., Antonio J.K., Crawford K. and Madden J. (2010). “Banker's Deadlock Avoidance Algorithm for Distributed Service-Oriented Architectures”, PDPTACSREA Press, pp. 43–50.Menasce, D., Gomaa, H., Malek, S., & Sousa, J. (2011). SASSY: A Framework for Self-Architecting Service-Oriented Systems. IEEE Software, 28(6), 78-85. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.22Remy, S. L., & Blake, M. B. (2011). Distributed Service-Oriented Robotics. IEEE Internet Computing, 15(2), 70-74. doi:10.1109/mic.2011.38Sasa, A., Juric, M. B., & Krisper, M. (2008). Service-Oriented Framework for Human Task Support and Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 4(4), 292-302. doi:10.1109/tii.2008.2008641Unver, H. O. (2011). System Architectures Enabling Reconfigurable Laboratory-Automation Systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews), 41(6), 909-922. doi:10.1109/tsmcc.2011.2107552Veiga, G., Pires, J. N., & Nilsson, K. (2009). Experiments with service-oriented architectures for industrial robotic cells programming. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 25(4-5), 746-755. doi:10.1016/j.rcim.2008.09.001Veiga, G., Pires, J. N., & Nilsson, K. (2007). ON THE USE OF SERVICE ORIENTED SOFTWARE PLATFORMS FOR INDUSTRIAL ROBOTIC CELLS. IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 40(3), 109-115. doi:10.3182/20070523-3-es-4908.00019WHITLEY, K. N. (1997). Visual Programming Languages and the Empirical Evidence For and Against. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 8(1), 109-142. doi:10.1006/jvlc.1996.0030Xu, L. D. (2011). Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 7(4), 630-640. doi:10.1109/tii.2011.216715

Plasmonic Control of Radiative Properties of Semiconductor Quantum Dots Coupled to Plasmonic Ring Cavities

In recent years, a lot of effort has been made to achieve controlled delivery of target particles to the hotspots of plasmonic nanoantennas, in order to probe and/or exploit the extremely large field enhancements produced by such structures. While in many cases such high fields are advantageous, there are instances where they should be avoided. In this work, we consider the implications of using the standard nanoantenna geometries when colloidal quantum dots are employed as target entities. We show that in this case, and for various reasons, dimer antennas are not the optimum choice. Plasmonic ring cavities are a better option despite low field enhancements, as they allow collective coupling of many quantum dots in a reproducible and predictable manner. In cases where larger field enhancements are required, or for larger quantum dots, nonconcentric ring-disk cavities can be employed instead

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe