A Survey of Positioning Systems Using Visible LED Lights

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems.Peer reviewe

A Locking Sweeping Method Based Path Planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Dynamic Maritime Environments

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are new marine intelligent platforms that can autonomously operate in various ocean environments with intelligent decision-making capability. As one of key technologies enabling such a capability, path planning algorithms underpin the navigation and motion control of USVs by providing optimized navigational trajectories. To accommodate complex maritime environments that include various static/moving obstacles, it is important to develop a computational efficient path planning algorithm for USVs so that real-time operation can be effectively carried out. This paper therefore proposes a new algorithm based on the fast sweeping method, named the locking sweeping method (LSM). Compared with other conventional path planning algorithms, the proposed LSM has an improved computational efficiency and can be well applied in dynamic environments that have multiple moving obstacles. When generating an optimal collision-free path, moving obstacles are modelled with ship domains that are calculated based upon ships’ velocities. To evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, particularly the capacity in dealing with practical environments, three different sets of simulations were undertaken in environments built using electronic nautical charts (ENCs). Results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively cope with complex maritime traffic scenarios by generating smooth and safe trajectories

Real-time motion data annotation via action string

Even though there is an explosive growth of motion capture data, there is still a lack of efficient and reliable methods to automatically annotate all the motions in a database. Moreover, because of the popularity of mocap devices in home entertainment systems, real-time human motion annotation or recognition becomes more and more imperative. This paper presents a new motion annotation method that achieves both the aforementioned two targets at the same time. It uses a probabilistic pose feature based on the Gaussian Mixture Model to represent each pose. After training a clustered pose feature model, a motion clip could be represented as an action string. Then, a dynamic programming-based string matching method is introduced to compare the differences between action strings. Finally, in order to achieve the real-time target, we construct a hierarchical action string structure to quickly label each given action string. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our method

Active optical clock based on four-level quantum system

Active optical clock, a new conception of atomic clock, has been proposed recently. In this report, we propose a scheme of active optical clock based on four-level quantum system. The final accuracy and stability of two-level quantum system are limited by second-order Doppler shift of thermal atomic beam. To three-level quantum system, they are mainly limited by light shift of pumping laser field. These limitations can be avoided effectively by applying the scheme proposed here. Rubidium atom four-level quantum system, as a typical example, is discussed in this paper. The population inversion between $6S_{1/2}$ and $5P_{3/2}$ states can be built up at a time scale of $10^{-6}$s. With the mechanism of active optical clock, in which the cavity mode linewidth is much wider than that of the laser gain profile, it can output a laser with quantum-limited linewidth narrower than 1 Hz in theory. An experimental configuration is designed to realize this active optical clock.Comment: 5 page

Preliminary investigation to combustion in a SI engine with direct ethanol injection and port gasoline injection (EDI+GPI)

Ethanol fuel, as a renewable fuel can play an important role in addressing the critical issue of energy resources if it is used in a proper way. Ethanol direct injection plus gasoline port injection (EDI+GPI) is such a new way to enable substantial improvement in engine efficiency and emission reduction in spark ignition engines. This paper reports our preliminary investigation to the combustion and emissions in this new dual fuel injection system. Experiments were conducted on a single-cylinder spark ignition engine equipped with EDI+GPI. In the experiments, the ethanol/gasoline volumetric percentage (EVP) was varied from 0% (gasoline fuel only) to 71%. Mass burnt fraction and indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) were calculated from the measured cylinder pressure for analysing the combustion process. The variance of IMEP, reduced with the increased EVP, showed that the combustion stability was improved by the direct injection of ethanol fuel. The effect of EVP on initial, early and major combustion time periods showed that ethanol fuel's higher combustion velocity and low ignition energy might contribute to accelerating the flame propagating, shortening the combustion periods and reducing the combustion temperature when EVP was less than 48%. However further increase of EVP when it was over 48% resulted in a negative effect on combustion which might be caused by the ethanol fuel's over cooling effect. Hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emission increased and nitric oxide emission decreased with the increase of EVP

Parametric study of cavity length and mirror reflectivity in ultralow threshold quantum well InGaAs/AlGaAs lasers

Record low CW threshold currents of 16 μA at-room temperature and 21 μA at cryogenic temperature have been demonstrated in buried heterostructure strained layer, single quantum well InGaAs/AlGaAs lasers with a short cavity length and high reflectivity coatings

Very High Modulation Efficiency of Ultralow Threshold Current Single Quantum Well InGaAs Lasers

A record high current modulation efficiency of 5 GHz/[sqrt](mA) has been demonstrated in an ultralow threshold strained layer single quantum well InGaAs laser

AN ITERATIVE INTERLACING APPROACH FOR SYNTHESIS OF COMPUTER-GENERATED HOLOGRAMS

A new approach to optimizing computer-generated holograms (CGH\u27s) is discussed. The approach can be summarized most generally as hierarchically designing a number of holograms to add up coherently to a single desired reconstruction. In the case of binary holograms, this approach results in the interlacing (IT) and the iterative interlacing (IIT) techniques. In the IT technique, a number of subholograms are designed and interlaced together to generate the total binary hologram. The first sttbhologram is designed to reconstruct the desired image. The succeeding subholograms are designed to correct the remaining error image. In the IIT technique, the remaining error image after the last subhologram is circulated back to the first subhologram, and the process is continued a number of sweeps until convergence. The IT and the IIT techniques can be used together with most CGH synthesis algorithms, and result in substantial reduction in reconstruction error as well as increased speed of convergence in the case of iterative algorithms