Evaluation of model predictive control method for collision avoidance of automated vehicles

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Collision avoidance design plays an essential role in autonomous vehicle technology. It's an attractive research area that will need much experimentation in the future. This research area is very important for providing the maximum safety to automated vehicles, which have to be tested several times under diFFerent circumstances for safety before use in real life. This thesis proposes a method for designing and presenting a collision avoidance maneuver by using a model predictive controller with a moving obstacle for automated vehicles. It consists of a plant model, an adaptive MPC controller, and a reference trajectory. The proposed strategy applies a dynamic bicycle model as the plant model, adaptive model predictive controller for the lateral control, and a custom reference trajectory for the scenario design. The model was developed using the Model Predictive Control Toolbox and Automated Driving Toolbox in Matlab. Builtin tools available in Matlab/Simulink were used to verify the modeling approach and analyze the performance of the system. The major contribution of this thesis work was implementing a novel dynamic obstacle avoidance control method for automated vehicles. The study used validated parameters obtained from previous research. The novelty of this research was performing the studies using a MPC based controller instead of a sliding mode controller, that was primarily used in other studies. The results obtained from the study are compared with the validated models. The comparisons consisted of the lateral overlap, lateral error, and steering angle simulation results between the models. Additionally, this study also included outcomes for the yaw angle. The comparisons and other outcomes obtained in this study indicated that the developed control model produced reasonably acceptable results and recommendations for future studies

Understanding the role of ion interactions in soluble salt flotation

ManuscriptThere is anecdotal evidence for the significant effects of salt ions on the flotation separation of minerals using process water of high salt content. Examples include flotation of soluble salt minerals such as potash, trona and borax in brine solutions. Although some of the effects are expected, some do not seem to be encompassed by classical theories of colloid science. Several experimental and modeling techniques for determining solution viscosity, surface tension, bubble-particle attachment time, contact angle, atomic force microscopy, sumfrequency vibrational spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulation have been used to provide further information on air-solution and solid-solution interfacial phenomena, especially the interfacial water structure due to the presence of dissolved ions. These studies indicate that the ion specific effect is the most significant factor influencing flotation in brine solutions

Physician Learning and Clinical Decision Support Systems

Despite the documented benefits of clinical decision support systems in reducing the number of adverse drug events (ADEs) and medication errors, their adoption has been very limited. In this paper, we propose a clinical learning model that incorporates the use of a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) to improve the decisions on the initial drug selection and ongoing dosage and application. The model allows for the analytical investigation of the effects of different CDSS functionalities on clinical learning. The analytical results suggest that using CDSS to improve drug selection decisions positively influences the importance of the patient-level information for the physician. On the other hand, absent improvements in successful drug selection, the use of CDSS may in fact negatively influence the clinical learning

Competition among Experts via Face-to-Face and Online Channels

Online experts increasingly compete against traditional, face-to-face experts by offering many consulting and customer services. In turn, some traditional high-quality experts consider offering online services to defend their markets. In this research, we investigate how a traditional high-quality expert should modify its business model to respond to the new competition arising due to the Internet. We find that the Internet impacts the high-quality traditional expert more adversely than the low-quality traditional expert due to losses in the second opinion market. If the online transaction costs are low, the online expert with an intermediate quality charges a lower price and obtains a higher profit compared to the traditional highquality expert

Adoption of Electronic and Personal Health Records: An Ecconomic Analysis

We investigate strategic issues surrounding the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and personal health records (PHR) using an economic framework. Through our analysis, we find evidence that health care providers do not have an incentive to implement interoperable EHR systems even though the implementation of EHR systems (interoperable or otherwise) will increase consumer surplus. In this context, we conjecture that PHR platforms can fundamentally alter the incentives of health care providers, potentially leading to increased EHR adoption under some conditions. In a pluralistic health care system like that which exists in the United States, where health care providers have varying incentives to implement interoperable electronic health records, an online PHR platform can provide an alternative means for consumers to freely exchange their health records among different providers

Performance measures for object detection evaluation

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We propose a new procedure for quantitative evaluation of object detection algorithms. The procedure consists of a matching stage for finding correspondences between reference and output objects, an accuracy score that is sensitive to object shapes as well as boundary and fragmentation errors, and a ranking step for final ordering of the algorithms using multiple performance indicators. The procedure is illustrated on a building detection task where the resulting rankings are consistent with the visual inspection of the detection maps. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved