Mechatronic design and construction of an intelligent mobile robot for educational purposes : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Engineering and Automation at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The main aim of this project was to produce a working intelligent mechatronically designed mobile robot, which could be used for educational purposes. A secondary aim was to make the robot as a test-bed to investigate new systems (sensors, control etc.) if possible. The mechatronic design of the robot was split in to three sections: the chassis, the sensors and the control. The design and construction of the chassis unit was relatively simple and very few problems were encountered. The drive system chosen for the robot was a four-wheeled Mecanum drive. The major advantage of this system is that it allows multiple degrees of freedom while keeping the control and the number of drive motors to a minimum. The design and construction of the sensors was the main research section. The sensor design evolved around the use of ultrasonic sensors. While a phased array type arrangement was tried with the intention of improving the angular accuracy of the sensors, the use of frequency modulation was used in the end and it proved to be excellent except that the problem of angular accuracy was still not solved. The entire mechatronic system was completed except for the micro controller programming. It operated well when it was given the correct inputs and performed all of the functions it was designed for. It is strongly recommended that further work be done on the use of a computer motherboard instead of the current micro controller as this would allow for easier programming, more complex programs and easy implementation of map building

“Structures of Irony: Curiosity and Fetishism in Late Imperial London”

This essay argues that curiosity can work as irony's shadow dialectic in modernist responses to imperialism and metropolitan culture, and suggests that curiosity deserves further exploration as a modernist device. Attentive to the settings and visual metaphors of space and structure that abet irony's role, this essay finds that curiosity's conspicuous absence in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) burdens irony with the obligation to respond alone to the late imperial culture Conrad characterizes as governed by fetishism. By contrast, curiosity emerges in E. M. Forster's review “The Birth of an Empire” (1924) not as irony's naive opposite but as that which may learn from the distance irony produces and as the occasion for testing tentative styles of reattachment to the metropole that seek deeper knowledge of British India and late imperial London than colonial exhibitions could display. Reading such texts today calls not for reaffirmations for ironic distance, but for pursuing an alternative knowledge of curiosity's role in response by considering it within the paradigm of modernist irony

Cultural Site Impacts

Slides of petroglyphs with vandalis

What price Philippine independence?

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1638/thumbnail.jp

Social Status and Badge Design

Many websites rely on user-generated content to provide value to consumers. These websites typically incentivize participation by awarding users badges based on their contributions. While these badges typically have no explicit value, they act as symbols of social status within a community. In this paper, we consider the design of badge mechanisms for the objective of maximizing the total contributions made to a website. Users exert costly effort to make contributions and, in return, are awarded with badges. A badge is only valued to the extent that it signals social status and thus badge valuations are determined endogenously by the number of users who earn each badge. The goal of this paper is to study the design of optimal and approximately badge mechanisms under these status valuations. We characterize badge mechanisms by whether they use a coarse partitioning scheme, i.e. awarding the same badge to many users, or use a fine partitioning scheme, i.e. awarding a unique badge to most users. We find that the optimal mechanism uses both fine partitioning and coarse partitioning. When status valuations exhibit a decreasing marginal value property, we prove that coarse partitioning is a necessary feature of any approximately optimal mechanism. Conversely, when status valuations exhibit an increasing marginal value property, we prove that fine partitioning is necessary for approximate optimality