Physical Activity in Individuals with Down Syndrome

This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Tennessee Honors Program at Trace: Tennessee Research an

Comparison of herpetofaunal species composition and response to edge on the Camp Dawson Collective Training Area, Preston County, West Virginia

Herpetofaunal species composition, abundance, and diversity were evaluated on the Camp Dawson Collective Training Area, Preston County, West Virginia, as a requirement of the Sikes Act (16 USC 670a et seq.), Army Regulation 200-3, and Department of Defense Instruction 4715.3. Herpetofauna were sampled using pitfall traps with drift fences and double-ended funnel traps, and also from area searches. Redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), red-spotted newt (Notophthalmus v. viridescens ), eastern American toad (Bufo a. americanus), and wood frog (Rana sylvatica) were most common in pitfall arrays; mountain dusky salamander (Desmognathus ochrophaeus), Appalachian seal salamander (Desmognathus m. monticola), and redback salamander were most common from searches. Northern red salamander ( Pseudotriton r. ruber), a West Virginia rare species, was documented on all 3 study sites. Species distributions varied among habitat (upland or riparian) and treatment (edge or interior) conditions; habitat characteristics and herpetofaunal size and biomass also varied between habitat and treatment conditions

Arbitrary Pole Placement with Sliding Mode Control

This paper considers the problem of placing all the poles arbitrarily for a linear time-invariant plant with the linear part 00 sliding mode control. We solve this problem in two ways. In the first approach, we design a sliding mode control by specifying the desired pole locations. The closed-loop system under this control law has all eigenvalues at the desired places. In the second approach, the sliding mode control is designed from a given state feedback gain so that all the poles of the closed-loop system are placed at the same location as that of the state feedback controller. Here, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a linear gain using the sliding mode control to achieve the desired pole assignment. This condition is always fulfilled for the single input case whereas it is only applicable for certain multi-input scenarios that meet the conditions stated in the paper. In both the approaches, one can place the closed-loop poles with the proposed sliding mode control at any arbitrary location in the left half of the complex plane, unlike with traditional design, where m poles are at the origin with m being the number of control inputs. A numerical example illustrates the proposed design methodology for sliding mode control

Decentralized Sliding Mode Control for Output Tracking of Large-Scale Interconnected Systems

In this paper, a class of nonlinear interconnected systems with matched and unmatched uncertainties is considered. The isolated subsystem dynamics are described by linear systems and a nonlinear component. The matched uncertainties and unmatched unknown interconnection terms are assumed to be bounded by known functions. Based on sliding mode techniques, a state feedback decentralized control scheme is proposed such that the outputs of the controlled interconnected system track given desired signals uniformly ultimately. The desired reference signals are allowed to be time-varying. Using multiple transformations, the considered system is transferred to a new interconnected system with an appropriate structure to facilitate the sliding surface design and the design of a decentralized controller. A set of conditions is proposed to guarantee that the designed controller drives the tracking errors onto the sliding surface. The sliding motion exhibited by the error dynamics is uniformly ultimately bounded. The developed results are applied to a river quality control problem. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized control strategy is effective and feasible