The Role of Railway Transport in Ceylon: Present Problems and Future Prospects.

This Thesis is a study of the role of railway transport in Ceylon. It is divided into three parts. Part One is devoted to the discussion of the Ceylon (Government) Railway's early role in the absence of competition, and to the present problems facing it as a consequence to the development of road transport on the one hand, and to an unrealistic transport policy, on the other. Part Two of the Thesis examines the proper role of the railways. A discussion of the country's financial difficulties, undertaken in chapter 5, reveals the extent to which the national interest clashes with orthodox economics; its importance cannot be overlooked in any solution to the transport problem. Chapter 6 deals with transport costs whilst the pricing and investment policies for the railways are discussed at length in chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9 examines the transport problem and the solutions. The study of public control of transport is restricted to chapter 10. The results of the analysis in Part Two provides the basis for stating the case of the Railway in Part Three. It is apparent that the future prospects for the Railway depend on the availability of traffic and Government policy on transport in general, and the Railway in particular, Chapter 11 is devoted to an examination of the opportunities that are for it to secure additional traffic; the common arguments in support of the wider use of the Railway are dealt with. Chapter 12 examines a lore realistic transport policy. The proposals for the Railway and the road industry, while accommodating the national interest, are deemed to assure both the economic objective of a transport policy and the proper role of the Railway

Learning Latent Space Dynamics for Tactile Servoing

To achieve a dexterous robotic manipulation, we need to endow our robot with tactile feedback capability, i.e. the ability to drive action based on tactile sensing. In this paper, we specifically address the challenge of tactile servoing, i.e. given the current tactile sensing and a target/goal tactile sensing --memorized from a successful task execution in the past-- what is the action that will bring the current tactile sensing to move closer towards the target tactile sensing at the next time step. We develop a data-driven approach to acquire a dynamics model for tactile servoing by learning from demonstration. Moreover, our method represents the tactile sensing information as to lie on a surface --or a 2D manifold-- and perform a manifold learning, making it applicable to any tactile skin geometry. We evaluate our method on a contact point tracking task using a robot equipped with a tactile finger. A video demonstrating our approach can be seen in https://youtu.be/0QK0-Vx7WkIComment: Accepted to be published at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019. The final version for publication at ICRA 2019 is 7 pages (i.e. 6 pages of technical content (including text, figures, tables, acknowledgement, etc.) and 1 page of the Bibliography/References), while this arXiv version is 8 pages (added Appendix and some extra details

OPTIMIZATION OF POMEGRANATE PEEL EXTRACTS FOR THE BIOCONVERSION OF THE ELLAGITANNINS TO ELLAGIC ACID USING ASPERGILLUS NIGER, RHIZOPUS ORYZAE AND MIXED CULTURE

Objective: The present study is aimed at optimization of concentration of substrate (pomegranate peel extract) for the production of Ellagic acid using Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus oryzae. Methods: Test organisms were isolated and identified using standard microbiological techniques. Collected pomegranate peels were dried, grained and used as the substrate for solid-state fermentation. Prepared spore suspension of the test organisms was inoculated and incubated at room temperature. At regular intervals of 24 h, samples were drawn and subjected to analysis of reducing sugar, soluble proteins, hydrolysable tannins and production of extracellular tannase using standard methods. Results: The results of the present investigation demonstrated the optimum substrate concentration for the active conversion of ellagitannins to ellagic was 15g of A. niger, 20g for R. oryzae and 15g for mixed culture. Conclusion: From the current work, it was concluded that solid-state bioprocessing of fruit substrates and fruit wastes using fungi has shown to enrich phenolic antioxidants and improve phytochemical consistency

Evolving Optimal IIR and Adaptive Filters

In this thesis, current digital filter design techniques are critically reviewed and problems associated with computational cost, complexity, frequency response and speed of convergence, identified. Based on this, a globally optimal, fine- tuned and efficient evolutionary hybrid technique has been developed to automate and optimise infinite impulse response (HR) and adaptive filter design. The proposed hybrid design approach employs an evolutionary algorithm (EA) as a global search tool and a least mean square (LMS) algorithm, whenever appropriate, as a fine-tuner. This permits optimal and real-time tracking of time varying changes in nonstationary environments as widely encountered in telecommunications. In the development, various improvements on existing algorithms are made, including those on components of EAs, LMS algorithm and the filter structures. The aims are to be able to evolve direct form HR structures using simple stability monitoring techniques, to improve local hue-tuning performance and to avoid premature convergence. To evolve complex phenotype chromosomes that are needed by complex HR. filters, a novel method of crossover operation is developed. This is a variation of the standard uniform crossover in which the split points are considered to combine uniquely as indivisible floating-point complex valued genes. The split-point crossover operation produces more new members than the standard crossover operation, and hence provides a faster rate of convergence and avoids premature convergence. The EAs have been particularly designed for small population sizes and to reduce premature convergence, a new operator is designed to introduce new members into the population during evolution. Two techniques are investigated in the design of linear adaptive HR digital filters, namely, the pole design method and the coefficient design method. The pole design method provides filter stability throughout the genetic search without requiring a variety of stability monitoring techniques. The coefficient design method uses simple stability guaranteeing techniques, which also improves the rate of convergence of the EAs. With the hybrid technique, complex-coefficient filters have been designed successfully and globally optimal and adaptive filters have been achieved. The developed methodologies and designs are verified using higher order complex HR systems and, for adaptation, inverse system modelling that is synonymous with channel equalising filters operating in multipath environments. Here adaptive complex parameters become possible to equalise amplitude and phase distortions of the received signals. Various stability-ensuring techniques are investigated extensively and their convergence performances are compared with the proposed method. The proposed hybrid, global and fine design technique is applied to solve adaptive channel equalisation and noise cancellation problems commonly existing in telecommunications