Multi fingered robot hand in industrial robot application using tele-operation

This research focuses on the working and development of wireless robotic hand system. In this research previously developed models have been studied. After analysis of those models, a better approach has been presented in this research. The objective of this research is to design and develop a tele-operated robotic hand system. The robotic hand is intended for providing solutions to industrial problems like robot reprogramming, industrial automation and safety of the workers working in hostile environments. The robotic hand system works in the master slave configuration where Bluetooth is being used as the communication channel for the tele-operation. The master is a glove, embedded with sensors to detect the movement of every joint present in the hand, which a human operator can wear. This joint movement is transferred to the slave robotic hand which will mimic the movement of human operator. The robotic hand is a multi fingered dexterous and anthropomorphic hand. All the fingers are capable of performing flexion, extension, abduction, adduction and hence circumduction. A new combination of pneumatic muscles and springs has been used for the actuation purpose. As a result, this combination reduces the size of the robotic hand by decreasing the number of pneumatic muscles used. The pneumatic muscles are controlled by the opening and closing of solenoid valves. A novel technique has been used in the robotic hand for tendon routing, which gives the ability of independence to all finger joints. The heart of all the control mechanism of the system is mbed microcontroller. The designed system was tested at different module levels. The results show the successful establishment of communication between master and slave at a rate of 10 packets per second, which was sufficient for smooth motion of the system. The amount of torque produced at all the joints in the robotic hand has been presented in this research. The posture tests have been performed in which two fingers were actuated which followed the master. This system has achieved motion of fingers without any tendon coupling problem. The system is able to replace the human industrial workers performing dexterous tasks

Ensembles of Randomized Time Series Shapelets Provide Improved Accuracy while Reducing Computational Costs

Shapelets are discriminative time series subsequences that allow generation of interpretable classification models, which provide faster and generally better classification than the nearest neighbor approach. However, the shapelet discovery process requires the evaluation of all possible subsequences of all time series in the training set, making it extremely computation intensive. Consequently, shapelet discovery for large time series datasets quickly becomes intractable. A number of improvements have been proposed to reduce the training time. These techniques use approximation or discretization and often lead to reduced classification accuracy compared to the exact method. We are proposing the use of ensembles of shapelet-based classifiers obtained using random sampling of the shapelet candidates. Using random sampling reduces the number of evaluated candidates and consequently the required computational cost, while the classification accuracy of the resulting models is also not significantly different than that of the exact algorithm. The combination of randomized classifiers rectifies the inaccuracies of individual models because of the diversity of the solutions. Based on the experiments performed, it is shown that the proposed approach of using an ensemble of inexpensive classifiers provides better classification accuracy compared to the exact method at a significantly lesser computational cost

Exchange Rate Pass-through to Consumer Prices in Pakistan: Does Misalignment Matter?

This study investigates the impact of exchange rate changes on consumer prices (commonly known as exchange rate pass-through (ERPT)) in Pakistan for the period 1995M1 to 2009M3. The study estimates short-run and long-run ERPT in Pakistan while taking into account the existing real exchange rate misalignment (RERM). The results suggest that the ERPT to consumer price inflation in Pakistan is very low (close to zero). The impact of the previous periods’ misalignment on inflation is found significant in managed exchange rate regime. However, the overall sample misalignment does not affect inflation. The impact of foreign inflation on domestic inflation is positive and statistically significant.Pass-through, Misalignment, Inflation