My art, my world, my piano

The topic for this thesis is how Taiwanese and Western cultures have influenced me both as an artist and an individual. In my thesis, I paint Taiwanese floral patterns. Along with a number of paintings and prints, the most complex work involves painting on a piano. The watercolor paintings are in grid format to demonstrate the concept of pattern, and the piano has a single large peony on top and other decorations on the sides. My research focuses upon the art of Taiwanese culture. I choose Taiwanese floral patterns as my subject matter because of their variety of elements, and those elements, in fact, refer to the cultures that have influenced Taiwan throughout history. Combining a Western instrument with a Taiwanese pattern also demonstrates how Western culture has influenced Taiwan. My thesis project represents traditional floral patterns through my own interpretation and presents them in a contemporary way

Leverage social filtering to enhance viewing experience with Amazon Prime Video

The development of technology has changed the way viewers consume video contents. With the rising of streaming services, video contents are gathered in one big platform, making them much more accessible than ever before. However, in the meantime, the ever increasing content choices on streaming services overwhelm and frustrate us, reducing our satisfaction with the experience. In addition, as recently as just a few years ago, television was a communal experience. We would watch TV together, on one shared screen. Now, we are isolated when using video streaming services on personal screens. This project is aimed to enhance viewing experience on streaming service by providing more precise and relevant movie recommendation based on viewer’s social networking, and leveraging video contents as the bridge to develop shared experience and foster greater social engagement. The outcomes will demonstrate a series of functionalities that allow users to refer to their friend’s viewing activities and reviews as options for movies, open up vivid conversations with friends by easily capturing and sharing memorable scenes from movies, as well as expand social connections based primarily on affinity in movie preferences for greater social engagement and richer viewing experience

Model Predictive Control with and without Terminal Weight: Stability and Algorithms

This paper presents stability analysis tools for model predictive control (MPC) with and without terminal weight. Stability analysis of MPC with a limited horizon but without terminal weight is a long-standing open problem. By using a modified value function as an Lyapunov function candidate and the principle of optimality, this paper establishes stability conditions for this type of widely spread MPC algorithms. A new stability guaranteed MPC algorithm without terminal weight (MPCS) is presented. With the help of designing a new sublevel set defined by the value function of one-step ahead stage cost, conditions for checking its recursive feasibility and stability of the proposed MPC algorithm are presented. The new stability condition and the derived MPCS overcome the difficulties arising in the existing terminal weight based MPC framework, including the need of searching a suitable terminal weight and possible poor performance caused by an inappropriate terminal weight. This work is further extended to MPC with a terminal weight for the completeness. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tool, whereas the existing stability analysis tools are either not applicable or lead to quite conservative results. It shows that the proposed tools offer a number of mechanisms to achieve stability: adjusting state and/or control weights, extending the length of horizon, and adding a simple extra constraint on the first or second state in the optimisation

On a switching control scheme for nonlinear systems with ill-defined relative degree

This paper discusses the applicability of a switching control scheme for a nonlinear system with ill-defined relative degree. The control scheme switches between exact and approximate input-output linearisation control laws. Unlike a linear system under a switching control scheme, the equilibria of a nonlinear system may change with the switching. It is pointed out that this is not sufficient to cause instability. When the region of the approximate linearisation control law is attractive to the exact zero dynamics, it is possible that the closed-loop system under the switching control scheme is still stable. The results in this paper shows that the switching control scheme proposed in Tomlin and Sastry (Systems Control Lett. 35(3) (1998) 145) is applicable for a wider class of nonlinear systems

Disturbance observer based control for nonlinear systems

This paper presents a general framework for nonlinear systems subject to disturbances using disturbance observer based control (DOBC)techniques. A two-stage design procedure to improve disturbance attenuation ability of current linear/nonlinear controllers is proposed where the disturbance observer design is separated from the controller design. To facilitate this concept, a nonlinear disturbance observer is developed for disturbances generated by an exogenous system, and global exponential stability is established under certain condition. Furthermore, semiglobal stability condition of the composite controller consisting of a nonlinear controller and the nonlinear disturbance observer is established. The developed method is illustrated by the application to control of a two-link robotic manipulator

Development of nonlinear disturbance observer based control and nonlinear PID: A personal note

This paper gives an overview of early development of nonlinear disturbance observer design technique and the Disturbance Observer Based Control (DOBC) design. Some critical points raised in the development of the methods have been reviewed and discussed which are still relevant for many researchers or practitioners who are interested in this method. The review is followed by the development of a new type of nonlinear PID controller for a robotic manipulator and its experimental tests. It is shown that, under a number of assumptions, the DOBC consisting of a predictive control method and a nonlinear disturbance observer could reduce to a nonlinear PID with special features. Experimental results show that, compared with the predictive control method, the developed controller significantly improves performance robustness against uncertainty and friction. This paper may trigger further research and interests in the development of DOBC and related methods, and building up more understanding between this group of control methods with comparable ones (particularly control methods with integral action)