Implementation of a Training Module on Alcohol Prevention for Promotoras on a Border Community in the Rio Grande Valley.

Background: Complications due to unhealthy alcohol use are widely spread, and there is a significant unmet need for prevention and treatment in the community. The South Texas-Mexico border region consists of over ninety percent of Hispanics and suffers from a significant shortage of physicians. Alcohol-related problems are highly unrecognized and untreated in this large Hispanic population due to the shortage of healthcare providers, low education levels, and limited trust in the health care system. Prevention efforts should be designed to prevent or reduce the risk of developing alcohol addiction. Methods: The proposed module focuses on enhancing the Promotoras or Community Health Worker (CHW) ability to screen and recognize unhealthy alcohol use and the need for referral for care. We use a survey to follow and record the experience of a subset of these Promotoras who will educate Hispanic families from their communities. Results: This module provides data that will significantly contribute to our understanding of the barriers in knowledge, access to services, and care for people with alcohol problems. The study consists of a train-the-trainer module designed by the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) specifically for Promotoras. CHW aimed at increasing their knowledge concerning general health practices among ethnic minorities, specifically in terms of alcohol abuse prevention. The initial workshop trained 44 Promotoras from Cameron and Hidalgo counties. Each Promotora was assessed using pre-and post-test questionnaires. Conclusions: The research team assessed Promotora\u27s alcohol knowledge and prevention strategies with plotted data. In summary, the study provided a measurable unit of our training module in enhancing understanding of screening and the need for intervention for alcohol-related problems by Community Health Workers

Preliminary results on UAV-based forest fire localization based on decisional navigation

International audienceEfficient localization of forest-fires based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represents valuable assessment. Due to the fast deployment of UAVs, it is practical to use them. For forest fire detection purposes, usually the area to explore is unknown, thus existing strategies use an automatic coverage exploration strategy. However, such approach is not efficient in terms of exploration time since the mission execution and achievement in an unknown environment that needs a strong vehicle decision and control. Based on this observation, we improved the localization mission by a decision-based strategy resulting from a probabilistic model based on the temperature in order to estimate the distance towards the forest-fire. The UAV optimizes its trajectory according to the state of the forest-fire knowledge by using a map to represent its knowledge and updates it at each step of its exploration. We show in this paper that our planning and control methodology for forest-fire localization is efficient. Simulation results are carried out to evaluate the proposed methodology and approves our claim

Distributed Event-Based Sliding-Mode Consensus Control in Dynamic Formation for VTOL-UAVs

International audienceThe present work deals with consensus control for a multi-agent system composed by mini Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) rotorcrafts by means of a novel nonlinear event-based control law. First, the VTOL system modeling is presented using the quaternion parametrization to develop an integral sliding-mode control law for attitude stabilization of the aerial robots. Then, the vehicle position dynamics is expanded to the multi-agent case where a cuttingedge event-triggered sliding-mode control is synthesized to fulfill the collective consensus objective within a formation context. With its inherent robustness and reduced computational cost, the aforementioned control strategy guarantees closed-loop stability, while driving trajectories to the equilibrium in the presence of time-varying disturbances. Finally, for validation and assessment purposes of the overall consensus strategy, an extensive numerical simulation stage is conducted

Navigation strategy in-flight retrieving and transportation operations for a rotorcraft MAV

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Modeling and Control of an Aerial Multi-Cargo System: Robust Acquiring and Transport Operations

International audienceIn this paper, we introduce the concept of a multi-link unmanned aerial system (ML-UAS) designed for multi-cargo transportation tasks. Such a system features three links who are actuated by four flying robots. We present in detail the dynamics modeling based on the Euler-Lagrange formulation. A preliminary control scheme based on robust Adaptive Integral Sliding Mode Control (AISMC) is applied considering the ML-UAS model uncertainties and external disturbances. The control objective is to follow/track avian-inspired acquiring patterns for acquiring operations. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by numerical simulations

Wind-Tolerant Event-Based Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control for VTOL Rotorcrafts Multi-Agent Systems

International audienceThe present paper investigates the consensus control of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) composed by Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) rotorcrafts subject to aerodynamic disturbances. Initially, the attitude's VTOLs model based on quaternion formalism is detailed to subsequently derive the corresponding control law. Likewise, the MAS translational dynamics is extended to entail the airframe's aerodynamics. In order to achieve the consensus objective, a robust adaptive eventtriggered sliding-mode control (SMC) is synthesized considering a leader-follower scheme guaranteeing Lyapunov's closed-loop stability and avoiding the Zeno behavior. Results from an extensive simulation stage witness the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. The latter allows to fulfill the collective consensus and leader's trajectory tracking objectives in presence of unknown disturbances while keeping a reduced computational cost

Time-delay Control of a Multi-Rotor VTOL Multi-Agent System Towards Transport Operations

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A Comparative Stability Analysis of Underactuated Versus Fully-Actuated Rotorcrafts Having Time-Delay Feedback

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