Interfaz de comunicación entre Matlab y Pro ENGINEER para el análisis y modelado de un eje ferroviario según norma UNE-EN 13103

Este proyecto es una apuesta del Departamento de Ingeniería Mecánica de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid para optimizar el proceso de diseño mecánico de un eje ferroviario gracias a un mayor aprovechamiento de los recursos disponibles, ya que uno de los aspectos de más importancia junto con el análisis del contacto rueda carril, es el estudio de los ejes ferroviarios, que supone una pieza clave en la mejora del funcionamiento del ferrocarril y de sus prestaciones. El proyecto describe la arquitectura de comunicación entre la fase de diseño y dimensionado y la de modelado CAD 3D, facilitando la transmisión de los valores característicos, entre las herramientas de análisis matemático como Matlab y los programas CAD 3D como Pro ENGINEER. Esta comunicación entre el análisis y el modelado CAD permite optimizar procesos de diseño basados en el seguimiento de normas, de esta forma que mejora la productividad y la fiabilidad. Esta arquitectura de comunicación entre Matlab y Pro ENGINEER, estará desarrollada con el fin de servir de base para futuros proyectos de investigación que se lleven a cabo dentro del Departamento de Ingeniería Mecánica de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________This project is a bet the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University Carlos III of Madrid to optimize the mechanical design of a rail link through a better use of available resources as one of the most important aspects with the wheel rail contact analysis is the study of railways, which is a key factor in improving the functioning of the railway and its services. The project describes the architecture of communication between the project design and dimensioning and 3D CAD modeling, facilitating the transmission of the characteristic values, between the mathematical analysis tools such as Matlab and 3D CAD programs such as Pro ENGINEER. This communication between CAD modeling and analysis to optimize design processes based on monitoring of standards, thus improving productivity and reliability. This architecture of communication between Matlab and Pro ENGINEER, will be developed to serve as a basis for future research projects are conducted within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University Carlos III of Madrid.Ingeniería Industria

Automatic supervision of temperature, humidity, and luminance with an Assistant Personal Robot

Smart environments and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies are defining the future society where energy optimization and intelligent management are essential for a sustainable advance. Mobile robotics is also making an important contribution to this advance with the integration of sensors and intelligent processing algorithms. This paper presents the application of an Assistant Personal Robot (APR) as an autonomous agent for temperature, humidity, and luminance supervision in human-frequented areas. The robot multiagent capabilities allow gathering sensor information while exploring or performing specific tasks and then verifying human comfortability levels. The proposed methodology creates information maps with the distribution of temperature, humidity, and luminance and interprets such information in terms of comfort and warns about corrective actuations if required

Experimental characterization of the twin-eye laser mouse sensor

This paper proposes the experimental characterization of a laser mouse sensor used in some optical mouse devices. The sensor characterized is called twin-eye laser mouse sensor and uses the Doppler effect to measure displacement as an alternative to optical flow-based mouse sensors. The experimental characterization showed similar measurement performances to optical flow sensors except in the sensitivity to height changes and when measuring nonlinear displacements, where the twin-eye sensor offered better performance. The measurement principle of this optical sensor can be applied to the development of alternative inexpensive applications that require planar displacement measurement and poor sensitivity to -axis changes such as mobile robotics.The authors acknowledge the support of the Government of Catalonia (Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca, Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Empresa) and the European Social Fund

Measurement of vibrations in two tower-typed assistant personal robot implementations with and without a passive suspension system

This paper presents the vibration pattern measurement of two tower-typed holonomic mobile robot prototypes: one based on a rigid mechanical structure, and the other including a passive suspension system. Specific to the tower-typed mobile robots is that the vibrations that originate in the lower part of the structure are transmitted and amplified to the higher areas of the tower, causing an unpleasant visual effect and mechanical stress. This paper assesses the use of a suspension system aimed at minimizing the generation and propagation of vibrations in the upper part of the tower-typed holonomic robots. The two robots analyzed were equipped with onboard accelerometers to register the acceleration over the X, Y, and Z axes in different locations and at different velocities. In all the experiments, the amplitude of the vibrations showed a typical Gaussian pattern which has been modeled with the value of the standard deviation. The results have shown that the measured vibrations in the head of the mobile robots, including a passive suspension system, were reduced by a factor of 16.This work was partially funded by Indra, the University of Lleida, the RecerCaixa 2013 grant, the Government of Catalonia (Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca, Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Empresa), and by the European Social Fund (ECO/1794/2015)

A Novel Typing Method for Streptococcus pneumoniae Using Selected Surface Proteins

The diverse pneumococcal diseases are associated with different pneumococcal lineages, or clonal complexes. Nevertheless, intra-clonal genomic variability, which influences pathogenicity, has been reported for surface virulence factors. These factors constitute the communication interface between the pathogen and its host and their corresponding genes are subjected to strong selective pressures affecting functionality and immunogenicity. First, the presence and allelic dispersion of 97 outer protein families were screened in 19 complete pneumococcal genomes. Seventeen families were deemed variable and were then examined in 216 draft genomes. This procedure allowed the generation of binary vectors with 17 positions and the classification of strains into surfotypes. They represent the outer protein subsets with the highest inter-strain discriminative power. A total of 116 non-redundant surfotypes were identified. Those sharing a critical number of common protein features were hierarchically clustered into 18 surfogroups. Most clonal complexes with comparable epidemiological characteristics belonged to the same or similar surfogroups. However, the very large CC156 clonal complex was dispersed over several surfogroups. In order to establish a relationship between surfogroup and pathogenicity, the surfotypes of 95 clinical isolates with different serogroup/serotype combinations were analyzed. We found a significant correlation between surfogroup and type of pathogenic behavior (primary invasive, opportunistic invasive, and non-invasive). We conclude that the virulent behavior of S. pneurnoniae is related to the activity of collections of, rather than individual, surface virulence factors. Since surfotypes evolve faster than MLSTs and directly reflect virulence potential, this novel typing protocol is appropriate for the identification of emerging clones

A mobile robot agent for gas leak source detection

Trends in Practical Applications of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection.This paper presents an autonomous agent for gas leak source detec-tion. The main objective of the robot is to estimate the localization of the gas leak source in an indoor environment without any human intervention. The agent implements an SLAM procedure to scan and map the indoor area. The mobile robot samples gas concentrations with a gas and a wind sensor in order to estimate the source of the gas leak. The mobile robot agent will use the in-formation obtained from the onboard sensors in order to define an efficient scanning path. This paper describes the measurement results obtained in a long corridor with a gas leak source placed close to a wall.This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministery of Economy and Competitivity, Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica: TEC2011-26143, and by the Government of Catalonia (Comisionat per a Universitats i Recerca, Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Empresa) and the European Social Fund