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A system using aerial vehicles to autonomously locate and retrieve ground packages of various colors and shapes within a designated area was developed. This system was notable for its use of an innovative rotor configuration that offered a higher degree of control compared to traditional designs. To accurately identify and track the packages, a multi-sensor approach combining vision and Light Detection and Ranging technologies was implemented, integrating data into an extended Kalman filter framework for precise position and velocity estimates. An electro-permanent magnet was employed to securely grab and release the packages, which have a ferrous material. The process of path planning and collision avoidance was conducted in a decentralized manner, leveraging a shared global map among the airborne vehicles. This paper details system technical design, including the integration of various technologies, and shares insights and outcomes derived from its application.

Existing and legacy software systems are the product of lengthy and individual developmental histories. Interoperability among such systems offers the support of global applications on these systems and intelligent information processing. However, interoperability among these heterogeneous systems is hampered by the absence of an integrated environment that would allow the development of global applications requiring intersystem cooperation. A uniform application-system interface is necessary to abstract the common properties of the global applications and of systems, mask their differences, and thus overcome this heterogeneity barrier. This paper presents such a solution, termed Remote System Interfaces (RSIs), which has been designed and implemented in the course of the InterBase project at Purdue University.

Quality and reliability for a product or process is defined and evaluated by the customer. Reliability is a time oriented quality characteristic. Time is a compound noise factor, and a reliable product/process must be robust against time. Similarly, a system has several quality characteristics which create impacts on customer satisfaction. This paper develops an integration of several quality and reliability methodologies such as robust design, quality engineering, quality function deployment (QFD), reliability engineering, and strategies for system integration. The objective is to develop a customer-focused approach for quality and reliability.

In recent years, car makers are relying more heavily on global sourcing of supplies while automotive suppliers are going through a rapid global consolidation process, which requires automotive suppliers develop parts in shorter time at lower cost with higher quality. To meet these challenges, automotive suppliers need a well-established information system strategy together with a BPMS (business process management system) framework tailored to them. In this paper, a workflow-based BPMS framework for automotive part development is proposed together with an information system strategy. Component technologies for developing such a BPMS are available, but the gap is in methodologies for developing it. This paper aims to fill this gap.

This paper proposes a function model-based approach to develop manufacturing automation systems. Methods for manufacturing automation system integration and main function component design based on a function model are discussed. System cost and main function component optimization are performed in the early design stage to find low risk cost-effective solutions. To illustrate the idea, the proposed approach has been applied to a simple example of designing a flexible micro-titer tray manufacturing automation system used to fabricate DNA microarrays.

In this paper, we propose a locomotion planning framework for a humanoid robot with stable whole-body collision avoidance motion, which enables the robot to traverse an unknown narrow space on the spot based on environmental measurements. The key idea of the proposed method is to reduce a large computational cost for the whole-body locomotion planning by utilizing global footstep planning results and its centroidal trajectory as a guide. In the global footstep planning phase, we modify the bounding box of the robot approximating the centroidal sway amplitude of the candidate footsteps. This enables the planner to obtain appropriate footsteps and transition time for next whole-body motion planning. Then, we execute sequential whole-body motion planning by prioritized inverse kinematics considering collision avoidance and maintaining its ZMP trajectory, which enables the robot to plan stable motion for each step in 223ms at worst. We evaluated the proposed framework by a humanoid robot HRP-5P in the dynamic simulation and the real world. The major contribution of our paper is solving the problem of increasing computational cost for whole-body motion planning and enabling a humanoid robot to execute adaptive on-site locomotion planning in an unknown narrow space.

There are many scenarios where high resolution, wide field of view video is useful. Such panorama video may be generated using camera arrays where the feeds from multiple cameras pointing at different parts of the captured area are stitched together. However, processing the different steps of a panorama video pipeline in real-time is challenging due to the high data rates and the stringent timeliness requirements. In our research, we use panorama video in a sport analysis system called Bagadus. This system is deployed at Alfheim stadium in Tromsø, and due to live usage, the video events must be generated in real-time. In this paper, we describe our real-time panorama system built using a low-cost CCD HD video camera array. We describe how we have implemented different components and evaluated alternatives. The performance results from experiments ran on commodity hardware with and without co-processors like graphics processing units (GPUs) show that the entire pipeline is able to run in real-time.

Online monitoring is an important tool for the management of power transformer. This paper put forwards an integrated processing unit (IPU) to standardize the remote monitoring of power transformers from different manufacturers, specified in according to IEC 61850; that includes casting, neutral point DC, temperature, moisture content, gases dissolved in transformer oil, on-load tap-charger, core earthing current and transformer cooling system. In a way, the remote monitoring comprehensively provides the real-time status of the transformers under management. Practical application showed that this uniform data model has provided only the real-time data feed, it has also enable the diagnosis of fault on transformers in this integrated environment.