IAENG Transactions on Engineering Sciences

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE
• CONTENTS

In human-robot collaboration, robots interact directly and safely with humans in a shared workspace without protective guards. This paper presents the design of OmniMan, which is a mobile manipulator for human-robot collaboration consisting of an omnidirectional mobile platform and a lightweight robotic arm. Mobile manipulators extend the workspace of manipulators (robotic arms) by mounting them on mobile platforms. The mobile platform is driven by Mecanum wheels, which provide 3 degrees of freedom in motion. The paper develops the kinematic model of the whole system including platform and manipulator. Furthermore the overall controller structure for OmniMan including the real-time synchronization of platform and manipulator is described.

Baseline shifts caused by a variety of factors depending on the type of spectroscopy are common degradation problems in Raman spectra. An effective and efficient method is presented for the baseline correction of Raman spectra. A kernel smoothing function is developed for the estimation of baseline, and a negative signal filter is designed for the removal of negative impulse responses caused from the spectroscopy. Results on the computer and instrument implementation confirm the feasibility of the proposed method.

A new method is proposed for the design of a biquadratic (biquad) allpass phase-compensating system whose stability-margin satisfies an arbitrarily preset stability criterion. The design technique utilizes both the generalized stability-triangle (GST) and the bilinear (BL) phase-error function of the all-pass biquad system, which are derived by the author. Based on the GST condition, it is shown that the original coefficients of the allpass biquad system can be converted into the functions of other two new variables, while the two variables have no limits (bounds) on their values to satisfy the GST condition. That is, arbitrary values of the two new variables can meet the GST condition. Based on the above variable conversions, the design technique further employs a nonlinear optimization method to find the optimum values of the two variables to approximate a prescribed ideal phase. Thanks to the variable conversitions, the resulting values of the two variables never violate the GST condition. As a result, the resulting biquad allpas system not only can always satisfy a prescribed stability margin, but also can best approximate a given ideal phase in the minimax sense. To demonstrate the guaranteed stability margin as well as the system accuracy, a biquad system design example is included.

We evaluate regional differences in road recovery in Fukushima Prefecture following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. We divided Fukushima Prefecture into seven regions, i.e., Soso, Iwaki, Kenhoku, Kenchu, Kennan, Aizu, and Minami-aizu regions. The cumulative usable road distance ratio of the main roads has been precisely calculated for each city from telematics probe-car data using the open source geographical information software. Defining the cumulative usable distance up to September 30, 2011 as 100%, the percentages of usable road distances were calculated. According to the results of our study, we conclude that the recovery conditions of regional roads in different areas of Fukushima Prefecture following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake differed. The road recovery speeds in Coastal and Inland areas were not so different from each other. The road recovery speed in Aizu region was about a month slower than that in Coastal and Inland areas. The road recovery speed in Minami-aizu region was about a month slower than that in Aizu region. We concluded that the roads in these two regions whose recovery was significantly delayed were narrow, steep-walled, and located in mountainous regions.

Twitter data sentiment analysis has gained considerable attention as a research topic. The ability to obtain information about a public opinion by analyzing Twitter data and automatically classifying their sentiment polarity has attracted researchers because of the concise language used in tweets. In this study, we aimed at classifying the sentiments expressed in Twitter data using the Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). However, since most earlier research focused on binary classification, we propose a multi-classification scheme to analyze tweets in this study. We used VADER to classify tweets related to the 2016 US election. The finding of the present study reveals that the VADER sentiment analyzer can perform a good results in detecting ternary and multiple classes and accurately classify people’s opinion.

Customer Reviews play an important role in the online shopping experience, particularly for products such as Cosmetics where the value of the product tends to be subjective. However, it is time consuming for consumers to filter through the large number of reviews and identify those which are meaningful to their purchase decisions. Recommender systems could be a useful tool in helping recommend products to customers which are relevant to their particular needs and context. However, there are many different attributes of the cosmetic product (such as anti-ageing effect and whitening effect) which could not be represented with a single user score. As such, In our research, we aim to develop a recommender system which takes into account such attributes when recommending cosmetic products to consumers. This paper describes how a cosmetic evaluation dictionary could be constructed based on review expressions extracted from text-based review comments for different cosmetic categories.

Nowadays, there are a large number of users who post complaints about a certain service on the Internet. Because users have various values and views, even if they receive the same service, they may complain in different ways. However, it is quite difficult to respond to various user demands for service in real time and there are almost no direct solutions when users feel dissatisfied with a certain service. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a web search method by analyzing complaint data from Fuman Kaitori Center. First, the system generates query keywords according to various user complaints about a certain service by calculating the score of each query. Then suitable web pages containing advice are recommended from the results of the query. This advice could address users' dissatisfaction and respond to their various demands in a comprehensive way. Also, we verify the usability of proposed system by using a questionnaire survey evaluation.

Online media might be a way to introduce as well as preserve cultural heritage. Related to Indonesian culture, there are publication services available which focus only on information sources without metadata properties. This article explains our effort to preserve the Indonesian cultural heritage using semantic web and linked open data for a comprehensive presentation. An OWL-based ontology has been trying to be developed for a repository application consists of 13 ontologies of Indonesian cultural objects based on Description Logic of manually extracted literatures. The development process involved important partners in Special Region of Yogyakarta, i.e. Department of Culture, Regional Library and Archives Agency, Indonesian University Library Forum, as well as cultural practitioners and researchers. The applications of cultural objects are introduced at the end of this article. It is a baby step of a giant dream.

The purpose of this study is to examine the differences between ages on Self Learning Aspect (SLA), Effective Learning Aspect (ELA) and Multimedia Aspect (MMA) towards e-learning courses in Hong Kong higher education. 140 questionnaires were collected. The findings show that there are no significantly difference between ages on Self-learning Aspect (SLA), Effective Learning Aspect (ELA) and Multimedia Aspect (MMA) towards e-learning courses in Hong Kong higher education.

Methylal can be blended in diesel oil to reduce gas pollutants and to improve performance of a diesel engine. Methylal (Dimethoxymethane, DMM) can be synthesized by the reversible reaction of methanol excess and formaldehyde or paraformaldehyde to eliminate the chemical equilibrium. A mixture of methylal and methanol can be separated by extractive distillation system that combines with an extractive distillation (EDC) and entrainer recovery (RDC) column. Disadvantage of the extractive distillation system is the great energy consumption especially in the EDC. The design of EDC needs to be optimized the energy consumption and product purity. In this work, a conventional entrianer (DMF) was substituted by a lower-toxic of entrainer such as propylene-glycol. The response surface methodology (RSM) was used to optimize the condition in EDC design. The parameters and their interactions had significant effect on energy consumption in the reboiler and product purity. The optimal parameters of EDC could be determined by RSM with simulation runs and the predicted results by the RSM gave good agreement with the simulated results. Purity of 99.90 % methylal was withdrawn in the overhead of the EDC that could be achieve.

The search for grand unification, the understanding and identifying the relations of forces of physics, has been the interest of many particle physicist for many decades. The present paper investigates the validity of a previous paper that proposed two possible equations for both the strong force and the weak force. It investigates the magnitude of these equations for the Hydrogen atom. Also, the coupling constant are determined and compared with known values. Both the forces and coupling constants show good agreement with existing known results. Other elements on the periodic table are used to further evaluate the validity of the equations. It is also shown that the four forces of strong, weak, gravitational and Coulomb converge to the expected energy and corresponding length identified by the Standard model and Super Symmetry models. It is believed that these equations represent the dominate terms in a perturbation series solution. The work is extended to include a strong force pressure with comparison to recent data and single degree of freedom frequency equations for each of the four forces. In addition periodic table numerical results for pressure and frequencies are included.

The quest for more energy remains vital to energy sustainability. In the wake of several adverse consequences of indiscriminate combustion of fossil fuel, there is an urgency to exploit our natural environment for ecologically benign alternatives. This search led to S. anisatum dye being investigated for its prospective application in dye-sensitized solar cells. Phytochemical screening revealed the presence of phenols, flavonoids, tannins, glycosides, terpenoids and protein, presenting a wide repertoire of chromophore selection for charge transport. UV/VIS spectroscopy showed that S.anisatum dye exhibits multiple peak absorbances of radiation within the near ultraviolet and the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. The consequent adsorption of its chromophores into titanium structure, amplitude of interatomic vibrations of the novel structures formed in S. anisatum dye were subject of our investigation. The outcome shows TiO₂/S.anisatum dye interface reveals the impact of orientation on output photovoltaic performance of S.anisatum dye-sensitized solar cells with a short circuit current of 0.07 mA, open circuit voltage of 68.8 mV, fill factor value of 0.84 and the output efficiency was 0.027 % using KBr electrolyte. This is a comparatively good result considering previous records of dye-sensitized solar cell photovoltaic performance. The significance of these results was re-analyzed from molecular perspective with the aid of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A need to boost the efficiency necessitated the interpretation of SEM micrographs using Gwwydion software program. These presented possible areas for charge transport within the electron shells of S.anisatum dye nanocomposite, and regions where tunneling occurred providing a much needed insight for future studies. Consequently, this study was expanded to accommodate the influence of bandgap on electron occupancy in S.anisatum shells. This elucidation captures the molecular dynamics of charge transport versus tunneling, consequent upon output performance of dyesensitized solar cell technology explained with quantum principles. The application of this work is particularly relevant in modelling, photovoltaic simulations and building energy efficient models.