14450831
Some New Parallel Mechanisms Containing the Planar Four-Bar Parallelogram
A parallelogram allows the output link to remain at a fixed orientation with respect to an input link, for which it acts as a unique role in the design of parallel mechanisms. In this paper, the unique role of a parallelogram is used completely to design some new parallel mechanisms with two to six degrees of freedom (DoFs). In these mechanisms, some with three DoFs possess the advantage of very high rotational capability and some with two DoFs have the translational output of a rigid body. More than that, the design concept is also applied first to some parallel mechanisms to improve the systems' rotational capability. The parallel mechanisms proposed in this paper have wide applications in industrial robots, simulators, micromanipulators, parallel kinematics machines, and any other manipulation devices in which high rotational capability and stiffness are needed. Especially, the paper provides new concepts of the design of novel parallel mechanisms and the improvement of rotational capability for such systems.
3096595
Analysis of a novel cylindrical 3-DoF parallel robot
Abstract In this paper, a novel three degrees of freedom (DoFs), that are two degrees of translational freedom and one degree of rotational freedom, parallel robot is proposed. The parallel robot consists of a base plate, a movable platform, and three connecting legs. Because the locus of any point on the moving platform is the subset of a cylinder if z is specified, the robot is called a cylindrical parallel robot. The inverse and forward kinematics problems are described in closed forms. And the velocity equation of the new parallel robot is given. Three kinds of singularities are presented. The workspace for the robot is analyzed systematically, especially, a new index to evaluate the mobility (In this paper, mobility means rotational capability.) of the moving platform of the robot is defined and discussed in detail. The parallel robot has wide application in the fields of industrial robots, simulators, microrobots and parallel machine tools.
10565448
Singularity analysis of the HALF parallel manipulator with revolute actuators
This paper concerns the singularity of the half parallel manipulator, a novel three degrees of freedom (DOFs) mechanism, with revolute actuators. The parallel manipulator, proposed previously, consists of a base plate, a movable platform, and three connecting legs. It has the advantages in terms of only single-DOF joints and high rotational capability. The parallel manipulator has wide application in the fields of industrial robots, simulators, parallel machine tools and any other manipulating devices that high rotational capability is required. The inverse kinematics problem and Jacobian matrices are recalled firstly. And then all possible singularities of the manipulator are analyzed in detail. The results of the paper are very useful for the apprehension and the application of the manipulator.
7114960
On the optimum design of planar 3-DOF parallel manipulators with respect to the workspace
The design of the robotic mechanisms is one of the most important activities, because these mechanisms determine the performance characteristics of the robots. The paper concerns the issue of computer-aided design (CAD) for planar 3-DOF parallel robotic mechanisms by means of the physical model of the solution space, which can be used systematically to express the relationships between the performance criteria and all link lengths of one type of the robotic mechanism. The performance atlases of the workspace volume for the manipulators are plotted in the physical model of the solution space. The characteristics of the distribution of the workspace shapes in the physical model of the solution space are presented. The results are useful for the optimum design of the robotic mechanisms. The paper proposes a new way for the robotic CAD.
9772572
A spatio-temporal Bayesian network classifier for understanding visual field deterioration
OBJECTIVE
Progressive loss of the field of vision is characteristic of a number of eye diseases such as glaucoma which is a leading cause of irreversible blindness in the world. Recently, there has been an explosion in the amount of data being stored on patients who suffer from visual deterioration including field test data, retinal image data and patient demographic data. However, there has been relatively little work in modelling the spatial and temporal relationships common to such data. In this paper we introduce a novel method for classifying visual field (VF) data that explicitly models these spatial and temporal relationships.


METHODOLOGY
We carry out an analysis of our proposed spatio-temporal Bayesian classifier and compare it to a number of classifiers from the machine learning and statistical communities. These are all tested on two datasets of VF and clinical data. We investigate the receiver operating characteristics curves, the resulting network structures and also make use of existing anatomical knowledge of the eye in order to validate the discovered models.


RESULTS
Results are very encouraging showing that our classifiers are comparable to existing statistical models whilst also facilitating the understanding of underlying spatial and temporal relationships within VF data. The results reveal the potential of using such models for knowledge discovery within ophthalmic databases, such as networks reflecting the 'nasal step', an early indicator of the onset of glaucoma.


CONCLUSION
The results outlined in this paper pave the way for a substantial program of study involving many other spatial and temporal datasets, including retinal image and clinical data.
9790968
Fuzzy approximate disturbance decoupling of MIMO nonlinear systems by backstepping and application to chemical processes
Fuzzy approximate disturbance decoupling concept is introduced for a class of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) nonlinear systems with completely unknown nonlinearities. Based on backstepping technique, a fuzzy almost disturbance decoupling control scheme is proposed. The fuzzy controllers guarantee internal uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop adaptive systems and render a bounded approximate L/sub 2/ gain from the disturbance input to the output. The developed design scheme is applied to control a two continuous stirred tank reactor process. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper.
9356286
A design of overlay anonymous multicast protocol
Multicast services are demanded by a variety of applications. Many applications require anonymity during their communication. However, there has been very little work on anonymous multicasting and such services are not available yet. Since there are fundamental differences between multicast and unicast, the solutions proposed for anonymity in unicast communications cannot be directly applied to multicast applications. In this paper, we define the anonymous multicast system, and propose a mutual anonymous multicast (MAM) protocol including the design of a unicast mutual anonymity protocol and construction and optimization of an anonymous multicast tree. MAM is self organizing and completely distributed. We define the attack model in an anonymous multicast system and analyze the anonymity degree. We also evaluate the performance of MAM by simulations
460263
Heuristic algorithms for multi-constrained quality of service routing
Multi-constrained quality of service (QoS) routing finds a route in the network that satisfies multiple independent quality of service constraints. This problem is NP-hard and a number of heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve the problem. This paper studies two heuristics, the limited granularity heuristic and the limited path heuristic, for solving general k-constrained problems. Analytical and simulation studies are conducted to compare the time/space requirements of the heuristics and the effectiveness of the heuristics in finding the paths that satisfy the QoS constraints. We prove analytically that for an N nodes and E edges network with k (a small constant) independent QoS constraints, the limited granularity heuristic must maintain a table of size O(|N|/sup k-1/) in each node to be effective, which results in a time complexity of O(|N|/sup k/|E|). We also prove that the limited path heuristic can achieve very high performance by maintaining O(|N|/sup 2/lg(|N|)) entries in each node, which indicates that the performance of the limited path heuristic is not sensitive to the number of constraints. We conclude that although both the limited granularity heuristic and the limited path heuristic can efficiently solve 2-constrained QoS routing problems, the limited path heuristic is superior to the limited granularity heuristic in solving k-constrained QoS routing problems when k>3. Our simulation study further confirms this conclusion.
1984219
Incorporation of input glitches into power macromodeling
Previous research on power macromodeling has always assumed glitch-free input signals. However, in an actual operating environment, the input signals of a circuit can contain glitches, which are generated by the previous stage of circuitry. In this paper, we investigate the impact of input glitches on the power dissipation of a circuit. Specifically, we show that the frequency and average duration of input glitches are two important factors affecting the overall power consumption. Input glitches can also increase output glitching by a surprisingly large amount. We present a simple yet effective analytical power macromodeling approach incorporating the effects of input glitching. In experiments with ISCAS-85 benchmark circuits, the average error of the proposed technique is 4.44%.