The principles of systems and software engineering can be re-applied beyond the range of the individual project. Traditional enterprise-wide tasks such as technology management, decision-making, organizational objectives, reuse, innovation and outsourcing are amenable to systems engineering. Examples of all of these areas will be presented. The rewards from a disciplined approach are clearly hi...

Crane payloads are frequently subject to oscillations induced through movement and external disturbances. These oscillations degrade performance and can be dangerous. Input shaping is an effective method to move cranes without creating oscillation, however it is not effective on initial swing. This paper develops a feedback control system, with two operation modes based on input shaping, that a...

Article history: Available online 30 March 2010

This paper proposes the use of a time-varying sliding surface for robust transient shaping of periodic linear discrete-time plants subject to saturating actuators, in the presence of bounded matched uncertainties. A constructive procedure is presented, ultimate boundedness of state trajectories is proved and a result about the choice of tuning parameters for robust transient shaping is given.

As multimedia applications proliferate, there is a desire to provide wireless transport to information streams with inherently different data rates. Direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) is a natural multiple-access strategy for multiple data-rate systems. Recent work on multirate DSCDMA receivers has focused on signal-processing techniques, which detect all users of all rates...

Shaping is a potentially powerful tool in reinforcement learning applications. Shaping often fails to function e ectively because of a lack of understanding about its e ects when applied in reinforcement learning settings and the use of inadequate algorithms in its implementation. Because of these di culties current shaping techniques require some form of manual intervention. We examine some of...

Phase manipulated ultrafast laser pulses and temporally tailored pulse trains with THz repetition rates are promising new tools for quality micromachining of brittle dielectric materials, allowing to adapt the energy delivery rate to the material properties for optimal processing quality. The sequential energy delivery with judiciously chosen pulse trains may induce softening of the material du...

In this thesis is initiated a more systematic geometric exploration of energy shaping. Most of the previous results have been dealt with particular cases and neither the existence nor the space of solutions has been discussed with any degree of generality. The geometric theory of partial differential equations originated by Goldschmidt and Spencer in late 1960’s is utilized to analyze the parti...