The ability to reason about and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robot tasks. Analytical rigid-body contact models are used extensively in planning and control due to their computational efficiency and simplicity, yet despite their prevalence, little if any empirical comparison of these models has been made and it is unclear how well they approxim...

A self-diagnosis design for wireless sensor node is a big challenge for designers. Particularly, when sensor nodes are deployed in harsh environment, it’s very difficult for human to intervene in case of hardware failure of node components. In this paper, we present our novel self-diagnosis for the discrete event systems (DES) like sensor node, which includes a complete strategy of self-diagnos...

The higher the reliability requirements on a product are, the more extensive the test must be to ensure the required reliability. One is often unable to obtain a reasonable amount of test items, when stresses approximate normal operating conditions. To reduce sample-sizes and test duration components are exposed to much higher stresses during the test than within their normal use conditions. Th...

Understanding what makes a good wood adhesive is difficult since the type of adhesive, wood species, bonding process, and resultant products vary considerably. Wood bonds are subjected to a variety of tests that reflect the different product performance criteria in diverse countries. The most common tests involve some type of moisture resistance; both wood and adhesive factors influence this mo...

We investigate the effects of initialization and architecture on the start of training in deep ReLU nets. We identify two common failure modes for early training in which the mean and variance of activations are poorly behaved. For each failure mode, we give a rigorous proof of when it occurs at initialization and how to avoid it. The first failure mode, exploding/vanishing mean activation leng...

The quality and reliability of plastic-encapsulated microcircuits (PEMs) manufactured today are closely equivalent, and in some ways superior, to their hermetic counterparts. The key to reliable use of PEMs in military applications is gained by matching the capabilities of PEMs to the application environment. The intent of this paper is to address the guidelines for achieving these ends by summ...

New electronic architectures and mechatronic integration in automotive and oil-field applications lead to increasing requirements concerning operating temperatures and vibration levels. At the same time, reliability and lifetime have to fulfil strong demands. In the European funded project PROCURE (Program for the development of passive devices used in rough environments) a generic spectrum of ...

Reliability of long-term storage products is related to the availability of the whole system, and the evaluation of storage life is of great necessity. These products are usually highly reliable and little failure information can be collected. In this paper, an analytical method based on data from accelerated storage life test is proposed to evaluate the reliability index of the long-term stora...

We investigate the mathematical modelling of maintenance and repair of components that can fail due to a variety of failure mechanisms. Our motivation is to build a model, which can be used to unveil aspects of the quality of the maintenance performed. The model we propose is motivated by imperfect repair models, but extended to model preventive maintenance as one of several “competing risks”. ...

In this paper texture analysis techniques are used to segment rough surfaces into regions of homogeneous texture. The performance of three rough surface classifiers was assessed and compared. The classifiers differ in their discrimination as well as their input and computational requirements. Experiments were used to identify the failure modes of the classifiers and to identify which classifier...