Large structures, like manipulators for assembling the space station, are lightweight, and hence flexible. The structural flexibility results in significant elastic vibrations that are caused not only by exogenous perturbations but are also caused by maneuvers like slewing. For example, the Mobile Transporter Unit in the Space Station carries a flexible manipulator with payloads from one part o...

Controlling Chaos could be a big factor in getting great stable amounts of energy out of small amounts of not necessarily stable resources. By definition, Chaos is getting huge changes in the system’s output due to unpredictable small changes in initial conditions, and that means we could take advantage of this fact and select the proper control system to manipulate system's initial conditions ...

The aim of multi-focus image fusion is to combine several images taken by different sensors and with different focuses to increase the perception of scene. The proposed methods suffer from some undesirable side effects like blurring artifact and/or blocking which decreases the quality of the output image. This paper presents an efficient approach for multi-focus image fusion based on variance a...

An actuator array performs distributed manipulation where an object being transported and manipulated rests on a large number of stationary supporting actuators. The authors have developed a macroscopic actuator array consisting of many motorized wheels. As opposed to a MEMS array, the analysis requires the explicit modeling of the discreteness in the system, including the set of supports, dist...

When energetic electrons are incident on high atomic number absorbers, a substantial fraction is back-scattered. This phenomenon is responsible for several undesirable effects in X-ray tubes, in particular a reduction in the X-ray output. The extent of this shortfall has been estimated by using Monte Carlo simulation to start electrons at increasing depth inside the anode, the results indicatin...

Many countries are attempting to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions while increasing the productivity and efficiency of their industries. An undesirable-output-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with slacks-based measure (SBM) was used to evaluate the changes in the environmental efficiency of the transportation sector in 30 Chinese provinces (municipalities and autonomous ...

The European Union is one of the blocks of countries in the world that is doing more in the fight against climate change and therefore it has opted to promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper we analyze Natural and Managerial efficiency of the 28 countries of EU from 2005 to 2013. For this purpose the Malmquist index (MI) has been used, considering crosses on the efficie...

INTRODUCTION We previously developed a method for implementing feedforward neuroprosthetic controllers for musculoskeletal systems with multiple degrees of freedom and complex mechanical interactions [1]. These controllers employed inverse models of the musculoskeletal systems under control. Experimental tests showed poorer performance than expected, which we attribute to redundancy of the data...

This paper proposes a new methodology for designing robust affine state-feedback control laws, so that wide-range safe and efficient operation of switched-mode DC-DC boost converters is guaranteed. Several undesirable nonlinear phenomena such as unstable attractors and subharmonic oscillations are avoided through bifurcation analysis based on the bilinear averaged model of the converter. The co...

An additional independent control needed to eliminate the undesirable variable switching frequency of quasi-resonant converters can be obtained if the output rectifier is replaced by an active switch. The concept is applicable to all classes of quasi-resonant converters. It is demonstrated that in addition to operation at constant switching frequency, selected classes of constant-frequency quas...