Trajectory Tracking and Formation Control of a Platoon of Mobile Robots Mahsa Aliakbar Golkar This thesis is concerned with controlling a platoon of wheeled mobile robots (WMR), where the robots are aimed to follow a trajectory while they maintain their formation intact. The control design is carried out by considering unicycle kinematics for each robot, and the leader-follower structure for th...

BACKGROUND Musculoskeletal disorders are one of the most important causes of work disability. Various rehabilitation services and return-to-work programs have been developed in order to reduce sickness absence and increase sustainable return-to-work. As the effects of conventional medical rehabilitation programs on sickness absence duration were shown to be slight, work-related medical rehabili...

‘The nutrient composition of nine by-product feedstuffs (BPF) was determined. BPF were selected based on economic importance to the dairy industry, nutritional value, and availability. Three to nine different samples for each BPF were obtained throughout California. A total of 51 samples were collected: nine beet pulp (BP), eight rice bran (RB), seven almond hulls (AH), four citrus pulp (CT), f...

The majority of waste plastics currently produced are either landfilled or incinerated. Plastics do not readily degrade and toxic elements can be leached from the landfill. Combustion of waste plastics can generate environmentally hazardous air pollutants such as dioxins/furans, as well as undesirable carbon dioxide. Consequently, cost effective ways of recycling the increasing amounts of gener...

Ever since the Sojourner rover of the United States landed on Mars in 1997 (Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL], a), there has been an upsurge in the exploration of planets using wheeled mobile robots (WMRs or rovers). The twin rovers that followed, Spirit and Opportunity, have endured many years of activity on Mars and have made many significant discoveries (JPL, b). Several other new missions are...

Theme and goals Traditionally, in the software engineering field, a lot of effort is dedicated to design/model, project, and implement software. In fact the importance of designing a robust and well written software system is known and recognized by the industry and the scientific community. However, the " activities " related to general software maintenance (including re-engineering and revers...

Last half century depicted an enormous progress in robotics. However, this field is still in its infancy as compared with the human behaviour. Therefore, the ability of a robot is limited in its movement, understanding complex sensorial inputs or performing higher level reasoning. Important clues to enable further progress to be made are the integration of several different fields of knowledge,...

The fuzzy logic control (FLC) has been successfully applied in diverse fields since Zadeh [8] first introduced the fuzzy set theory. Basically, one of the most widely adopted FLCs is the fuzzy-rule-based-system, the Mamdani FLC, which is based on human expertise and knowledge, so that precise and accurate descriptions of the mathematical model of the controlled plant are not required for design...

Simulating flow and transport in layered geologic media comprising aquifers and aquitards still represents a challenge to current finite-difference modeling techniques. In aquifers, the flow direction is usually horizontal and accurate simulation requires a sufficiently fine horizontal discretization. In aquitards, the flow direction is often vertical which requires grid refinement in the verti...