We consider a finite-dimensional model for the motion of microscopic organisms whose propulsion exploits the action of a layer of cilia covering its surface. The model couples Newton’s laws driving the organism, cosidered as a rigid body, with Stokes equations governing the surrounding fluid. The action of the cilia is described by a set of controlled velocity fields on the surface of the organ...

In deadlock prevention, much work has been done under the assumption that all the transitions are controllable and observable. This paper develops a method to decide whether a deadlock prevention policy is applicable to a plant with uncontrollable and unobservable transitions. By solving a set of linear programming problems, a set of critical controllable transitions and a set of critical obser...

We study the single machine scheduling problem with controllable job processing times to minimize a linear combination of the total weighted job completion time and the total weighted processing time compression. We show that this scheduling problem is a positive half-product minimization problem. Positive half-products make up an interesting subclass of half-products and are introduced in this...

We are interested in using low degree-of-freedom robots to perform complex manipulation tasks by not grasping. By not grasping, the robot can use rolling, slipping, and free flight to control more degrees-of-freedom of the part. To demonstrate this we study the controllabilityproperties of planar dynamic nonprehensile manipulation. We show that almost any planar object is small-time locally con...

This paper proposes a second-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode decomposed control method for multivariable linear systems with internal parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. First, the systems are converted into the block controllable form, consisting of an input-output subsystem and a stable internal dynamic subsystem. A special second-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode...

Each synchronization point represents a point of serialization, and thereby can easily hurt parallel scalability. As demonstrated by recent studies, approximating, i.e., relaxing synchronization by eliminating a subset of synchronization points spatio-temporally can help improve parallel scalability, as long as approximation incurred violations of basic execution semantics remain predictable an...

Network emulation has gained wide interest in the community of network researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of new protocols and applications in controllable and realistic network scenarios. To ensure scalability, modern emulation systems rely on the use of virtualization techniques to create complex networked systems by means of the computational resources available in a cluster of comput...

The scalable application of quantum information science will stand on reproducible and controllable high-coherence quantum bits (qubits). Here, we revisit the design and fabrication of the superconducting flux qubit, achieving a planar device with broad-frequency tunability, strong anharmonicity, high reproducibility and relaxation times in excess of 40 μs at its flux-insensitive point. Qubit r...

Current methods for building models using implicit volume techniques present problems defining accurate and controllable blend shapes between implicit primitives. We present new methods to extend the freedom and controllability of implicit volume modeling. The main idea is to use a free-form curve to define the profile of the blend region between implicit primitives. The use of a free-form impl...

We present nonlinear-optical four-wave mixing (4WM) at coupled gold nanoparticles. By decreasing the interparticle distance from large separation to touching contact, the 4WM yield increases by 4 orders of magnitude. The reason for this dramatic enhancement lies in the shift of the localized plasmon resonance to infrared wavelengths as the dimer is formed, making one of the input wavelengths do...