Advanced Materials and Structures for Extreme Operating Conditions
The present monograph deals with new advanced materials, including composites, functionally graded materials, materials for high temperature service, advanced approaches to local and non-local analysis of localized damage, new description of crack deactivation, and many more.
Advanced Man-Machine Interaction : Fundamentals and Implementation
Man-machine interaction is the gateway providing access to functions and services, which, due to the ever increasing complexity of smart systems, threatens to become a bottleneck. This book therefore introduces not only advanced interfacing concepts, but also gives insight into the related theoretical background.This refers mainly to the realization of video-based multimodal interaction via gesture, mimics, and speech, but also to interacting with virtual object in virtual environments, cooperating with local or remote robots, and user assistance. this book puts special emphasis on implementation aspects. To this end it is accompanied by software development environments for image processing, classification, and virtual environment implementation. In addition a test data base is included for gestures, head pose, facial expressions, full-body person recognition, and people tracking.
Advanced Fuzzy Logic Technologies in Industrial Applications
Addresses the problem by introducing a dynamic, on-line fuzzy inference system. In this system membership functions and control rules are not determined until the system is applied and each output of its lookup table is calculated based on current inputs. The tuning process is a major focus in this volume because it is the most difficult stage in fuzzy control application. Using new methods such as µ-law technique, histogram equalization and the Bezier-based method, all detailed here, the tuning process can be significantly simplified and control performance improved. The other great strength of this book lies in the range and contemporaneity of its applications and examples which include: laser tracking and control; robot calibration; image processing and pattern recognition; medical engineering; audio systems; autonomous underwater vehicles and data mining.
Adaptive Backstepping Control of Uncertain Systems : Nonsmooth Nonlinearities, Interactions or Time-Variations
This book employs the powerful and popular adaptive backstepping control technology to design controllers for dynamic uncertain systems with non-smooth nonlinearities.
Acoustic MIMO Signal Processing
Telecommunication systems and human-machine interfaces start employing multiple microphones and loudspeakers in order to make conversations and interactions more lifelike, hence more efficient. This development gives rise to a variety of acoustic signal processing problems under multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenarios, encompassing distant speech acquisition, sound source localization and tracking, echo and noise control, source separation and speech dereverberation, and many others. The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in exploring these problems, but there has been little effort to develop a theory to have all these problems investigated in a unified framework. This unique book attempts to fill the gap.
Acoustic Emission Testing : Basics for Research - Applications in Civil Engineering
The book covers all levels from the description of AE basics for AE beginners (level of a student) to sophisticated AE algorithms and applications to real large-scale structures as well as the observation of the cracking process in laboratory specimen to study fracture processes.
3D-Position Tracking and Control for All-Terrain Robots
Rough terrain robotics is a fast evolving field of research and a lot of effort is deployed towards enabling a greater level of autonomy for outdoor vehicles. This book demonstrates how the accuracy of 3D position tracking can be improved by considering rover locomotion in rough terrain as a holistic problem. In this work, a mechanical structure allowing smooth motion across obstacles with limited wheel slip is used. In particular, it enables the use of odometry and inertial sensors to improve the position estimation in rough terrain. A method for computing 3D motion increments based on the wheel encoders and chassis state sensors is developed. The algorithm runs online and can be adapted to any kind of passive wheeled rover. Finally, sensor fusion using 3D-Odometry, inertial sensors and visual motion estimation based on stereovision is presented. The experimental results demonstrate how each sensor contributes to increase the accuracy and robustness of the 3D position estimation.






