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robots.net - Robots: Chaos Control - 0 views

robots.net/3010.html mechatronics technology electronics engineering mechanics robotics robots AI
shared by Aasemoon =) on 28 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Walking, swallowing, respiration and many other key functions in humans and other animals are controlled by Central Pattern Generators (CPGs). In essence, CPGs are small, autonomous neural networks that produce rhythmic outputs, usually found in animal's spinal cords rather than their brains. Their relative simplicity and obvious success in biological systems has led to some success in using CPGs in robotics. However, current systems are restricted to very simple CPGs (e.g., restricted to a single walking gait). A recent breakthrough at the BCCN at the University of Göttingen, Germany has now allowed to achieve 11 basic behavioral patterns (various gaits, orienting, taxis, self-protection) from a single CPG, closing in on the 10–20 different basic behavioral patterns found in a typical cockroach. The trick: Work with a chaotic, rather than a stable periodic CPG regime. For more on CPGs, listen to the latest episode of the Robots podcast on Chaos Control, which interviews Poramate Manoonpong, one of the lead researchers in Göttingen, and Alex Pitti from the University of Tokyo who uses chaos controllers that can synchronize to the dynamics of the body they are controlling.
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ARM Launches Cortex-M4 Processor for Digital Signal Control Solution - 0 views

embeddedsystemnews.com/l-signal-control-solution.html technology electronics engineering processors signal contro
shared by Aasemoon =) on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • The ARM Cortex™-M4 processor is the latest embedded processor by ARM specifically developed to address digital signal control markets that demand an efficient, easy-to-use blend of control and signal processing capabilities. The combination of high-efficiency signal processing functionality with the low-power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits of the Cortex-M family of processors is designed to satisfy the emerging category of flexible solutions specifically targeting the motor control, automotive, power management, embedded audio and industrial automation markets. The Cortex-M4 processor features extended single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions, optimized SIMD arithmetic, saturating arithmetic instructions and an optional single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU). These features build upon the innovative technology that characterizes the ARM Cortex-M series processors…
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7mm Thick Pico Projector Can Produce a 70 inch Image (video) | Singularity Hub - 0 views

singularityhub.com/...-produce-a-70-inch-image-video electronics technology engineering
shared by Aasemoon =) on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Japan’s Explay Ltd recently announced that it has begun to ship its pico projector engines to developers around the world. The Explay Projector Engine is only 6.7 cubic centimeters in size and just 7mm thick (~1/4 of an inch). Despites its tiny dimensions, the pico projector generates 14 lumens laser light on just 1.3 Watts of power (1.8 with control circuits) and can produce images 7 to 70 inches in size. Resolution is a respectable 852×480 and with a laser based system it should stay in sharp focus over a wide range (20 to 200cm). While Explay has yet to announce which manufacturers will be using their projector they did say that they expect it to appear in devices as early as February of 2011. Looks like we’ll need to watch for it at CES. Explay plans on improving their projector engine further. They hope that the end of 2011 will see the arrival of a 25 lumens WXGA 1366×768 version. A member of the R&D team in Israel (part of XDM Ltd) shows off the 14 lumens pico projector in a prototype testing rig in the video below. Not a bad image for the world’s smallest laser projector.
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Drive Servo Control Problems - 0 views

www.eetimes.com/...Freewheeling-with-PID-controls mechatronics engineering design PID engineering electronics technology robots robotics servo motors
shared by Aasemoon =) on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Perhaps the most difficult control problem for a drive servo is that of going down a ramp. Any back drivable drive servo will exhibit a freewheeling velocity on a given ramp. This is the speed at which the robot will roll down the ramp in an unpowered state. At this speed, the surface drag and internal drag of the servo are equal to the gravitational force multiplied by the sine of the slope. The freewheeling speed is thus load dependent.
  • Aasemoon =) on 24 Aug 10
     
    Great series of articles. Make sure to check out parts 1 and 2.
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･e-nuvo HUMANOID - 0 views

www.plasticpals.com/?p=18810 robots robotics humanoids androids electronics engineering ai technology
shared by Aasemoon =) on 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The Nippon Institute of Technology, with Harada Vehicle Design, ZMP, and ZNUG Design, have developed a humanoid robot about the size of an elementary school student for educational purposes.  The university adopted 35 of ZMP’s e-nuvo WALK robots in 2004 for a 1:1 student-robot ratio.  Whereas the e-nuvo WALK (the educational version of NUVO) is quite small, the new robot is tall enough to interact with its environment in a more meaningful way.  Students will demonstrate the robot at elementary and junior high schools, as well as care facilities.  The goal is to improve student learning by raising awareness of bipedal robot technology and its connection to math and physics, while also giving them hands-on experience with the bot.  Additionally, by visiting care facilities the university students will come to understand the real-world needs and applications for robots.
  • Soren C on 02 Jan 10
     
    The Nippon Institute of Technology, with Harada Vehicle Design, ZMP, and ZNUG Design, have developed a humanoid robot about the size of an elementary school student for educational purposes.  The university adopted 35 of ZMP's e-nuvo WALK robots in 2004 for a 1:1 student-robot ratio.  Whereas the e-nuvo WALK (the educational version of NUVO) is quite small, the new robot is tall enough to interact with its environment in a more meaningful way.  Students will demonstrate the robot at elementary and junior high schools, as well as care facilities.  The goal is to improve student learning by raising awareness of bipedal robot technology and its connection to math and physics, while also giving them hands-on experience with the bot.  Additionally, by visiting care facilities the university students will come to understand the real-world needs and applications for robots.\nThe e-nuvo HUMANOID stands 126cm (4′) tall and weighs 15kg (33 lbs), with 21 degrees of freedom (2 legs x6, 2 arms x3, head x3), powered by a Lithium Ion battery.  It is equipped with the usual sensors including cameras, accelerometers, gyro sensors, obstacle detection sensors, distance sensors, and peizoelectric sensors, and can be controlled via PC or remote controller.  Besides basic speech capabilities, the robot can serve as a kind of teacher's assistant, since it has a built-in projector which will allow it to display diagrams on a blackboard that might be difficult to explain in words alone.  The robot will be programmed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which the students have been using to test control algorithms for the e-nuvo WALK robots
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Brain-controlled prosthetic limb most advanced yet - 0 views

robotzeitgeist.com/...d-modular-prosthetic-limb.html technology electronics engineering mechanics biotechnology robotics
shared by Aasemoon =) on 12 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.
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A designer's guide to a new industrial control paradigm | Industrial Control Designline - 0 views

www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/224900373 technology engineering electronics design MCUs control
shared by Aasemoon =) on 20 May 10 - Cached
  • A Product How-To on building a unified control environment using architectures such as TI’s Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3-based MCUs or Cortex-A8-based Sitara AM35x MPUs.
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Ensuring the thermal integrity of your IC package/PC board design | Industrial Control ... - 0 views

www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/...223300091 ICs PCs control engineering engineering technology electronics
shared by Aasemoon =) on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • You just built a breadboard of your expert design. You did all the simulations needed before going to layout, and reviewed the manufacturer's suggested techniques for a good thermal design for the particular package chosen. You even did your due diligence in going through the initial thermal analysis equations on paper to be sure not to exceed IC junction temperatures with a comfortable margin. But wait, you turn on the power and the IC is pretty hot to the touch. You are uncomfortable with this (not to mention the concern of your thermal experts and reliability people). Now what do you do?
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Bionic Pancreas - IEEE Spectrum - 0 views

spectrum.ieee.org/...bionic-pancreas bionics electronics engineering technology ieee medical
shared by Aasemoon =) on 27 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • When Pantelis Georgiou and his fellow biomedical engineers at Imperial College London decided to design an intelligent insulin pump for diabetes patients, they started at the source. "We asked ourselves, what does a pancreas do to control blood glucose?" Georgiou recalls. The answer is pretty well known: The organ relies primarily on two populations of cells—beta cells, to secrete insulin when blood glucose is high, and alpha cells, which release a hormone called glucagon when glucose levels are low. "We simulated them both in microchip form," Georgiou says. This biomimetic approach diverges from today's dominant method of delivering only insulin using a relatively simple control system.
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Module aids Camera Link FPGA image processing | Industrial Control Designline - 0 views

www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/225600044 DSP programmable logic devices FPGAs electronics technology engineering image processing digital signal processing
shared by Aasemoon =) on 20 Jun 10 - Cached
  • National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.
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Sensorless BLDC motor control using a Majority Function Part 1 of 2 | Your Electronics ... - 0 views

dev.emcelettronica.com/ing-majority-function-part-1-2 electronics technology engineering motor bldc
shared by Aasemoon =) on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Here is the agenda for today’s seminar. We will recall the principles of controlling a brushless DC motor. Secondly we will discuss the back EMF sensing method used in this sensorless technique. We will also cover the principles of digital filter and the so called majority function. Last section of this seminar discusses the motor start up sequence and the sensorless operation.
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TechOnline | Universal DMA Controller: One stop solution for increasing throughput and ... - 0 views

www.techonline.com/...223100611 electronics technology dma cpu engineering
shared by Aasemoon =) on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • DMA is used in almost every complex system or subsystems, but it's observed that teams either build the DMA controller from scratch for each project for specific application or take the existing DMAC available from elsewhere. This article discusses the architecture of DMAC that can be used with any kind of Bus, configuration (parallel, serial transfers), can be connected to any kind of ports, most importantly any kind of software assumptions can be implemented in the DMAC very easily.
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Ethernet controller IP implements new audio video bridging features | Audio DesignLine - 0 views

www.audiodesignline.com/224900200 ip DSP technology engineering electronics audio video
shared by Aasemoon =) on 20 May 10 - Cached
  • Synopsys, Inc., has unveiled the DesignWare Ethernet Quality-of-Service (QoS) Controller IP which implements the new IEEE specifications for audio video bridging (AVB) features. The DesignWare Ethernet IP solution supports the new IEEE 802.1AS and 802.1-Qav version D6.0 specifications. These specifications enable efficient networking of streaming audio video (AV) applications through IEEE 802.1 networks found in consumer electronics, automotive AV and professional sound system products. Synopsys' DesignWare Ethernet QoS Controller, which supports 10/100/1G data transfer speeds, allows designers to develop system-on-chips (SoCs) that deliver time-synchronized, low-latency audio and video over Ethernet networks with exceptional quality-of-service while retaining compatibility with legacy networks.
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Smart grid standards expected by mid-2011 | Industrial Control Designline - 0 views

www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/225300105 electronics smart grid technology engineering
shared by Aasemoon =) on 18 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Engineers aim to deliver within a year a broad suite of standards needed to build smart electric grids. They reported on their stepwise progress at the end of Connectivity Week here. Beyond the standards, the industry needs to create new regulations and business models and show consumers the benefits of a smart grid to make the transition to a digital, networked grid happen, said attendees and presenters at the event. The good news is the standards are underway.
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How to Cheat at Securing a Wireless Network--Wireless Network Design--Part V - 0 views

www.eetimes.com/...Wireless-Network-Design-Part-V technology electronics networks network security
shared by Aasemoon =) on 29 Jul 10 - Cached
  • In traditional short-haul microwave transmission (that is, line-of-sight microwave transmissions operating in the 18 GHz and 23 GHz radio bands),RF design engineers typically are concerned with signal aspects such as fade margins, signal reflections, multipath signals, and so forth. Like an accountant seeking to balance a financial spreadsheet, an RF design engineer normally creates an RF budget table, expressed in decibels (dB), in order to establish a wireless design. Aspects like transmit power and antenna gain are registered in the assets (or plus) column, and free space attenuation, antenna alignment, and atmospheric losses are noted in the liabilities (or minus) column. The goal is to achieve a positive net signal strength adequate to support the wireless path(s) called for in the design.
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IEEE Spectrum: Japanese Snake Robot Goes Where Humans Can't - 0 views

spectrum.ieee.org/...e-robot-goes-where-humans-cant ieee robotics technology electronics mechatronics AI engineering mechanics
shared by Aasemoon =) on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Japanese robotics company HiBot has unveiled a nimble snake bot capable of moving inside air ducts and other narrow places where people can't, or don't want to, go. The ACM-R4H robot, designed for remote inspection and surveillance in confined environments, uses small wheels to move but it can slither and undulate and even raise its head like a cobra. The new robot, which is half a meter long and weighs in at 4.5 kilograms, carries a camera and LEDs on its head for image acquisition and can be fitted with other end-effectors such as mechanical grippers or thermo/infrared vision systems. Despite its seemingly complex motion capabilities, "the control of the robot is quite simple and doesn't require too much training," says robotics engineer and HiBot cofounder Michele Guarnieri.
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Autonomous Satellite Chasers Can Use Robotic Vision to Capture Orbiting Satellites | Po... - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...-apprehend-orbiting-satellites robotics technology electronics engineering machine vision computer vision
shared by Aasemoon =) on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • UC3M's ASIROV Robotic Satellite Chaser Prototype ASIROV, the Acoplamiento y Agarre de Satélites mediante Sistemas Robóticos basado en Visión (Docking and Capture of Satellites through computer vision) would use computer vision tech to autonomously chase down satellites in orbit for repair or removal. Image courtesy of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Spanish robotics engineers have devised a new weapon in the battle against zombie-sats and space junk: an automated robotics system that employs computer vision technology and algorithmic wizardry to allow unmanned space vehicles to autonomously chase down, capture, and even repair satellites in orbit. Scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) created the system to allow for the removal of rogue satellites from low earth orbit or the maintenance of satellites that are nearing the ends of their lives, prolonging their service (and extending the value of large investments in satellite tech). Through a complex set of algorithms, space vehicles known as “chasers” could be placed into orbit with the mission of policing LEO, chasing down satellites that are damaged or have gone “zombie” and dealing with them appropriately.
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Embedded.com - Early verification cuts design time & cost in algorithm-intensive systems - 1 views

www.embedded.com/...222400348 technology electronics programming coding embedded systems
shared by Aasemoon =) on 31 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Verification of algorithm-intensive systems is a long, costly process. Studies show that the majority of flaws in embedded systems are introduced at the specification stage, but are not detected until late in the development process. These flaws are the dominant cause of project delays and a major contributor to engineering costs. For algorithm-intensive systems —including systems with communications, audio, video, imaging, and navigation functions— these delays and costs are exploding as system complexity increases. It doesn't have to be this way. Many designers of algorithm-intensive systems already have the tools they need to get verification under control. Engineers can use these same tools to build system models that help them find and correct problems earlier in the development process. This can not only reduce verification time, but also improves the performance of their designs. In this article, we'll explain three practical approaches to early verification that make this possible. First, let's examine why the current algorithm verification process is inefficient and error-prone. In a typical workflow, designs start with algorithm developers, who pass the design to hardware and software teams using specification documents.
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This Robotic Dragonfly Flew 40 Years Ago | BotJunkie - 0 views

www.botjunkie.com/...ic-dragonfly-flew-40-years-ago robotics engineering mechanics mechatronics robots technology electronics
shared by Aasemoon =) on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped. An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine. A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant. Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. “You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece.”
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robots.net - Physics-based Planning - 0 views

robots.net/3025.html programming technology electronics engineering computer science robots robotics AI physics
shared by Aasemoon =) on 06 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.
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