The paper describes the initial stages and immediate aims of an engineering project to control a tyre tread production line. The line is part of the Avon Tyres pic plant at Melksham, Wiltshire. The paper specifically ...
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The paper describes the initial stages and immediate aims of an engineering project to control a tyre tread production line. The line is part of the Avon Tyres pic plant at Melksham, Wiltshire. The paper specifically describes the modelling, automatic control, hardware and software developments that are (and will be) used as a basis for the continuation of the project. Ultimately, the technology developed and expertise gained on the project will be extended to the control of other plants within the Avon group.
A binary decision controller is a programmable logic device whose use falls between that of hard-wired logic and microcomputer controllers. The paper explores the use of this type of controller for a number of simple ...
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A binary decision controller is a programmable logic device whose use falls between that of hard-wired logic and microcomputer controllers. The paper explores the use of this type of controller for a number of simple tasks.
The use of linear, constant feedback control in automatic flight control systems for aircraft inevitably gives rise to formidable design difficulties when attempting to satisfy the conflicting requirements for faithfu...
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The use of linear, constant feedback control in automatic flight control systems for aircraft inevitably gives rise to formidable design difficulties when attempting to satisfy the conflicting requirements for faithful tracking of a pilot's manoeuvre commands and maintaining the aircraft's trimmed attitude in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. Two nonlinear control policies, VICTOR and ZOC, are shown to provide superior performance and, when used simultaneously in the same flight control system, to assure global stability. Such stability obviates the need to provide adaptive control or gain-scheduling schemes to satisfy the flying quality requirements over the entire flight envelope of an aircraft. The potential performance of the nonlinear control is demonstrated by means of some results obtained from a digital simulation of a pitch-rate manoeuvre-demand system for a typical medium jet transport aircraft.
The article focuses on the development of an OPC UA (object linking and embedding (OLE) for process control unified architecture) server. One of the major concerns regarding this new specification is the migration fro...
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The article focuses on the development of an OPC UA (object linking and embedding (OLE) for process control unified architecture) server. One of the major concerns regarding this new specification is the migration from the old component object model (COM) to the new UA specification. From the various migration strategies described in this article, the authors' server represents a special adapter software solution which aggregates several COM servers, one for each flexible manufacturing system (FMS) modelled in the address space of the UA server. The article focuses on the advantages introduced by the new specification like the unified modelling capability and the extensible meta model. The address space is exemplified by means of a screw fitting station, which is part of the flexible line, on which the UA server has been tested. From the four generally accepted use cases, the server implements the first two: observation and control. They are mainly supported through the variables and the methods of the address space. During the testing phase, the minimum sampling interval regarding the communication with the underlying COM servers has been determined for a different number of FMSs. As a result the special adapter software solution is a fast but also a well-performing approach, which works well even in very complex environments.
The market for industrial machinery is driven by increased product throughput, greater application flexibility and the expectation of decreasing purchase price and operating cost. As we move into the 21st century, the...
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The market for industrial machinery is driven by increased product throughput, greater application flexibility and the expectation of decreasing purchase price and operating cost. As we move into the 21st century, there is little doubt this trend will encourage the development of integrated high-performance mechatronic systems. This Inaugural Address follows the theme of highspeed machinery control through examples taken from a DTI Link programme and from the requirements of high-performance vacuum pumping systems for the semiconductor and instrumentation industries. It uses these examples to highlight the challenges of managing collaborative research involving academic and industrial partners and the ever more important theme of fast-to-market product development.
System integration is the elephant in the china store of large-scale cyber-physical system (CPS) design. It would be hard to find any other technology that is more undervalued scientifically and at the same time has b...
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System integration is the elephant in the china store of large-scale cyber-physical system (CPS) design. It would be hard to find any other technology that is more undervalued scientifically and at the same time has bigger impact on the presence and future of engineered systems. The unique challenges in CPS integration emerge from the heterogeneity of components and interactions. This heterogeneity drives the need for modeling and analyzing cross-domain interactions among physical and computational/networking domains and demands deep understanding of the effects of heterogeneous abstraction layers in the design flow. To address the challenges of CPS integration, significant progress needs to be made toward a new science and technology foundation that is model based, precise, and predictable. This paper presents a theory of composition for heterogeneous systems focusing on stability. Specifically, the paper presents a passivity-based design approach that decouples stability from timing uncertainties caused by networking and computation. In addition, the paper describes cross-domain abstractions that provide effective solution for model-based fully automated software synthesis and high-fidelity performance analysis. The design objectives demonstrated using the techniques presented in the paper are group coordination for networked unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and high-confidence embedded control software design for a quadrotor UAV. Open problems in the area are also discussed, including the extension of the theory of compositional design to guarantee properties beyond stability, such as safety and performance.
Acoustic diagnostics, traditionally associated with mechanical fault modes, can potentially solve a wider range of monitoring applications. Typically, fault modes are induced purposefully by the researcher through phy...
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Acoustic diagnostics, traditionally associated with mechanical fault modes, can potentially solve a wider range of monitoring applications. Typically, fault modes are induced purposefully by the researcher through physical component damage whilst the system is shutdown. This study presents low-cost real-time fault diagnostics of a previously unreported acute electrical origin fault that manifests sporadically during system operation with no triggering intervention. A suitability study into acoustic measurements from readily available consumer-grade sensors for low-cost real-time diagnostics of audible faults, and a brief overview of the theory and configuration of the wavelet packet transform (including optimal wavelet selection methods) and empirical mode decomposition processing algorithms is also included. The example electrical origin fault studied here is an unpredictable current instability arising with the pulse-width modulation controller of a BrushLess DC motor. Experimental trials positively detect 99.9% of the 1160 resultant high-bandwidth torque transients using acoustic measurements from a USB microphone and a smartphone. While the use of acoustic techniques for detecting emerging electrical origin faults remains largely unexplored, the techniques demonstrated here can be readily adopted for the prevention of catastrophic failure of drive and power electronic components.
Radar sensing offers a method of achieving 24-h all-weather drone surveillance, but in order to be maximally effective, systems need to be able to discriminate between birds and drones. This work examines drone-bird c...
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Radar sensing offers a method of achieving 24-h all-weather drone surveillance, but in order to be maximally effective, systems need to be able to discriminate between birds and drones. This work examines drone-bird classification performance as a function of signal to noise ratio (SNR). Classification at low SNR values is necessary in order to classify drones with a small radar cross-section (RCS), as well as to facilitate reliable classification at longer ranges. To investigate the relationship between classification performance and SNR, Gaussian noise is added to an experimentally obtained dataset of radar spectrograms. Classification is performed by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It is shown that for the data available classification accuracy drops with falling SNR, as might be expected for any given CNN. The degree to which performance degrades with reduced SNR is presented. It is further shown that simpler network architectures are more robust to noise. Finally, it is demonstrated that data augmentation can be used as a means of enhancing classification accuracy at lower SNR values. Bayesian optimisation is used to find the optimal augmentation hyperparameters and overall, classification accuracies of 92% are achieved at low SNR.
A generic simulation approach for digital-signal-processor (DSP) controlled power converter systems is described. Software program statements for simulating a feedback control scheme could also be incorporated in the ...
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A generic simulation approach for digital-signal-processor (DSP) controlled power converter systems is described. Software program statements for simulating a feedback control scheme could also be incorporated in the software code of a DSP-controlled power conversion system. The power electronic circuit simulation technique is based on the substitution of switch-modulated resistors in place of all the active and/or passive power switches;one stale equation described by state variables, i.e. inductor currents and capacitor voltages, and the solution of the state equation is computed by an appropriate numerical method. The simulation approach is explained by a practical application example of the DSP-controlled active-switch three-phase power-factor-correction (FC) converter system.
In the paper the author develops a unified bidirectional linear systolic array for performing model reduction of a feedback control system using continued fractions. The array is capable of computing the 1st, 2nd and ...
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In the paper the author develops a unified bidirectional linear systolic array for performing model reduction of a feedback control system using continued fractions. The array is capable of computing the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Cauer forms of the fraction and their associated inverses as well as the Routh stability criterion. Timing graphs are presented to indicate the speed-up obtained on five transputers for common problem ranges.
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