Cheap Platform Research Articles

Biomechanical Analysis of Typical Upper Limb Movements Based on Kinect-LifeMOD

In traditional biomechanical analysis of upper limb, the high-precision motion data and lifelike human models are needed. It is obvious that those processes are costly and time-consuming. In this paper, a novel and simple combination method based on Kinect-LifeMOD is proposed. Firstly, the Microsoft Kinect (a latest depth sensor) is used to build a cheap and precise motion capture platform. Real-time and reliable key-node rotation data of human skeletons can be acquired by this motion capture system. Next, rotation data is converted into position data as the input of the LifeMOD software which can establish mathematical model of upper limb and execute biomechanical analysis automatically. The experimental results show that the proposed method could achieve the satisfactory performance.

Beyond Moore's law

Computer and communications technologies have permeated all areas of modern life, including business, education, government, science and entertainment. These developments are all underpinned by micro-electronics that, for half a century, has been driven by Moore's law. Named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, the ‘law’ describes the exponential growth in the complexity of integrated circuits year on year, driven by the search for profit. This rapid progress has delivered astonishing levels of functionality and cost-effectiveness, as epitomized by the boom in sophisticated digital consumer electronics products. However, this exponential growth in complexity cannot continue forever, and there is increasing evidence that, as transistor geometries shrink towards atomic scales, the limits to Moore's law may be reached over the next decade or two. As the physical limits are approached, other factors, such as design costs, manufacturing economics and device reliability, all conspire to make progress through device scaling alone ever more challenging, and alternative ways forward must be sought. Microelectronics therefore seeks to develop in new ways, not only to continue to deliver better performance in traditional markets, but also to grow into new markets based on devising new, non-electronic, functions on integrated circuits. Microelectronics relies on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the backbone of the electronics industry. Beyond Moore's law, it is foreseen that microelectronics will be a platform to support optical, chemical and biotechnology to deliver a step change beyond electronics-only integration. Research is now heavily engaged in the integration of non-electronic devices and systems using CMOS as a cheap platform. Building upon electronics, it is increasingly possible to create highly heterogeneous systems using a great variety of technologies. New and revolutionary technologies such as ‘post-light’ genome sequencing are now rising to dominance in the market place. It is now clear that heterogeneous integration will make an impact in the relatively integration-poor fields of biomedical, sensing and healthcare technologies. However, this is not the only important strand of ‘beyond Moore's law’ technology that we explore in this Discussion Meeting Issue. While new applications for CMOS will be discovered, there is also a pressing need to continue to develop computer and communication technologies yet more. Integrated optics and, more specifically, silicon photonics represent a major pathway that is being vigorously explored. The objective is to increase information bandwidth dramatically in low-cost technologies to deliver high-bandwidth communications. The research and funding landscape is now changing to acknowledge and support this potential for scientific and technological advance. As the field develops scientifically, new opportunities are emerging that will use low-cost electronics, and exploit the added value of design and manufacture for integration. To achieve this, a multidisciplinary approach is essential: traditional physics and engineering research must now work closely alongside biological, chemical and medical science to develop new applications and acquire new capabilities. At the Discussion Meeting and satellite meetings that were held in May 2013, we were able to explore this diverse and complex landscape with internationally leading speakers in the field. This Discussion Meeting Issue offers a glimpse into the topic and the excitement that is felt by many scientists and engineers as they prepare to tackle new challenges in the coming years.

An Attitude Control System for the Deployment and Stabilisation of a Tethered Dual CubeSat Mission

The use of electrodynamic tethers on board satellites is a promising scientific prospect. While the theory describing such systems has been studied by numerous scientists and mathematicians, practical testing of these systems has been relatively unsuccessful and test data concerning the topic is limited. Low-cost CubeSats offer a cheap platform from which practical tests can be done which would contribute to advancements in the field. The design of an attitude determination and control system for such a CubeSat tether mission is discussed in this paper. This includes the design of a sensor capable of measuring the orientation of the tethered CubeSat pair using a CMOS imager. Further, the study includes the design of an active deployment system, mathematical modelling of the system, formulation of control-algorithms for controlling the tether orientation, and full orbital simulations of the system.

REAL TIME IMPLEMANTION OF STC AND FTC RADAR SYSTEM BASED ON FPGA

In this paper we are explosively the fundamental theory of radar system modules STC (sensitivity time control) or sea clutter and FTC (fast time constant) or rain clutter. The STC and FTC are commonly used to some clutter. The radar signal is widely used for weather forecast, air port traffic control, military and fire control. The system implements radar processing procedures in real time mode in FPGA (field programmable gate array). The FPGA device providing good performance of cheap platform for research and development. The compact structure of STC and FTC can Implementations of Xilinx FPGA using the generated VHDL code.

A Low Cost Stirring Platform with Integrated Temperature Control Scheme for Microbioreactor Operation

In this paper, we presented the establishment of a cheap and simple stirring platform integrated with on/off temperature controller for microbioreactor operation. The stirring platform was designed to provide necessary mixing via magnetic stirrer bar for a microbioreactor setup. The microbioreactor (volume ~ 300 mL) used in this investigation was fabricated out of the poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) polymer material via micromachining. The reactor was deliberately designed to work under bubble-free conditions and limited only to batch operation. The paper first described the details of the mechanical design of the stirring platform and the microbioreactor prototype used in the work. These include the dimensions of the reactor and the stirring platform, positioning of the sensors and actuators employed, wiring connections, and the process control algorithm. Secondly, experimental results obtained to assess the mixing quality of the reactor and to characterize the performance of the controller (stirring and temperature) in terms of control accuracy and system responses were presented. We show that by implementing a rather straight forward control algorithm, the mixing quality and the temperature of the microbioreactor can be accurately controlled within an acceptable range of the set point values and provide a good response (i.e. in the range of few seconds). Results also showed that (1) at agitation rate of 300 rpm, mixing time as fast as 3 seconds was obtained and (2) reactor temperature can be tightly controlled at ±0.15 oC of the set point value.

Directly Georeferenced Ground Feature Points with UAV Borne Photogrammetric Platform without Ground Control

In order to facilitate applications such as environment detection or disaster monitoring, developing a quickly and low cost system to collect near real time spatial information is very important. Such a rapid spatial information collection capability has become an emerging trend in the technology of remote sensing and mapping application. In this study, a fixed-wing UAV based spatial information acquisition platform is developed and evaluated. The proposed UAV based platform has a direct georeferencing module including an low cost INS/GPS integrated system, low cost digital camera as well as other general UAV modules including immediately video monitoring communication system. This direct georeferencing module is able to provide differential GPS processing with single frequency carrier phase measurements to obtain sufficient positioning accuracy. All those necessary calibration procedures including interior orientation parameters, the lever arm and boresight angle are implemented. In addition, a flight test is performed to verify the positioning accuracy in direct georeferencing mode without using any ground control point that is required for most of current UAV based photogrammetric platforms. In other word, this is one of the pilot studies concerning direct georeferenced based UAV photogrammetric platform. The preliminary results in term of positioning accuracy in direct georeferenced mode without using any GCP illustrate horizontal positioning accuracies in x and y axes are both less than 20 meters, respectively. On the contrary, the positioning accuracy of z axis is less than 50 meters with 600 meters flight height above ground. Such accuracy is good for near real time disaster relief. Therefore, it is a relatively safe and cheap platform to collect critical spatial information for urgent response such as disaster relief and assessment applications where ground control points are not available.

Quantum reactive scattering on innovative computing platforms

The possibility of implementing quantum reactive scattering programs on cheap platforms, originally used for graphic purposes only, has been investigated using a NVIDIA GPU. After a conversion of the code considered from Fortran to C and its deep restructuring for exploiting the GPU key features, significant speedups have been obtained for RWAVEPR, a time dependent quantum reactive scattering code propagating in time a complex wavepacket. As benchmark calculations those concerned with the evaluation of the reactive probabilities of the Cl+H2 and the N+N2 reactions have been considered.

Simultaneous navigation and synthetic aperture radar focusing

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) equipment is a radar imaging system that can be used to create high-resolution images of a scene by utilizing the movement of a flying platform. Knowledge of the platform's trajectory is essential to get good and focused images. An emerging application field is real-time SAR imaging using small and cheap platforms where estimation errors in navigation systems imply unfocused images. This contribution investigates a joint estimation of the trajectory and SAR image. Starting with a nominal trajectory, we successively improve the image by optimizing a focus measure and updating the trajectory accordingly. The method is illustrated using simulations using typical navigation performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle. One real data set is used to show feasibility, where the result indicates that, in particular, the azimuth position error is decreased as the image focus is iteratively improved.

THE PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A UAV BASED MOBILE MAPPING SYSTEM

Abstract. In order to facilitate applications such as environment detection or disaster monitoring, developing a quickly and low cost system to collect near real time spatial information is very important. Such a rapid spatial information collection capability has become an emerging trend in the technology of remote sensing and mapping application. In this study, a fixed-wing UAV based spatial information acquisition platform is developed and evaluated. The proposed UAV based platform has a direct georeferencing module including an low cost INS/GPS integrated system, low cost digital camera as well as other general UAV modules including immediately video monitoring communication system. This direct georeferencing module is able to provide differential GPS processing with single frequency carrier phase measurements to obtain sufficient positioning accuracy. All those necessary calibration procedures including interior orientation parameters, the lever arm and boresight angle are implemented. In addition, a flight test is performed to verify the positioning accuracy in direct georeferencing mode without using any ground control point that is required for most of current UAV based photogrammetric platforms. In other word, this is one of the pilot studies concerning direct georeferenced based UAV photogrammetric platform. The preliminary results in term of positioning accuracy in direct georeferenced mode without using any GCP illustrate horizontal positioning accuracies in x and y axes are both less than 20 meters, respectively. On the contrary, the positioning accuracy of z axis is less than 50 meters with 600 meters flight height above ground. Such accuracy is good for near real time disaster relief. Therefore, it is a relatively safe and cheap platform to collect critical spatial information for urgent response such as disaster relief and assessment applications where ground control points are not available.

Electrophysiological characterization of ion channels in beta-cells using silicon based lateral patch clamp device

Metabolic syndrome, a collection of metabolic abnormalities including diabetes and obesity, affects hundreds of millions of people, and poses a major financial burden to public healthcare around the world. There are two major types of diabetes: Type-1, which is caused by a lack of insulin production and Type-2, which results from a relative deficiency of insulin secretion. Electrical activity of various ion channels in beta (β)-cells plays an important role in the stimulus-secretion of insulin in Type-2 diabetes. Here, we utilize a silicon based lateral patch clamp device to conduct whole cell patch clamp measurements in insulin secreting rat insulinoma (INS-1) cells. High gigaohm seals were achieved between the microfabricated glass capillary apertures and INS-1 cells resulting in picoampere current recordings from various potassium and calcium ion channels. Steady state I–V plots elicited characteristic ion channel properties and longevity of the whole cell mode could be maintained for 1 h without any breakage of the gigaohm seal. Glucose dose responses were also recorded and showed proportional current responses in voltage gated potassium channels. Delivery of multiple ion channel blockers (sulfonylurea drugs) resulted in suppression of currents in potassium channels. The results showcase the capability of our device in performing whole cell measurements and pave a way for developing a cheap platform using our silicon based approach.

Partitioning of Mealy Finite State Machines

As widely accepted, the most popular way for realization of control units are finite state machines. Up-to-date control unit circuits very often are implemented using programmable logic devices. Microprocessors can be also considered as a solution taking costs into account. But very often microprocessors are too slow for realization control units of digital systems. The partitioning of state machines can be a solution for this problem allowing a parallel execution of sub-state machines, keeping performance, cost, and energy consumption at adequate levels. In this case, the time critical part of the control unit (associated with specific sub-state machines) can be implemented in fast FPGA device and other parts can be realized by cheaper platforms (namely based on microprocessors). Additional advantage of such solution is that each part can be synthesized using different methods. The problems and algorithms of partitioning of state machines are discussed in this paper. A CAD tool for partitioning implementing the proposed algorithm is also presented.

Structural Engineering Aspects of the STAR Platform

Based on the economic frames of the late eighties, the general urge to develop cheap and small platforms for marginal fields is outlined. Through a case story covering main aspects of the structural development and design of the STAR platforms, originated by Mærsk Olie og Gas AS, it is demonstrated how a new, cheap jackup installed platform type has been developed for shallow Danish North Sea conditions. Due to the platform’s relatively slender layout, it is more susceptible to dynamic loads than traditional jackets. Therefore, special investigations have been carried out for ship impact, fatigue, vortex shedding and pile driving-induced vibrations. Both the approach chosen for the analyses and design, as well as typical results, have been included. Finally, the present record of this new platform has been given.