Remote Room Research Articles

A Reprogrammable and Intelligent Monitoring System for Rock-Collapse Forecasting

The lack of clearly noticeable forerunners, the need to acquire large amounts of data coming from sensors sampled at middle/high rates, and the potentially catastrophic effects of the physical phenomenon under monitoring make rock-collapse forecasting a challenging and valuable environmental monitoring application. In this paper, we describe a rock-collapse forecasting system based on a hybrid wireless–wired architecture, where a set of acquisition units is connected through a fieldbus to a base station, which collects and wirelessly transmits acquired measurements to a remote control room. The main features of the proposed rock-collapse forecasting system are the ability to process data sampled at high-frequency rates locally and in real time, the run-time remote reconfigurability of the forecasting application, and the possibility to distribute intelligent processing through the system layers to balance energy consumption and the application performance. Five instances of the proposed system have been deployed along the Swiss–Italian Alps.

Design and evaluation of a real-time video conferencing environment for support teaching: an attempt to promote equality of K-12 education in China

ABSTRACTImbalanced allocation of teacher resources is a major factor causing inequality in K-12 education in China. Traditional ways to solve this problem, such as on-site support teaching and recorded lectures of quality teachers, have posed many defects. It is suggested that information and communication technology should be employed to deal with the problem. The research put forward an idea of building a particular real-time video conferencing environment (RVCE) for support teaching guided by the Community of Inquiry framework. An experimental environment was built in June 2014, which comprised two Internet-connected multimedia classrooms, one as the local room and the other as the remote room. A case study was then conducted to examine the efficacy of RVCE. Results showed that RVCE could support different kinds of learning activities and would be a feasible practice to promote the Equality of K-12 Education in China.

Multichannel Double-Talk Detector based on Fundamental Frequency Estimation

Multichannel acoustic echo cancellers aim at reducing the undesired acoustic coupling among microphones and loudspeakers in multichannel audio/video teleconferencing systems. In this scenario, double-talk refers to the situation in which there is an active speaker both in the remote room and in the local room. The detection of double-talk is one of the main issues to be faced in such systems to ensure a correct echo cancellation. Indeed, filters coefficients update has to be suppressed during double-talk in order to prevent the filter from diverging because of the presence of the local speaker. In this paper, a novel approach for double-talk detection is discussed based on the estimation of the fundamental frequency of the residual error signals through adaptive second-order notch filters. More specifically, simultaneous speaker activity in the remote and local rooms is revealed by exploiting the same frequency tracking introduced for multichannel decorrelation. Several experiments have been carried out to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach also making comparison with other solutions of the state of the art.

GUI based Wireless Communication for Plant Automation

field instruments of the process plant are communicated with the remote control room where the supervisor is alarmed to monitor the process parameters regulating at some desired value. The onsite monitoring is limited to only specific supervisors. This paper aims to interface the plant parameters to web server for constant monitoring the state of the process plant at various locations by multiple supervisors. This paper considered the temperature parameter (PV) to regulate at some desired value. The measured signal is logged by the arduino board and then the signal is transferred to the AT mega 328 microcontroller. PID algorithm is applied to regulate the parameters. AT mega 328 is used as a controller and to output the data serially to IEEE 802.4.15 wireless communication device. The data received at the personal computer for analysis and monitoring the state of the plant parameters using Graphic user interface (GUI) approach. GUI is implemented with the support of python, internet of things application. The developed model produced more reliable results to consider for implementation in process plants. Keywordstemperature, Arduino board, AT mega 328 microcontroller, Graphic user interface.

Requirements for tokamak remote operation: Application to JT-60SA

Remote operation and data analysis are becoming key requirements of any fusion devices. In this framework a well-conceived data management system integrated with a suite of analysis and support tools are essential components for an efficient remote exploitation of any fusion device. The following components must be considered: data archiving data model architecture; remote data and computers access; pulse schedule, data analysis software and support tools; remote control room specifications and security issues. The definition of a device-generic data model plays also important role in improving the ability to share solution and reducing learning time. As for the remote control room, the implementation of an Operation Request Gateway has been identified as an answer to security issues meanwhile remotely proving all the required features to effectively operate a device.Previous requirements have been analyzed for the new JT-60SA tokamak device. Remote exploitation is paramount in the JT-60SA case which is expected to be jointly operated between Japan and Europe. Due to the geographical distance of the two parties an optimal remote operation and remote data-analysis is considered as a key requirement in the development of JT-60SA. It this case the effects of network speed and delay have been also evaluated and tests have confirmed that the performance can vary significantly depending on the technology used.

Design of Monitoring System of Cooling Water System in EAST Neutral Beam Injector

The monitoring system of the cooling water system in EAST Neutral Beam Injector (EAST-NBI) is introduced in this paper. The key heat loading components of the EAST-NBI consist of two ion sources and high-heat-flux components inside the beamline. In order to meet requirements of the water flow inside the key components, the monitoring system of the water cooling system provides functions to configure the water process control parameters, real-time measurement and remote control. The water quality process control is running in the automatic control modes including the working mode and standby mode in accordance with the operational parameters. The water cooling system is operated in the remote control room by using graphical user interfaces which visually reflect the working status of the cooling water system. The experimental results show that the hardware and software architecture of the monitoring system meets the water quality process requirements and provides reliable remote monitoring functions.

A Remote Monitoring System Based on Measuring Instrument Cloud

A remote lab room monitoring system based on measuring instrument cloud is presented in this paper. The system consists of cloud computing center, embedded front-end acquisition hardware, mobile terminal device, and network equipment. Measuring service software system located in cloud computing center sends control commands to front-end acquisition hardware and collects acquisition data. Then processing, analysis and integration of signals are completed in the cloud computing framework. Finally, all the information can be interacted with mobile terminals by Web service. The system can monitor environmental parameters of lab rooms located in different campuses, such as temperature, humidity, light, smoke, and flooding. When environmental parameters exceed the preset thresholds, light and audio alarms will be immediately switched on and the administrator will be noticed on Web management page.

Continuous Monitoring of Smart Grid Devices Through Multi Protocol Label Switching

Data refreshment rate of a present power system is relatively slow and in some cases this slow refreshment rate may not be capable of providing information about dynamic state of power system devices. The use of multi protocol label switching based technique is one option to overcome this problem. A cost effective and simpler detection device is needed for condition monitoring and integrating the sensor signals into the smart grid monitoring system. Remote and on-line monitoring of ultra wide band partial discharge signal in a switch-yard is a new concept in smart grid technology that will help avoid damage of switchyard devices. It is possible to convert the radio frequency partial discharge signal into an equivalent milli-volt or milli-ampere output for remote or centralized monitoring of switchyard devices. Multi Protocol Label Switching based data transfer rate is faster than the conventional data transfer system of a power grid. In this paper a new and technically better method of on-line radio frequency partial discharge monitoring from a remote smart grid control room through multi protocol label switching is discussed.

Service-Oriented Remote Operation System for J-TEXT Tokamak

To fully use the tokamak facility, it is necessary to allow researchers to remotely participate in the tokamak experiments via the Internet. Being able to control the operation of the tokamak is a key point. In this paper, the design and implementation of the remote operation system for the Joint Texas Experimental Tokamak (J-TEXT) are presented. To make this system flexible, the service-oriented design is applied. Instead of just providing software or website that controls devices and instruments on the tokamak, a series of Application Programming Interfaces are exposed as web services. All the operations of the J-TEXT tokamak are wrapped in these services. The representational state transfer design practice has been adopted to ensure that these services are accessible by various clients. A remote operation website based on these services has been developed. However, users can build their own websites or remote control rooms, which consume these services to operate the J-TEXT tokamak. An authorization and authentication system is included to prevent the users from consuming unauthorized services. The proposed remote operation system is compatible with Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System and has been integrated within the J-TEXT control, data access, and communication system.

Auger ACCESS—Remote Controlling and Monitoring the Pierre Auger Observatory

Ultra high energy cosmic rays are the most energetic particles in the universe. They are measured to have energies of up to 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">20</sup> eV and occur at a rate of about once per square kilometer per century. To increase the probability of detecting one of these events, a huge detector covering a large area is needed. The Pierre Auger Collaboration build up an observatory covering 3000 square kilometers of the Pampa Amarilla close to Malargüe for this purpose. Until now, the Auger Observatory has been controlled exclusively via the local network for security and performance reasons. As local operation is associated with high travel costs, the Auger ACCESS project, started in 2005, has constructed a secure, operable and sustainable solution for remote control and monitoring. The implemented solution includes Grid technologies for secured access and infrastructure virtualization for building up a fully featured testing environment for the Auger Observatory. Measurements showed only a negligible delay for communicating with the observatory in Argentina, which allows the establishment of remote control rooms in the near future for full remote operation and remarkable cost reduction.

Research on Design of Remote Computer Room Monitoring System

In order to solve the problems of remote management on computer room for campus networks, OPC technology is introduced into the design of remote monitoring system for campus computer room. The application of OPC technology can improve the interoperability and adaptability among buses, and reduce the repetitive work of multi-bus system data in the process of the integration, so as to make computer room management more effective, and make the system update and integration become more convenient. Especially in the special environment, the application of OPC technology plays an instructive significance and reference value to unattended management and the remote fault diagnosis and maintenance.

Design of Multi-Channel Temperature and Humidity Sensor Acquiring System

In this paper, the design of remote multi-point temperature and humidity control system consists of two parts of the master and slave, Responsible for the display and control of the host system. Responsible for the collection of temperature data and humidity data from the local system, Between the master and slave data transmission RS-485 communication interface chip, can be realized in a remote control room to monitor the scene of multiple monitoring points.

Cognitive Human-Machine Interface Applied in Remote Support for Industrial Robot Systems

An attempt is currently being made to widely introduce industrial robots to Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Since the enterprises usually employ too small number of robot units to afford specialized departments for robot maintenance, they must be provided with inexpensive and immediate support remotely. This paper evaluates whether the support can be provided by means of Cognitive Info-communication – communication in which human cognitive capabilities are extended irrespectively of geographical distances. The evaluations are given with an aid of experimental system that consists of local and remote rooms, which are physically separated – a six-degree-of-freedom NACHI SH133-03 industrial robot is situated in the local room, while the operator, who supervises the robot by means of audio-visual Cognitive Human-Machine Interface, is situated in the remote room. The results of simple experiments show that Cognitive Info-communication is not only efficient mean to provide the support remotely, but is probably also a powerful tool to enhance interaction with any data-rich environment that require good conceptual understanding of system's state and careful attention management. Furthermore, the paper discusses data presentation and reduction methods for data-rich environments, as well as introduces the concepts of Naturally Acquired Data and Cognitive Human-Machine Interfaces.

A new remote control room for tokamak operations

This paper presents a summary of a new remote tokamak control room constructed near the offices of DIII-D's scientific staff. This integrated system combines hardware, software, data, and control of the room (R-232) into a unified package that has been designed and constructed in a generic fashion so that it can be used with any tokamak operating worldwide. The room is approximately 300ft2 and can accommodate up to 12 seated participants. Mounted on the wall facing each scientist are five 52″ LCD televisions and mounted to the wall on their right are six 24″ LCD monitors. Each seat has associated with it a 24″ monitor, network connection, and power and the scientist is either provided with a computer or they can use their own. The room has been used for operation of DIII-D, EAST, and KSTAR. Due to the long distances, data from EAST and KSTAR was brought back to local DIII-D computers in one large parallel network transfer and subsequently served to scientists in the remote control room to other US collaborators. This parallel data transfer allowed the data to be available to US participants between pulses making remote experimental participation highly effective.

Three Dimensional GIS Monitoring System of Mineral Pipeline Transporting System

Designing the three dimensional (3D) GIS software used in monitoring mineral pipeline transporting system. The software can truly show and restore the geography of project and the features of terrain .The operator can not only examine and grasp the true situation of the distribution of pipeline, but also keep watch on the secure running of the pipeline by real-time remote video in the remote control room. The practical application indicates that the pipeline can run safely, stably and efficiently with the monitoring system.

LabVIEW를 이용한 Conveyor Scale의 원격 교정제어 및 모니터링 시스템

In general, electronic conveyor scales are installed in a relatively distributed manner on the crushed rock and sand production site. It is one of the time-consuming and difficult engineering works to monitor and control the plant operation status such as the management of measuring data, malfunction of belt conveyor, and fault of electronic conveyor scale. Therefore, to alleviate the inefficient problems and to monitor the operating plant in the online and remote control room, a remote calibration and real-time monitoring system, which is practically applied to the electronic conveyor scale system and verified by onsite experiment, is developed based on the LabVIEW.

The Birth and First Steps of the UK Supreme Court

At the end of this legal year I will step down from my position as the first President of the UK Supreme Court, having overseen the first three years of its existence. It would be nice to be able to say that I was involved in the creation of the Court from the first twinkle in the eye to the present day. But it was not to be. No senior judge had been consulted or even warned before Tony Blair announced in June 2003 that the Law Lords were to be abolished and a supreme court to be created in their place. The decision was part of a constitutional package, which included the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor. The latter aim proved more complicated than the Prime Minister anticipated, and we still have a Lord Chancellor with important statutory responsibility for upholding the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, albeit with his judicial functions removed. Notwithstanding the shock of the manner of the announcement, I had for many years shared the opinion of Lord Bingham and other senior jurists that the importance in our unwritten constitution of the separation of powers required the UK to change its arrangements for hearing appeals at the highest level. The Lord Chancellor, amember of the government but also then the highest judge in the land, presided over the Law Lords, who were not only judges but members of a legislative body in the House of Lords. For the public, this was a confusing picture and an ‘appeal to the House of Lords’ did not make it clear that, in practice, the judicial and legislative functions of this body were kept almost completely separate. Moreover, justice could not easily be seen to be done with hearings in a remote committee room and judgments delivered on the floor of the House in a ceremony which conveyed almost nothing about the decision that had been made. A supreme court would be a change of form rather than substance, but form in this instance was of vital importance. It took two years to pass the necessary legislative measures—found in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005—and a further four years before the Supreme Court opened its doors on 1 October 2009. The majority of the delay was

Development of Autonomous Bucket Wheel Reclaimer with Laser Vision

An autonomous system of the bucket wheel reclaimer is developed to improve capability of the reclaimer in dark or bad whether. It obtains the 3D shape of the pile by the laser scanners mounted the reclaimer, and extracts the landing position through computer vision techniques. All the operations of the reclaimer can be controlled automatically in the remote control room. The system can control simultaneously six reclaimers. And it has been successfully implanted to the reclaimer in the stockyards of Majishan of Bao Steel Co. and show satisfactory result.

Localization of sound sources in rooms using an improved version of steered response power algorithm.

Localization of sound sources inside a room is a challenging problem. The possible applications involving speech‐based source localization systems range from teleconferencing to home automation systems. For example, the localization of a speaker inside a conference room can be very useful to place the speaker in a remote room by means of a spatial audio reproduction system. Also, new applications will appear in home automation if accurate source localization systems are available in the future. One of the most robust approaches to source localization is the SRP‐PHAT algorithm, which has shown to provide very good localization results inside rooms with moderate reverberation. However, the computational cost is highly dependent on the spatial sampling and the number of microphones, making very difficult the localization of sound events if a coarse spatial sampling is used. In this paper, we propose an improvement of this method where sound events are not missed even if a very coarse grid is used. The improvement is based on a previous calculation of the existent cross‐correlation lags between spatially adjacent points in the grid, assuring that the non‐sampled space is covered in terms of cross‐correlation lags between microphone pairs when running the algorithm. Several experiments conducted in different rooms with complex acoustics confirm the validity and benefits of the proposed method.

A remote control room at DIII-D

This paper describes a remote control room built at DIII-D to support remote participation activities of DIII-D research staff. In order to create a persistent, efficient, and reliable remote participation environment for DIII-D scientists, a remote control room has been built in a 640-ft 2 dedicated area. The purpose of this room is to experiment and define a remote control room framework that can facilitate the remote participation needs of current and future fusion experiments such as ITER. A variety of hardware equipment has been installed and several remote participation and collaboration technologies have been deployed. Objectivity and practical consideration has been the key while designing the room and deploying the technologies. Although, the DIII-D remote control room is still a work in progress and new software tools are being implemented, it has been already useful for a number of international remote participation activities. For example, it has been used for remote support of the EAST Tokamak in China during the start up operation and proven effective for other collaborative experiment activities. The description of the remote control room design is given along with technologies deployed for remote collaboration needs. We will also discuss our recent experiences involving the DIII-D remote control room as well as future plans for improvements.