A voltage disturbances prototype for testing electrical generators connected to microgrids

The search for new energy models arises as a necessity to have a sustainable power supply. The inclusion of distributed generation sources (DG) allows to reduce the cost of facilities, increase the security of the grid or alleviate problems of congestion through the redistribution of power flows. In remote microgrids it is needed in a particular way a safe and reliable supply, which can cover the demand for a low cost; due to this, distributed generation is an alternative that is being widely introduced in these grids. But the remote microgrids are especially weak grids because of their small size, low voltage level, reduced network mesh and distribution lines with a high ratio R/X. This ratio affects the coupling between grid voltages and phase shifts, and stability becomes an issue of greater importance than in interconnected systems. To ensure the appropriate behavior of generation sources inserted in remote microgrids -and, in general, any electrical equipment-, it is essential to have devices for testing and certification. These devices must, not only faithfully reproduce disturbances occurring in remote microgrids, but also to behave against the equipment under test (EUT) as a real weak grid. This also makes the device commercially competitive. To meet these objectives and based on the aforementioned, it has been designed, built and tested a voltage disturbances generator, in order to provide a simple, versatile, full and easily scalable device to manufacturers and laboratories in the sector.

Pedestrian Motion Prediction: A Graph Based Approach

A novel pedestrian motion prediction technique is presented in this paper. Its main achievement regards to none previous observation, any knowledge of pedestrian trajectories nor the existence of possible destinations is required; hence making it useful for autonomous surveillance applications. Prediction only requires initial position of the pedestrian and a 2D representation of the scenario as occupancy grid. First, it uses the Fast Marching Method (FMM) to calculate the pedestrian arrival time for each position in the map and then, the likelihood that the pedestrian reaches those positions is estimated. The technique has been tested with synthetic and real scenarios. In all cases, accurate probability maps as well as their representative graphs were obtained with low computational cost.