Automatic lateral control for unmanned vehicles via genetic algorithms

It is known that the techniques under the topic of Soft Computing have a strong capability of learning and cognition, as well as a good tolerance to uncertainty and imprecision. Due to these properties they can be applied successfully to Intelligent Vehicle Systems; ITS is a broad range of technologies and techniques that hold answers to many transportation problems. The unmannedcontrol of the steering wheel of a vehicle is one of the most important challenges facing researchers in this area. This paper presents a method to adjust automatically a fuzzy controller to manage the steering wheel of a mass-produced vehicle; to reach it, information about the car state while a human driver is handling the car is taken and used to adjust, via iterative geneticalgorithms an appropriated fuzzy controller. To evaluate the obtained controllers, it will be considered the performance obtained in the track following task, as well as the smoothness of the driving carried out.

Knowledge-based models for adaptive traffic management systems

This paper describes a general approach for real time traffic management support using knowledge based models. Recognizing that human intervention is usually required to apply the current automatic traffic control systems, it is argued that there is a need for an additional intelligent layer to help operators to understand traffic problems and to make the best choice of strategic control actions that modify the assumption framework of the existing systems.

Teaching automatic control in non-specialist engineering schools

Automatic Control Teaching in the new degree syllabus has reduced both, its contents and its implementation course, with regard to traditional engineering careers. On the other hand, where the qualification is not considered as automatic control specialist, it is required an adapted methodology to provide the minimum contents that the student needs to assimilate, even in the case that students do not perceive these contents as the most important in their future career. In this paper we present the contents of a small automatic course taught Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Degrees at the School of Naval Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. We have included the contents covered using the proposed methodology which is based on practical work after lectures. Firstly, the students performed exercises by hand. Secondly, they solve the exercises using informatics support tools, and finally, they validate their previous results and their knowledge in the laboratory platforms.

Soporte de redes activas para un servicio integrado de multipunto fiable con control de congestión

Las limitaciones de las tecnologías de red actuales, identificadas en la Agencia de Proyectos de Investigación Avanzados para la Defensa (DARPA) durante 1995, han originado recientemente una propuesta de modelo de red denominado Redes Activas. En este modelo, los nodos proporcionan un entorno de ejecución sobre el que se ejecuta el código asociado a cada paquete. El objetivo es disponer de una tecnología de red que permita que nuevos servicios de red sean desarrollados e instalados rápidamente sin modificar los nodos de la red. Un servicio de red que se puede beneficiar de esta tecnología es la transmisión de datos en multipunto con diferentes grados fiabilidad. Las propuestas actuales de servicios de multipunto fiable proporcionan una solución específica para cada clase de aplicaciones, y los protocolos existentes extremo a extremo sufren de limitaciones técnicas relacionadas con una fiabilidad limitada, y con la ausencia de mecanismos de control de congestión efectivos. Esta tesis realiza propuestas originales conducentes a solucionar parte de las limitaciones actuales en el ámbito de Redes Activas y multipunto fiable con control de congestión. En primer lugar, se especificará un servicio genérico de multipunto fiable que, basándose en los requisitos de una serie de aplicaciones consideradas relevantes, proporcione diferentes clases de sesiones y grados de fiabilidad. Partiendo de la definición del servicio genérico especificado, se diseñará un protocolo de comunicaciones sobre la tecnología de Redes Activas que proporcione dicho servicio. El protocolo diseñado estará dotado de un mecanismo de control de congestión para que la fuente ajuste dinámicamente el tráfico inyectado a las condiciones de carga de la red. En esta tesis se pretende también profundizar en el estudio y análisis de la tecnología de Redes Activas, experimentando con dicha tecnología para proporcionar una realimentación a sus diseñadores. Dicha experimentación se realizará en tres ámbitos: el de los servicios y protocolos que puede soportar, el del modelo y arquitectura de las Redes Activas y el de las plataformas de ejecución disponibles. Como aportación adicional de este trabajo, se validarán los objetivos anteriores mediante una implementación piloto de las entidades de protocolo y de su interfaz de servicio sobre uno de los entornos de ejecución disponibles. Abstract The limitations of current networking technologies identified in the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) along 1995 have led to a recent proposal of a new network model called Active Networks. In this model, the nodes provide an execution environment over which the code used to process each packet is executed. The objective is a network technology that allows the fast design and deployment of new network services without requiring the modification of the network nodes. One network service that could benefit from this technology is the transmission of multicast data with different types of loss tolerance. The current proposals for reliable multicast services provide specific solutions for each application class, and existing end-to-end protocols suffer from technical drawbacks related to limited reliability and lack of an effective congestion control mechanism. This thesis contains original proposals that aim to solve part of the current drawbacks in the scope of Active Networks and reliable multicast with congestion control. Firstly, a generic reliable multicast network service will be specified. This service will be designed from the requirements of a relevant set of applications, and will provide different session classes and different types of reliability. Then, a network protocol based on Active Network technology will be designed such that it provides the specified network service. This protocol will incorporate a congestion control mechanism capable of performing an automatic adjustment of the traffic injected by the source to the available network capacity. This thesis will also contribute to a deeper study and analysis of Active Network technology, by experimenting with the technology in order to provide feedback to its designers. This experimentation will be done attending to three different scopes: support of Active Network for services and protocols, Active Network model and architecture, and currently available Active Network execution environments. As an additional contribution of this work, the previous objectives will be validated through a prototype implementation of the protocol entities and the service interface based on one of the current execution environments.

Automatic Understanding of ATC Speech: Study of Prospectives and Field Experiments for Several Controller Positions

Although there has been a lot of interest in recognizing and understanding air traffic control (ATC) speech, none of the published works have obtained detailed field data results. We have developed a system able to identify the language spoken and recognize and understand sentences in both Spanish and English. We also present field results for several in-tower controller positions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that field ATC speech (not simulated) is captured, processed, and analyzed. The use of stochastic grammars allows variations in the standard phraseology that appear in field data. The robust understanding algorithm developed has 95% concept accuracy from ATC text input. It also allows changes in the presentation order of the concepts and the correction of errors created by the speech recognition engine improving it by 17% and 25%, respectively, absolute in the percentage of fully correctly understood sentences for English and Spanish in relation to the percentages of fully correctly recognized sentences. The analysis of errors due to the spontaneity of the speech and its comparison to read speech is also carried out. A 96% word accuracy for read speech is reduced to 86% word accuracy for field ATC data for Spanish for the "clearances" task confirming that field data is needed to estimate the performance of a system. A literature review and a critical discussion on the possibilities of speech recognition and understanding technology applied to ATC speech are also given.

Exploring differences between phonetic classes in Sleep Apnoea Syndrome Patients using automatic speech processing techniques

This work is part of an on-going collaborative project between the medical and signal processing communities to promote new research efforts on automatic OSA (Obstructive Apnea Syndrome) diagnosis. In this paper, we explore the differences noted in phonetic classes (interphoneme) across groups (control/apnoea) and analyze their utility for OSA detection

Automatic Adaptation of Airport Surface Surveillance to Sensor Quality

This paper describes a novel method to enhance current airport surveillance systems used in Advanced Surveillance Monitoring Guidance and Control Systems (A-SMGCS). The proposed method allows for the automatic calibration of measurement models and enhanced detection of nonideal situations, increasing surveillance products integrity. It is based on the definition of a set of observables from the surveillance processing chain and a rule based expert system aimed to change the data processing methods

Suplementación de raciones para cebo intensivo de terneros con aceites vegetales: rendimientos productivos, calidad de la canal, de la grasa y de la carne

Se han estudiado los efectos de la incorporación de aceites de origen vegetal sobre los rendimientos productivos, calidad de la canal y de la grasa en el ganado vacuno. Se utilizaron 240 terneros agrupados en 24 lotes de 10 terneros cada uno. Las raciones experimentales fueron: Tratamiento Control (4% de aceite de palma), Oliva (4,8% de jabón cálcico de aceite de oliva), Soja (4% de aceite de soja). De cada lote se seleccionó al azar un ternero (8 terneros por tratamiento) para diseccionar su 6ª costilla. No se han observado diferencias significativas entre tratamientos para ningún parámetro productivo ni de calidad de la canal. Los animales que consumieron aceite de oliva presentaron un mayor contenido (P=0,09) en C18:2 cis-9, trans-11 CLA en la grasa intramuscular que los que consumieron palma.

Experiences on using closed-loop control systems for smoke control

The main objective of ventilation systems in case of fire is the reduction of the possible consequences by achieving the best possible conditions for the evacuation of the users and the intervention of the emergency services. In the last years, the required quick response of the ventilation system, from normal to emergency mode, has been improved by the use of automatic and semi-automatic control systems, what reduces the response times through the support to the operators decision taking, and the use of pre-defined strategies. A further step consists on the use of closedloop algorithms, which takes into account not only the initial conditions but their development (air velocity, traffic situation, etc), optimizing the quality of the smoke control process

Automatic Inference of Determinacy and Mutual Exclusion for Logic Programs Using Mode and Type Analyses

We propose an analysis for detecting procedures and goals that are deterministic (i.e., that produce at most one solution at most once),or predicates whose clause tests are mutually exclusive (which implies that at most one of their clauses will succeed) even if they are not deterministic. The analysis takes advantage of the pruning operator in order to improve the detection of mutual exclusion and determinacy. It also supports arithmetic equations and disequations, as well as equations and disequations on terms,for which we give a complete satisfiability testing algorithm, w.r.t. available type information. Information about determinacy can be used for program debugging and optimization, resource consumption and granularity control, abstraction carrying code, etc. We have implemented the analysis and integrated it in the CiaoPP system, which also infers automatically the mode and type information that our analysis takes as input. Experiments performed on this implementation show that the analysis is fairly accurate and efficient.

An automatic translation scheme from prolog to the andorra kernel language

The Andorra family of languages (which includes the Andorra Kernel Language -AKL) is aimed, in principie, at simultaneously supporting the programming styles of Prolog and committed choice languages. On the other hand, AKL requires a somewhat detailed specification of control by the user. This could be avoided by programming in Prolog to run on AKL. However, Prolog programs cannot be executed directly on AKL. This is due to a number of factors, from more or less trivial syntactic differences to more involved issues such as the treatment of cut and making the exploitation of certain types of parallelism possible. This paper provides basic guidelines for constructing an automatic compiler of Prolog programs into AKL, which can bridge those differences. In addition to supporting Prolog, our style of translation achieves independent and-parallel execution where possible, which is relevant since this type of parallel execution preserves, through the translation, the user-perceived "complexity" of the original Prolog program.

Automatic parallelization of irregular and pointer-based computations: perspectives from logic and constraint programming

Irregular computations pose some of the most interesting and challenging problems in automatic parallelization. Irregularity appears in certain kinds of numerical problems and is pervasive in symbolic applications. Such computations often use dynamic data structures which make heavy use of pointers. This complicates all the steps of a parallelizing compiler, from independence detection to task partitioning and placement. In the past decade there has been significant progress in the development of parallelizing compilers for logic programming and, more recently, constraint programming. The typical applications of these paradigms frequently involve irregular computations, which arguably makes the techniques used in these compilers potentially interesting. In this paper we introduce in a tutorial way some of the problems faced by parallelizing compilers for logic and constraint programs. These include the need for inter-procedural pointer aliasing analysis for independence detection and having to manage speculative and irregular computations through task granularity control and dynamic task allocation. We also provide pointers to some of the progress made in these áreas. In the associated talk we demónstrate representatives of several generations of these parallelizing compilers.

An automatic translation scheme from CLP to AKL

The Andorra Kernel language scheme was aimed, in principle, at simultaneously supporting the programming styles of Prolog and committed choice languages. Within the constraint programming paradigm, this family of languages could also in principle support the concurrent constraint paradigm. This happens for the Agents Kernel Language (AKL). On the other hand, AKL requires a somewhat detailed specification of control by the user. This could be avoided by programming in CLP to run on AKL. However, CLP programs cannot be executed directly on AKL. This is due to a number of factors, from more or less trivial syntactic differences to more involved issues such as the treatment of cut and making the exploitation of certain types of parallelism possible. This paper provides a translation scheme which is a basis of an automatic compiler of CLP programs into AKL, which can bridge those differences. In addition to supporting CLP, our style of translation achieves independent and-parallel execution where possible, which is relevant since this type of parallel execution preserves, through the translation, the user-perceived "complexity" of the original program.

Advanced predictive quality control strategy involving different facilities

There are many industries that use highly technological solutions to improve quality in all of their products. The steel industry is one example. Several automatic surface-inspection systems are used in the steel industry to identify various types of defects and to help operators decide whether to accept, reroute, or downgrade the material, subject to the assessment process. This paper focuses on promoting a strategy that considers all defects in an integrated fashion. It does this by managing the uncertainty about the exact position of a defect due to different process conditions by means of Gaussian additive influence functions. The relevance of the approach is in making possible consistency and reliability between surface inspection systems. The results obtained are an increase in confidence in the automatic inspection system and an ability to introduce improved prediction and advanced routing models. The prediction is provided to technical operators to help them in their decision-making process. It shows the increase in improvement gained by reducing the 40 % of coils that are downgraded at the hot strip mill because of specific defects. In addition, this technology facilitates an increase of 50 % in the accuracy of the estimate of defect survival after the cleaning facility in comparison to the former approach. The proposed technology is implemented by means of software-based, multi-agent solutions. It makes possible the independent treatment of information, presentation, quality analysis, and other relevant functions.

Improving automatic detection of obstructive sleep apnea through nonlinear analysis of sustained speech

We present a novel approach for the detection of severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) based on patients' voices introducing nonlinear measures to describe sustained speech dynamics. Nonlinear features were combined with state-of-the-art speech recognition systems using statistical modeling techniques (Gaussian mixture models, GMMs) over cepstral parameterization (MFCC) for both continuous and sustained speech. Tests were performed on a database including speech records from both severe OSA and control speakers. A 10 % relative reduction in classification error was obtained for sustained speech when combining MFCC-GMM and nonlinear features, and 33 % when fusing nonlinear features with both sustained and continuous MFCC-GMM. Accuracy reached 88.5 % allowing the system to be used in OSA early detection. Tests showed that nonlinear features and MFCCs are lightly correlated on sustained speech, but uncorrelated on continuous speech. Results also suggest the existence of nonlinear effects in OSA patients' voices, which should be found in continuous speech.