Progetto e realizzazione del sistema di gestione autonoma del volo e controllo in remoto per un velivolo UAV ad ala rotante

This PhD thesis presents the results, achieved at the Aerospace Engineering Department Laboratories of the University of Bologna, concerning the development of a small scale Rotary wing UAVs (RUAVs). In the first part of the work, a mission simulation environment for rotary wing UAVs was developed, as main outcome of the University of Bologna partnership in the CAPECON program (an EU funded research program aimed at studying the UAVs civil applications and economic effectiveness of the potential configuration solutions). The results achieved in cooperation with DLR (German Aerospace Centre) and with an helicopter industrial partners will be described. In the second part of the work, the set-up of a real small scale rotary wing platform was performed. The work was carried out following a series of subsequent logical steps from hardware selection and set-up to final autonomous flight tests. This thesis will focus mainly on the RUAV avionics package set-up, on the onboard software development and final experimental tests. The setup of the electronic package allowed recording of helicopter responses to pilot commands and provided deep insight into the small scale rotorcraft dynamics, facilitating the development of helicopter models and control systems in a Hardware In the Loop (HIL) simulator. A neested PI velocity controller1 was implemented on the onboard computer and autonomous flight tests were performed. Comparison between HIL simulation and experimental results showed good agreement.

Analisi biomeccanica del MAWASHI GERI JODAN in cinture nere di Karate: modelli tecnici a confronto

In martial arts there are several ways to perform the turning kick . Following the martial arts or different learning models many types of kicks take shape. Mawashi geri is the karate turning kick. At the moment there are two models of mawashi geri, one comes from the traditional karate (OLD), and the other newer (NEW), who agrees to the change of the rules of W.K.F. (World Karate Federation) happened in 2000 (Macan J. et all 2006) . In this study we are focus on the differences about two models the mawashi geri jodan of karate. The purpose of this study is to analyse cinematic and kinetic parameters of mawashi geri jodan. Timing of the striking and supporting leg actions were also evaluated A Vicon system 460 IR with 6 cameras at sample frequency of 200 Hz was used. 37 reflective markers have been set on the skin of the subjects following the “PlugInGait-total body model”. The participants performed five repetitions of mawashi geri jodan at maximum rapidity with their dominant leg against a ball suspended in front of them placed at ear height. Fourteen skilled subjects (mean level black belt 1,7 dan; age 20,9±4,8 yrs; height 171,4±7,3 cm; weight 60,9±10,2 Kg) practicing karate have been split in two group through the hierarchical cluster analysis following their technical characteristics. By means of the Mann Whitney-U test (Spss-package) the differences between the two groups were verified in preparatory and execution phase. Kicking knee at start, kicking hip and knee at take-off were different between the two groups (p < 0,05). Striking hip flexion during the spin of the supporting foot was different between the two groups (p < 0,05). Peak angular velocity of hip flexion were different between the two groups (p < 0,05). Groups showed differences also in timing of the supporting spin movement. While Old group spin the supporting foot at 30% of the trial, instead New start spinning at 44% of the trial. Old group showed a greater supporting foot spin than New (Old 110° Vs New 82°). Abduction values didn’t show any differences between the two groups. At the hit has been evaluated a 120° of double hips abduction, for the entire sample. Striking knee extension happened for everybody after the kicking hip flexion and confirm the proximal-distal action of the striking leg (Sorensen H. 1996). In contrast with Pearson J.N. 1997 and Landeo R 2007, peak velocity of the striking foot is not useful to describe kick performance because affected by the stature. Two groups are different either in preparatory phase or in execution phase. The body is set in difference manner already before the take-off of the kicking foot. The groups differ for the timing of the supporting foot action Trainer should pay attention to starting posture and on abduction capacities of the athletes.

Well-being, distress and health status in a population of adolescent students

The present work explores the psychosocial issues emerging from a large cross-sectional study aimed to assess the prevalence, clinical manifestations, and psychosocial correlates of hyperandrogenism in a population of Italian high school students. Participants were 1804 adolescents, aged between 15 and 19 years, who volunteered to fill in a package of self-report questionnaires (including the Psychosocial Index, the Symptom Questionnaire and Ryff’s Psychological Well-Being scales for the assessment of psychological aspects) and undergo a comprehensive physical examination. Significant gender differences were found with regard to psychological distress, with females reporting higher scores compared with males, but not on well-being dimensions. The relationships of well-being to distress were found to be complex. Although inversely associated, well-being and ill-being appeared to be distinct domains of mental functioning. The evaluation of the moderating effects of well-being in the association between stress and psychological distress indicated that well-being may act as a protective factor, contributing to less pronounced psychological distress as stress levels increased. Higher rates of somatic complaints were found among current smokers. However, substance use (i.e., smoking and drug use) was also found to be positively associated with some well-being dimensions. A considerable number of participants were found to present with disordered eating symptoms, particularly females, and associated higher stress levels and lower quality of life. Sport activities were found to favourably affect psychological health. As to clinical signs of hyperandrogenism, a significant impairment in psychosocial functioning was found among females, whereas no effects on psychological measures could be detected among males. Subgroups of adolescents with distinct clinical and psychological characteristics could be identified by means of cluster analysis. The present study provides new insights into better understanding of the complex relationships between well-being, distress and health status in the adolescent population, with important clinical implications.

Bioinformatic methods in applied genomic research

Here I will focus on three main topics that best address and include the projects I have been working in during my three year PhD period that I have spent in different research laboratories addressing both computationally and practically important problems all related to modern molecular genomics. The first topic is the use of livestock species (pigs) as a model of obesity, a complex human dysfunction. My efforts here concern the detection and annotation of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. I developed a pipeline for mining human and porcine sequences. Starting from a set of human genes related with obesity the platform returns a list of annotated porcine SNPs extracted from a new set of potential obesity-genes. 565 of these SNPs were analyzed on an Illumina chip to test the involvement in obesity on a population composed by more than 500 pigs. Results will be discussed. All the computational analysis and experiments were done in collaboration with the Biocomputing group and Dr.Luca Fontanesi, respectively, under the direction of prof. Rita Casadio at the Bologna University, Italy. The second topic concerns developing a methodology, based on Factor Analysis, to simultaneously mine information from different levels of biological organization. With specific test cases we develop models of the complexity of the mRNA-miRNA molecular interaction in brain tumors measured indirectly by microarray and quantitative PCR. This work was done under the supervision of Prof. Christine Nardini, at the “CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology” of Shangai, China (co-founded by the Max Planck Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly) The third topic concerns the development of a new method to overcome the variety of PCR technologies routinely adopted to characterize unknown flanking DNA regions of a viral integration locus of the human genome after clinical gene therapy. This new method is entirely based on next generation sequencing and it reduces the time required to detect insertion sites, decreasing the complexity of the procedure. This work was done in collaboration with the group of Dr. Manfred Schmidt at the Nationales Centrum für Tumorerkrankungen (Heidelberg, Germany) supervised by Dr. Annette Deichmann and Dr. Ali Nowrouzi. Furthermore I add as an Appendix the description of a R package for gene network reconstruction that I helped to develop for scientific usage (http://www.bioconductor.org/help/bioc-views/release/bioc/html/BUS.html).

Ricerca di contaminanti in tessuti animali e in alimenti destinati all'uomo.

La contaminazione chimica rappresenta uno dei rischi principali per la sicurezza alimentare e può arrecare anche gravi danni alla salute umana. Rientrano in questa tesi di dottorato tre famiglie di contaminanti: Micotossine, Metalli e Insetticidi. La ricerca di aflatossina B1 è stata effettuata su 90 confezioni di farina, sia biologici sia convenzionali. La presenza della micotossina è stata rilevata solo nelle farine di mais. Solo un campione di produzione convenzionale ha superato il limite di 2 ppb definito per legge. Il dato di maggior rilievo è stato che il quantitativo di 5 grammi di campionamento si è dimostrato non rappresentativo sul totale della confezione commerciale di farina. Più attendibile si è invece dimostrato un campionamento di 20 grammi. L’aflatossina M1 è stata ricercata in 58 campioni di latte di cui 35 sono risultati positivi. Tuttavia, i livelli riscontrati erano costantemente inferiori al limite previsto per legge. Sono stati sottoposti a estrazione e purificazione, e analizzati con metodica HPLC-FL per la ricerca di Ocratossina A, 114 campioni di bile, 35 campioni di plasma, 40 campioni di rene prelevati da polli in Giordania. Le analisi hanno fornito risultati costantemente negativi. Sono stati analizzati 72 campioni (30 di muscolo, 29 di fegato e 13 di rene) prelevati da 30 bovini nel macello di Irbid (Giordania), di età compresa tra 8 e 30 mesi e provenienti da allevamenti diversi, per la ricerca di 13 elementi essenziali e non essenziali. In questo studio nessun campione supera i livelli massimi stabiliti dalla normativa europea per quanto riguarda gli elementi considerati. Infine, sono stati analizzati 37 campioni di latte ovino e 31 campioni di latte bovino, prelevati in Giordania in diversi allevamenti, per la ricerca di 4 neonicotinoidi (imidacloprid, acetamiprid, thiamethoxam e thiacloprid). I campioni, analizzati con sistema HPLC/MS/MS, sono risultati costantemente negativi ai quattro neonicotinoidi ricercati.

Temperature Variation Aware Energy Optimization in Heterogeneous MPSoCs

Thermal effects are rapidly gaining importance in nanometer heterogeneous integrated systems. Increased power density, coupled with spatio-temporal variability of chip workload, cause lateral and vertical temperature non-uniformities (variations) in the chip structure. The assumption of an uniform temperature for a large circuit leads to inaccurate determination of key design parameters. To improve design quality, we need precise estimation of temperature at detailed spatial resolution which is very computationally intensive. Consequently, thermal analysis of the designs needs to be done at multiple levels of granularity. To further investigate the flow of chip/package thermal analysis we exploit the Intel Single Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) and propose a methodology for calibration of SCC on-die temperature sensors. We also develop an infrastructure for online monitoring of SCC temperature sensor readings and SCC power consumption. Having the thermal simulation tool in hand, we propose MiMAPT, an approach for analyzing delay, power and temperature in digital integrated circuits. MiMAPT integrates seamlessly into industrial Front-end and Back-end chip design flows. It accounts for temperature non-uniformities and self-heating while performing analysis. Furthermore, we extend the temperature variation aware analysis of designs to 3D MPSoCs with Wide-I/O DRAM. We improve the DRAM refresh power by considering the lateral and vertical temperature variations in the 3D structure and adapting the per-DRAM-bank refresh period accordingly. We develop an advanced virtual platform which models the performance, power, and thermal behavior of a 3D-integrated MPSoC with Wide-I/O DRAMs in detail. Moving towards real-world multi-core heterogeneous SoC designs, a reconfigurable heterogeneous platform (ZYNQ) is exploited to further study the performance and energy efficiency of various CPU-accelerator data sharing methods in heterogeneous hardware architectures. A complete hardware accelerator featuring clusters of OpenRISC CPUs, with dynamic address remapping capability is built and verified on a real hardware.

The market manipulation regime in the European Union

Market manipulation is an illegal practice that enables a person can profit from practices that artificially raise or lower the prices of an instrument in the financial markets. Its prohibition is based on the 2003 Market Abuse Directive in the EU. The current market manipulation regime was broadly considered as a big success except for enforcement and supervisory inconsistencies in the Member States at the initial. A review of the market manipulation regime began at the end of 2007, which became quickly incorporated into the wider EU crisis-era reform program. A number of weaknesses of current regime have been identified, which include regulatory gaps caused by the development of trading venues and financial products, regulatory gaps concerning cross-border and cross-markets manipulation (particular commodity markets), legal uncertainty as a result of various implementation, and inefficient supervision and enforcement. On 12 June 2014, a new regulatory package of market abuse, Market Abuse Regulation and Directive on criminal sanctions for market abuse, has been adopted. And several changes will be made concerning the EU market manipulation regime. A wider scope of the regime and a new prohibition of attempted market manipulation will ensure the prevention of market manipulation at large. The AMPs will be subject to strict scrutiny of ESMA to reduce divergences in implementation. In order to enhance efficiency of supervision and enforcement, powers of national competent authorities will be strengthened, ESMA is imposed more power to settle disagreement between national regulators, and the administrative and criminal sanctioning regimes are both further harmonized. In addition, the protection of fundamental rights is stressed by the new market manipulation regime, and some measures are provided to guarantee its realization. Further, the success EU market manipulation regime could be of significant reference to China, helping China to refine its immature regime.

Calcoli di sezioni d'urto efficaci di riflettore in sistemi PWR di terza generazione

La corretta modellizzazione della zona del riflettore dei sistemi GEN III+ è un passaggio fondamentale per un’accurata predizione dei parametri di cella il cui valore influenza direttamente la distribuzione di potenza su tutto il nocciolo. Tale esigenza si è resa ancora più stringente dopo la constatazione che il fenomeno del “tilt power” risulta essere più amplificato nei noccioli nucleari equipaggiati con un riflettore pesante. Per tali ragioni, nel presente lavoro di tesi si è dedicata particolare attenzione alle metodiche di modellizzazione ed alla generazione delle sezioni d’urto efficaci omogenee ed agli assembly discontinuity factors (ADF) nella zona di riflessione. Il codice deterministico utilizzato per il calcolo è SCALE 6.1.3. La notevole differenza nelle proprietà neutroniche associata ad un’elevata eterogeneità geometrica tra un nocciolo ed un riflettore hanno suggerito di effettuare un’analisi preliminare sul sistema riflettente GEN II proposto nel benchmark NEA-NSC-DOC (2013) per testare la capacità di SCALE 6.1.3 di effettuare un corretto calcolo di cella adottando una modellizzazione monodimensionale assembly/riflettore. I risultati ottenuti sono confrontati con quelli presentati nel benchmark e e con quelli valutati attraverso il codice Monte Carlo SERPENT 2.0 confermando la capacità di calcolo di SCALE 6.1.3. L’analisi sulla modellizzazione dei sistemi riflettenti GEN III+ è stata effettuata ricavando il valore dei parametri di cella per configurazioni omogenee ed una serie di configurazioni geometriche esatte che comprendono tutte le modellizzazioni del sistema riflettente lungo la direzione angolare del riflettore. Si è inoltre effettuata un’analisi di sensitività su parametri operativi e sui parametri di codice. Si è infine effettuato un calcolo in color-set per indagare l’influenza degli effetti 2-D sui parametri di cella. I risultati prodotti rappresentano un contributo migliorativo nella conoscenza dei parametri di cella di riflettore e potranno essere utilizzati per una più precisa valutazione del fenomeno del tilt nei sistemi GEN III+.