See-and-avoid quadcopter using fuzzy control optimized by cross-entropy

In this work we present an optimized fuzzy visual servoing system for obstacle avoidance using an unmanned aerial vehicle. The cross-entropy theory is used to optimise the gains of our controllers. The optimization process was made using the ROS-Gazebo 3D simulation with purposeful extensions developed for our experiments. Visual servoing is achieved through an image processing front-end that uses the Camshift algorithm to detect and track objects in the scene. Experimental flight trials using a small quadrotor were performed to validate the parameters estimated from simulation. The integration of cross- entropy methods is a straightforward way to estimate optimal gains achieving excellent results when tested in real flights.

Quadcopter see and avoid using a fuzzy controller

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) industry is a fast growing sector. Nowadays, the market offers numerous possibilities for off-the-shelf UAVs such as quadrotors or fixed-wings. Until UAVs demonstrate advance capabilities such as autonomous collision avoidance they will be segregated and restricted to flight in controlled environments. This work presents a visual fuzzy servoing system for obstacle avoidance using UAVs. To accomplish this task we used the visual information from the front camera. Images are processed off-board and the result send to the Fuzzy Logic controller which then send commands to modify the orientation of the aircraft. Results from flight test are presented with a commercial off-the-shelf platform.

UAS See-and-Avoid using two different approaches of Fuzzy Control

This work presents two UAS See and Avoid approaches using Fuzzy Control. We compare the performance of each controller when a Cross-Entropy method is applied to optimase the parameters for one of the controllers. Each controller receive information from an image processing front-end that detect and track targets in the environment. Visual information is then used under a visual servoing approach to perform autonomous avoidance. Experimental flight trials using a small quadrotor were performed to validate and compare the behaviour of both controllers

Intuitionistic fuzzy Choquet integral operator-based approach for black-start decision-making

Determining the optimal of black-start strategies is very important for speeding the restoration speed of a power system after a global blackout. Most existing black-start decision-making methods are based on the assumption that all indexes are independent of each other, and little attention has been paid to the group decision-making method which is more reliable. Given this background, the intuitionistic fuzzy set and further intuitionistic fuzzy Choquet integral operator are presented, and a black-start decision-making method based on this integral operator is presented. Compared to existing methods, the proposed algorithm cannot only deal with the relevance among the indexes, but also overcome some shortcomings of the existing methods. Finally, an example is used to demonstrate the proposed method. © 2012 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Rough fuzzy control of SVC for power system stability enhancement

This paper presents a new approach to the design of a rough fuzzy controller for the control loop of the SVC (static VAR system) in a two area power system for stability enhancement with particular emphasis on providing effective damping for oscillatory instabilities. The performances of the rough fuzzy and the conventional fuzzy controller are compared with that of the conventional PI controller for a variety of transient disturbances, highlighting the effectiveness of the rough fuzzy controller in damping the inter-area oscillations. The effect of the rough fuzzy controller in improving the CCT (critical clearing time) of the two area system is elaborated in this paper as well.

Evaluating stakeholder satisfaction during public participation in major infrastructure and construction projects : a fuzzy approach

Numerous different and sometimes discrepant interests can be affected, both positively and negatively, throughout the course of a major infrastructure and construction (MIC) project. Failing to address and meet the concerns and expectations of the stakeholders involved has resulted in many project failures. One way to address this issue is through a participatory approach to project decision making. Whether the participation mechanism is effective or not depends largely on the client/owner. This paper provides a means of systematically evaluating the effectiveness of the public participation exercise, or even the whole project, through the measurement of stakeholder satisfaction. Since the process of satisfaction measurement is complicated and uncertain, requiring approximate reasoning involving human intuition, a fuzzy approach is adopted. From this, a multi-factor hierarchical fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model is established to facilitate the evaluation of satisfaction in both single stakeholder group and overall MIC project stakeholders.

Cross-entropy optimization for scaling factors of a fuzzy controller : a see-and-avoid approach for unmanned aerial systems

The Cross-Entropy (CE) is an efficient method for the estimation of rare-event probabilities and combinatorial optimization. This work presents a novel approach of the CE for optimization of a Soft-Computing controller. A Fuzzy controller was designed to command an unmanned aerial system (UAS) for avoiding collision task. The only sensor used to accomplish this task was a forward camera. The CE is used to reach a near-optimal controller by modifying the scaling factors of the controller inputs. The optimization was realized using the ROS-Gazebo simulation system. In order to evaluate the optimization a big amount of tests were carried out with a real quadcopter.

TS-fuzzy controlled DFIG based wind energy conversion system

This paper focuses on the implementation of the TS (Tagaki-Sugino) fuzzy controller for the active power and the DC capacitor voltage control of the Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) based wind generator. DFIG system is represented by a third-order model where electromagnetic transients of the stator are neglected. The effectiveness of the TS-fuzzy controller on the rotor speed oscillations and the DC capacitor voltage variations of the DFIG damping controller on converter ratings of the DFIG system is also investigated. The results of the time domain simulation studies are presented to elucidate the effectiveness of the TS-fuzzy controller compared with conventional PI controller in the DFIG system. The proposed TS-fuzzy controller can improve the fault ride through capability of DFIG compared to the conventional PI controller

The art of interpretation: Tracing logics of evaluation in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000) and Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2010)

Celebration (and the celebritisation) of the Australian-ness of children’s authors who enjoy critical or commercial international success, and especially of those who win international prizes speaks to a desire to partake in both national and international cultural spheres. Prizing is often presumed to both guarantee and emerge from a creator's reputation at home and abroad. Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan has received a wide array of cultural and literary prizes, ranging from Australian book awards, to an Academy Award, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize. This paper considers logics of evaluation and interpretation as they can be traced in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual codes of Shaun Tan’s picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010). It further considers the ways in which the desire for a global audience may necessitate an erasure of the national culture which is traded on in a global market.

A fuzzy TOPSIS based multi criteria performance measurement model for lean supply chain

Increasing global competition, rapid technological changes, advances in manufacturing and information technology and discerning customers are forcing supply chains to adopt improvement practices that enable them to deliver high quality products at a lower cost and in a shorter period of time. A lean initiative is one of the most effective approaches toward achieving this goal. In the lean improvement process, it is critical to measure current and desired performance level in order to clearly evaluate the lean implementation efforts. Many attempts have tried to measure supply chain performance incorporating both quantitative and qualitative measures but failed to provide an effective method of measuring improvements in performances for dynamic lean supply chain situations. Therefore, the necessity of appropriate measurement of lean supply chain performance has become imperative. There are many lean tools available for supply chains; however, effectiveness of a lean tool depends on the type of the product and supply chain. One tool may be highly effective for a supply chain involved in high volume products but may not be effective for low volume products. There is currently no systematic methodology available for selecting appropriate lean strategies based on the type of supply chain and market strategy This thesis develops an effective method to measure the performance of supply chain consisting of both quantitative and qualitative metrics and investigates the effects of product types and lean tool selection on the supply chain performance Supply chain performance matrices and the effects of various lean tools over performance metrics mentioned in the SCOR framework have been investigated. A lean supply chain model based on the SCOR metric framework is then developed where non- lean and lean as well as quantitative and qualitative metrics are incorporated in appropriate metrics. The values of appropriate metrics are converted into triangular fuzzy numbers using similarity rules and heuristic methods. Data have been collected from an apparel manufacturing company for multiple supply chain products and then a fuzzy based method is applied to measure the performance improvements in supply chains. Using the fuzzy TOPSIS method, which chooses an optimum alternative to maximise similarities with positive ideal solutions and to minimise similarities with negative ideal solutions, the performances of lean and non- lean supply chain situations for three different apparel products have been evaluated. To address the research questions related to effective performance evaluation method and the effects of lean tools over different types of supply chains; a conceptual framework and two hypotheses are investigated. Empirical results show that implementation of lean tools have significant effects over performance improvements in terms of time, quality and flexibility. Fuzzy TOPSIS based method developed is able to integrate multiple supply chain matrices onto a single performance measure while lean supply chain model incorporates qualitative and quantitative metrics. It can therefore effectively measure the improvements for supply chain after implementing lean tools. It is demonstrated that product types involved in the supply chain and ability to select right lean tools have significant effect on lean supply chain performance. Future study can conduct multiple case studies in different contexts.

Particle Swarm algorithm with Fuzzy decision making for a multi-objective economic and environmental optimization of design of a thermal system

Multi-Objective optimization for designing of a benchmark cogeneration system known as CGAM cogeneration system has been performed. In optimization approach, the thermoeconomic and Environmental aspects have been considered, simultaneously. The environmental objective function has been defined and expressed in cost terms. One of the most suitable optimization techniques developed using a particular class of search algorithms known as; Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) algorithm has been used here. This approach has been applied to find the set of Pareto optimal solutions with respect to the aforementioned objective functions. An example of fuzzy decision-making with the aid of Bellman-Zadeh approach has been presented and a final optimal solution has been introduced.

Functional encryption for threshold functions (or fuzzy IBE) from lattices

Cryptosystems based on the hardness of lattice problems have recently acquired much importance due to their average-case to worst-case equivalence, their conjectured resistance to quantum cryptanalysis, their ease of implementation and increasing practicality, and, lately, their promising potential as a platform for constructing advanced functionalities. In this work, we construct “Fuzzy” Identity Based Encryption from the hardness of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem. We note that for our parameters, the underlying lattice problems (such as gapSVP or SIVP) are assumed to be hard to approximate within supexponential factors for adversaries running in subexponential time. We give CPA and CCA secure variants of our construction, for small and large universes of attributes. All our constructions are secure against selective-identity attacks in the standard model. Our construction is made possible by observing certain special properties that secret sharing schemes need to satisfy in order to be useful for Fuzzy IBE. We also discuss some obstacles towards realizing lattice-based attribute-based encryption (ABE).

Efficient fuzzy matching and intersection on private datasets

At Eurocrypt’04, Freedman, Nissim and Pinkas introduced a fuzzy private matching problem. The problem is defined as follows. Given two parties, each of them having a set of vectors where each vector has T integer components, the fuzzy private matching is to securely test if each vector of one set matches any vector of another set for at least t components where t < T. In the conclusion of their paper, they asked whether it was possible to design a fuzzy private matching protocol without incurring a communication complexity with the factor (T t ) . We answer their question in the affirmative by presenting a protocol based on homomorphic encryption, combined with the novel notion of a share-hiding error-correcting secret sharing scheme, which we show how to implement with efficient decoding using interleaved Reed-Solomon codes. This scheme may be of independent interest. Our protocol is provably secure against passive adversaries, and has better efficiency than previous protocols for certain parameter values.