Fractional control of legged robots

Fractional calculus (FC) is being used in several distinct areas of science and engineering, being recognized its ability to yield a superior modelling and control in many dynamical systems. This article illustrates the application of FC in the area of robot control. A Fractional Order PDμ controller is proposed for the control of an hexapod robot with 3 dof legs. It is demonstrated the superior performance of the system by using the FC concepts.

Microwave-assisted and solvent-free peroxidative oxidation of 1-phenylethanol to acetophenone with a CuII-TEMPO catalytic system

The water-soluble copper(II) complex [Cu(H2R)(HL)]center dot H2O (1) was prepared by reaction of copper(II) nitrate hydrate with (E)-2-(((1-hydroxynaphthalen-2-yl)methylene)amino) benzenesulfonic acid (H2L) and diethanolamine (H3R). It was characterized by IR and ESI-MS spectroscopies, elemental and X-ray crystal structural analyses. 1 shows a high catalytic activity for the solvent-free microwave (MW) assisted oxidation of 1-phenylethanol with tert-butylhydroperoxide, leading, in the presence of TEMPO, to yields up to 85% (TON = 850) in a remarkably short reaction time (15 min, with the corresponding TOE value of 3.40 x 10(3) h(-1)) under low power (25W) MW irradiation. Crown Copyright (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A shared-disk parallel cluster file system

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática Pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

Adaptive tackling of the swinging problem for a 2 DOF crane – payload system

The control of a crane carrying its payload by an elastic string corresponds to a task in which precise, indirect control of a subsystem dynamically coupled to a directly controllable subsystem is needed. This task is interesting since the coupled degree of freedom has little damping and it is apt to keep swinging accordingly. The traditional approaches apply the input shaping technology to assist the human operator responsible for the manipulation task. In the present paper a novel adaptive approach applying fixed point transformations based iterations having local basin of attraction is proposed to simultaneously tackle the problems originating from the imprecise dynamic model available for the system to be controlled and the swinging problem, too. The most important phenomenological properties of this approach are also discussed. The control considers the 4th time-derivative of the trajectory of the payload. The operation of the proposed control is illustrated via simulation results.

FEW phone file system

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Performance evaluation of hospitals that provide care in the public health system, Brazil

OBJECTIVE To analyze if size, administrative level, legal status, type of unit and educational activity influence the hospital network performance in providing services to the Brazilian Unified Health System.METHODS This cross-sectional study evaluated data from the Hospital Information System and the Cadastro Nacional de Estabelecimentos de Saúde (National Registry of Health Facilities), 2012, in Sao Paulo, Southeastern Brazil. We calculated performance indicators, such as: the ratio of hospital employees per bed; mean amount paid for admission; bed occupancy rate; average length of stay; bed turnover index and hospital mortality rate. Data were expressed as mean and standard deviation. The groups were compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Bonferroni correction.RESULTS The hospital occupancy rate in small hospitals was lower than in medium, big and special-sized hospitals. Higher hospital occupancy rate and bed turnover index were observed in hospitals that include education in their activities. The hospital mortality rate was lower in specialized hospitals compared to general ones, despite their higher proportion of highly complex admissions. We found no differences between hospitals in the direct and indirect administration for most of the indicators analyzed.CONCLUSIONS The study indicated the importance of the scale effect on efficiency, and larger hospitals had a higher performance. Hospitals that include education in their activities had a higher operating performance, albeit with associated importance of using human resources and highly complex structures. Specialized hospitals had a significantly lower rate of mortality than general hospitals, indicating the positive effect of the volume of procedures and technology used on clinical outcomes. The analysis related to the administrative level and legal status did not show any significant performance differences between the categories of public hospitals.

Meta-heuristics self-parameterization in a multi-agent scheduling system using case-based reasoning

This paper proposes a novel agent-based approach to Meta-Heuristics self-configuration. Meta-heuristics are algorithms with parameters which need to be set up as efficient as possible in order to unsure its performance. A learning module for self-parameterization of Meta-heuristics (MH) in a Multi-Agent System (MAS) for resolution of scheduling problems is proposed in this work. The learning module is based on Case-based Reasoning (CBR) and two different integration approaches are proposed. A computational study is made for comparing the two CBR integration perspectives. Finally, some conclusions are reached and future work outlined.

A type system for access control in an object-oriented language

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

National Immunization Program: Computerized System as a tool for new challenges

The scope and coverage of the Brazilian Immunization Program can be compared with those in developed countries because it provides a large number of vaccines and has a considerable coverage. The increasing complexity of the program brings challenges regarding its development, high coverage levels, access equality, and safety. The Immunization Information System, with nominal data, is an innovative tool that can more accurately monitor these indicators and allows the evaluation of the impact of new vaccination strategies. The main difficulties for such a system are in its implementation process, training of professionals, mastering its use, its constant maintenance needs and ensuring the information contained remain confidential. Therefore, encouraging the development of this tool should be part of public health policies and should also be involved in the three spheres of government as well as the public and private vaccination services.

A Web-Based geographical information system prototype on Portuguese traditional food products

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Health self-assessment by hemodialysis patients in the Brazilian Unified Health System

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE To examine whether the level of complexity of the services structure and sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of patients in hemodialysis are associated with the prevalence of poor health self-assessment. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated 1,621 patients with chronic terminal kidney disease on hemodialysis accompanied in 81 dialysis services in the Brazilian Unified Health System in 2007. Sampling was performed by conglomerate in two stages and a structured questionnaire was applied to participants. Multilevel multiple logistic regression was used for data analysis. RESULTS The prevalence of poor health self-assessment was of 54.5%, and in multivariable analysis it was associated with the following variables: increasing age (OR = 1.02; 95%CI 1.01–1.02), separated or divorced marital status (OR = 0.62; 95%CI 0.34–0.88), having 12 years or more of study (OR = 0.51; 95%CI 0.37–0.71), spending more than 60 minutes in commuting between home and the dialysis service (OR = 1.80; 95%CI 1.29–2.51), having three or more self-referred diseases (OR = 2.20; 95%CI 1.33–3.62), and reporting some (OR = 2.17; 95%CI 1.66–2.84) or a lot of (OR = 2.74; 95%CI 2.04–3.68) trouble falling asleep. Individuals in treatment in dialysis services with the highest level of complexity in the structure presented less chance of performing a self-assessment of their health as bad (OR = 0.59; 95%CI 0.42–0.84). CONCLUSIONS We showed poor health self-assessment is associated with age, years of formal education, marital status, home commuting time to the dialysis service, number of self-referred diseases, report of trouble sleeping, and also with the level of complexity of the structure of health services. Acknowledging these factors can contribute to the development of strategies to improve the health of patients in hemodialysis in the Brazilian Unified Health System.

Effect of fractional orders in the velocity control of a servo system

The application of fractional-order PID controllers is now an active field of research. This article investigates the effect of fractional (derivative and integral) orders upon system's performance in the velocity control of a servo system. The servo system consists of a digital servomechanism and an open-architecture software environment for real-time control experiments using MATLAB/Simulink tools. Experimental responses are presented and analyzed, showing the effectiveness of fractional controllers. Comparison with classical PID controllers is also investigated.

On the robustness of the slotine-Li and the FPT/SVD-based adaptive controllers

A comparative study concerning the robustness of a novel, Fixed Point Transformations/Singular Value Decomposition (FPT/SVD)-based adaptive controller and the Slotine-Li (S&L) approach is given by numerical simulations using a three degree of freedom paradigm of typical Classical Mechanical systems, the cart + double pendulum. The effects of the imprecision of the available dynamical model, presence of dynamic friction at the axles of the drives, and the existence of external disturbance forces unknown and not modeled by the controller are considered. While the Slotine-Li approach tries to identify the parameters of the formally precise, available analytical model of the controlled system with the implicit assumption that the generalized forces are precisely known, the novel one makes do with a very rough, affine form and a formally more precise approximate model of that system, and uses temporal observations of its desired vs. realized responses. Furthermore, it does not assume the lack of unknown perturbations caused either by internal friction and/or external disturbances. Its another advantage is that it needs the execution of the SVD as a relatively time-consuming operation on a grid of a rough system-model only one time, before the commencement of the control cycle within which it works only with simple computations. The simulation examples exemplify the superiority of the FPT/SVD-based control that otherwise has the deficiency that it can get out of the region of its convergence. Therefore its design and use needs preliminary simulation investigations. However, the simulations also exemplify that its convergence can be guaranteed for various practical purposes.

Unified cooperative location system

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.

A system verification strategy based on the BST infrastructure

A good verification strategy should bring near the simulation and real functioning environments. In this paper we describe a system-level co-verification strategy that uses a common flow for functional simulation, timing simulation and functional debug. This last step requires using a BST infrastructure, now widely available on commercial devices, specially on FPGAs with medium/large pin-counts.