Sharif Digital Repository

Lack of force feedback during minimally invasive procedures is one of the downsides of such interventions and might result to excessive damage to surrounding tissues. The goal of the present research is to introduce a vision-based approach to estimate contact forces on soft tissues. In this approach, a model was developed in which, image of deformation of a sample soft tissue, under the jaws of laparoscopic gripper, is the input and the output is the gripper force. In this work, a FEM of soft tissue in contact with jaws of a laparoscopic tool is developed. . In the model, the effects of friction between the tool and tissue is considered which was not included in the previous studies. After... 

There has been a rising trend towards robotic tele-surgery operations in recent years. A major concern, however, is the lack of direct contact between the surgeon and patient’s body. Several researchers have proposed various designs of tactile sensors for surgical instruments to improve the dexterity of surgeons. Previously designed sensors, however, are mostly suitable for instruments with small contact areas. In this thesis, a novel tactile sensor is introduced in integration with the teeth of a surgical grasper for large organs. It includes strain gauges embedded underneath a toothed plate, which also acts as grasping teeth of the jaws of the instrument. The thickness of the plate and the... 

Recently, the tradeoff between low energy consumption and high fault-tolerance has attracted a lot of attention as a key issue in the design of real-time embedded systems. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is known as one of the most effective low energy techniques for real-time systems. Control-theoretic DVS techniques, which have been exploited recently for DVS-enabled systems, are able to adapt well to dynamic workload. In this thesis, we have combined the above two important issues i.e., the control-theoretic DVS and fault-tolerance, and investigated reducing the energy consumption of fault-tolerant hard real-time systems using feedback control theory. Our proposed feedback-based DVS method... 

In this study, the two rigid body modelling of a Coanda air vehicle (one rigid includes rotor and propeller and the second rigid includes the other parts of it) has been developed using Newton’s and Euler’s laws, and its motion was simulated in climb and forward flight conditions. Air vehicle propulsion force and moment have been modelled by employing the blade element momentum theory. In order to model the forces acting on the air vehicle, the drag force has been estimated by the results of analytical and computational fluid dynamics methods for the case of climb flight and by using experimental data of a cylindrical body for the forward flight. For modelling the control surfaces of this... 

The problem of spacecraft rendezvous on periodic orbits around the L_1Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon system is investigated. For this purpose, the nonlinear relative equations of motion are drived within the contex of the Circular Restricted Three Body (CRTB) problem. Subsequently, several types of rendezvous missionas well as control teqniques are considered for analysis and simulation. Application of different control approaches allows for partial verification as well as comparison of results achieved with various teqniques. The considered control approaches include optimal closed loop Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), nonlinear Feedback Linearazation (FL) as well as the nonlinear... 

In this research, the design of control system has been studied for a special flying vehicle at whole of flight time. This flying vehicle is vertically launched and few time after launch its attitude changes to the desired attitude by a reaction jet control system, then the acceleration commands are tracked when the aerodynamic is activated. Design process includes attitude control system design in launch phase and aerodynamic control system design. Because of the existence of nonlinear and multi-variable dynamics in the flying vehicle and the presence of uncertainty and disturbance, combination of nonlinear, robust and adaptive methods are used in controller design process. Design of... 

The present study investigates the relationships between feedback-seeking dimensions (frequency, method, timing, and content) and two types of individual performance (goal achievement and behavior-related performance). In addition, the relationships between feedback-seeking motives and feedback-seeking dimensions are examined. The purpose is to identify new explanations for the inconclusive results of the direct relationship between feedback-seeking and performance in the literature. Moreover, this study investigates work motivations based on self-determination theory as the antecedents of feedback-seeking motives. This study contains one qualitative phase and two quantitative ones.... 

Feedback-seeking behavior is the effort of employees to get feedback from the environment and around people about their performance. One of the research questions in this field is about the factors that increase this behavior in the staff. Transformational leadership as a leadership style, stimulates, and motivates followers to achieving desirable operational results. In addition, an important consequence of this style could be increasing the followers' capabilities. Transformational leaders are trying to empower their followers to build and empower them, which can provide a strong incentive for employees to move and grow, which may encourage them to have a better performance. One of... 

One of the ultimate goals in robotics is to design autonomous robots. Among other things, this means a robot has to be able to plan its own motion. To be able to plan a motion, a robot must have some knowledge about the environment in which it is moving. Some of this information can be provided by a floor plan. For other information the robot will have to rely on its sensors. In this thesis, we consider that the environment is unknown for the robot. So, the robot uses weak sensor to planning its motion. The sensor can distinguish between colors. The robot can follow the colors. Therefore, we need to specify the umber of colors in which the robot can navigate by them. We propose an efficient... 

Image retrieval, simply put, is the process of finding images in a predefined set , that are similar to an image specified by the user. In particular, the user inputs an image as query, and expects to see images similar to the query. Our purpose is to retrieve the images, by means of visual features, without any use of latent information such as tags and annotations.Afer the first round of retrieval, the answers can become more accurate, by means of user feedbacks. In this state, using active learning methods may be usefull. By using active data selection, we hope to achieve the answer faster. Learning based on manifold assumption, is another means which may be used in image retrieval.... 

Hard real-time embedded systems often operate in harsh environmental conditions that necessitate fault tolerant computing techniques. These embedded systems are also energy-constrained, since energy consumption is one of the key objectives. Examples include satellites, surveillance systems, autonomous seaborne and airborne systems. Generally, fault tolerance is obtained by hardware or time redundancy in these systems. Checkpointing with rollback recovery which employs time redundancy is one of the common techniques for tolerating transient faults in real-time embedded systems. Using checkpointing in energy constrained hard real-time systems should be carefully employed. In this thesis, we... 

The Yazd province is located in the dry and desert region of Iran and is constantly exposed to strong winds and dust storms due to its climatic conditions and geographical location. The first objective of this thesis is to assess the dust storm events that have occurred in Yazd province in order to identify their source and pathways of transport during the long-term period of 2012-2019. A novel multi-criteria framework for identifying the sources of dust storms and dust events in Yazd province has been presented using the HYSPLIT model. In this framework, the numerical results, along with geographical features, observational and satellite data, were used as criteria in the multi-criteria... 

This research has dedicated to study the control of chaos when the system dynamics is unknown and there are some limitations on measuring states. There are many chaotic systems with these features occurring in many biological, economical and mechanical systems. The usual chaos control methods do not have the ability to present a systematic control method for these kinds of systems. To fulfill these strict conditions we have employed Takens embedding theory which guarantees the preservation of topological characteristics of the chaotic attractor under an embedding named "Takens transformation". Takens transformation just needs time series of one of the measurable states. This transformation... 

The mathematical analysis of the kidney has always been considered due to its complex performance. It’s about two decades that mathematicians work on the mathematical modeling of this tissue. Since Glomerular filtration of blood in the kidney has been regarded by physiologists for many years, they can access only to the qualitative data. Mathematicians can solve this problem by numerical modeling. In this research, an engineering model is presented for the analysis of this capillary network by investigating in the different scientific fields such as, physiology, medicine, computer science and mathematics. There are two major renal autoregulatory mechanisms, the myogenic response and the... 

Chemotherapy is a proven and effective systematic approach to treat various types of cancers. Despite its advantages, chemotherapy would kill healthy as well as cancer cells. To overcome this problem, different controlling strategies are implemented. This study aims to provide a medicine drug delivery schedule for chemotherapy (by designing a proper controlling system) based on the verifiable mathematical models. First, the dynamic model is analysed and stability points are reviewed. The selected model has five state variables and two inputs. In this study, the focus is on dynamic model analysis and obtaining an effective and appropriate treatment pattern by designing a proper controller. To... 

One of the most surprising lessons of dynamical systems theory is that the phase spaces of simple nonlinear systems may contain strange attractors. For certain simple systems, such as pendulum, direct observations of the phase space and finding strange attractors are possible. But physical systems in which all the relevant dynamical variables can be simultaneously monitored are relatively scarce. Takens’ theory shows how a time-series of measurements of a single observable state can be often used to reconstruct qualitative features of the phase space of the system. In this research, using the time-series of one measurable state, an algorithm is proposed to control chaos. The approach... 

One of the main reasons of being unable in doing routine jobs is the disability to attain and keep balance. This ability can be restored using rehabilitation techniques. A physiotherapist can be very helpful. This approach, however, apart from being very time consuming and expensive, needs quite a few physiotherapists. The physiotherapist will be prone to physical damages as well. This leads to improving therapy methods which do not require a physiotherapist. Using the rehabilitation balance devices can help solve the problem to some extents. If good device with reliable value system be developed, this device can be used without physiotherapist.
This project has been carried out to... 

The idea of using master_salve robot in Surgical, entered the medical science in a new phase.The surgeon uses the master to perform arbitary actions and slave follow the movements of the master robot in the envirement.To increase the accuracy, it is necessary to transfer information between the robots in both directions, from master to slave and vice versa, that means bilateral teleoperation. But time delay is a serious problem for bilateral teleoperation systems. Even a small time delay will generally degrade the system’s performance and cause instability.Wave variable method based on passivity and scattering theory is an important approach that guarantees stability in the presence of any... 

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world accounting for 7.6 million deaths (around 13% of all deaths) in 2008. Deaths from cancer worldwide are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 13.1 million deaths in 2030 according to WHO. Cancer is a disease caused by normal cells changing so that they grow in an uncontrolled way. There are over 200 different types of cancer because there are over 200 different types of body cells. Various types of treatments are available among them surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are the three major ones. Mathematical models and control theories can be employed to improve the quality of treatment and obtain systematic strategies of... 

Lack of force feedback during minimally invasive procedures is one of the downsides of such interventions and might result to excessive damage to surrounding tissues. The goal of the present research is to introduce a vision-based approach to estimate contact forces on soft tissues. In this approach, a model was developed in which, image of deformation of a sample soft tissue, under the jaws of laparoscopic gripper, is the input and the output is the gripper force.
In this method, using finite element simulation, a database from different deformations of a rectangular soft tissue was generated. Accordingly, from the geometric position of nodes of the upper surface of the...