Sharif Digital Repository

Gimbal transmissions are non-linear direct transmissions and can be used in robotic arms replacing the traditional revolute joints. They offer potential advantages for critical cases such as joint space and task space singularities or where a different mechanical advantage is needed compared to what traditional revolute joints provide. This can be obtained by properly adjusting the different parameters of Gimbal joints used in different joints of the manipulator (such as their offset angle and/or chamfer angle). In this paper the concept of Gimbal mechanism as a joint is investigated. Then, as an example, Gimbal joints are used to replace the basic revolute joints of a 3-UPU parallel... 

In this paper, a sufficient condition for existence of an overshoot in the step response of fractional-order systems is presented. Based on this condition, it can be shown that the existence of an overshoot in the step responses of some classes of fractional-order systems (for example, the class of fractional-order systems having commensurate orders between 1 and 2) is unavoidable. To show the usefulness of the obtained condition, this condition is applied to prove some results on the time response analysis of fractional-order control systems  

In this paper we have presented a hardware implementation of 32-bit Fault-tolerant ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit) which is compared with the current techniques, Residue code, Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) with single voting and TMR with triplicated voter that are widely used in space application to mitigate the upsets, in terms of area penalty. We consider BCH (Bose, Chaudhuri, and Hocquenghem) codec (encoder, decoder) using the prototyping FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). The new implementation of ALU employing BCH code on Spartan-3 FPGA has been provided. The results show that our fault tolerant method has the lowest hardware overhead and it can correct any 5-bit error in any... 

In this paper, we propose a processor allocation mechanism for run-time assignment of a set of communicating tasks of input applications onto the processing nodes of a Chip Multiprocessor (CMP), when the arrival order and execution lifetime of the input applications are not known a priori. This mechanism targets the on-chip communication and aims to reduce the power and latency of the NoC employed as the communication infrastructure. In this work, we benefit from the advantages of non-contiguous processor allocation mechanisms, by allowing the tasks of the input application mapped onto disjoint regions (sub-meshes) and then virtually connecting them by bypassing the router pipeline stages of... 

A central problem in motor control is to understand how the many biomechanical degrees of freedom are coordinated to achieve a goal. A common assumption is that Central Nervous System (CNS) would minimize a performance index to achieve this goal which is called objective function. In this paper, two popular objective functions are utilized to design the optimal trajectory of trunk movements. A 3D computational method incorporated with 18 anatomically oriented muscles is used to simulate human trunk system. Inverse dynamics allows us to compute torque which is generated around Lumbosacral joint. This torque is divided among muscles by static stability-based optimization. Trunk movement from... 

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a novel non-Lipschitz protocol that guarantees consensus in finite-time domain. Its convergence in networks with both unidirectional and bidirectional links is investigated via Lyapunov Theorem approach. It is also proved that final agreement value is equal to average of agents' states for the bidirectional communication case. In addition effects of communication time-delay on stability are assessed and two other continuous Lipschitz protocols are also analyzed  

Object handling is one of the most important applications of cable-suspended robots, which can be obtained by use of a gripper as its end-effector. In this paper, a novel cable-driven multi-finger gripper assembled on a cable-suspended robot has been presented. Using lock/unlock mechanisms, the under-actuated finger mechanism has been designed to have a human like motion. A cable-suspended robot structure with 3 position degrees of freedom is also proposed by employing active/passive cables in such a way that makes it capable of resisting external moments, while it may be simplified to a spatial point-mass cable robot during positioning operation. Furthermore, the robot workspace has been... 

An accurate approximate closed-form solution is presented for bending of thin skew plates with clamped edges subjected to uniform loading using the extended Kantorovich method (EKM). Successive application of EKM together with the idea of weighted residual technique (Galerkin method) converts the governing forth-order partial differential equation (PDE) to two separate ordinary differential equations (ODE) in terms of oblique coordinates system. The obtained ODE systems are then solved iteratively with very fast convergence. In every iteration step, exact closed-form solutions are obtained for two ODE systems. It is shown that some parameters such as angle of skew plate have an important... 

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) issue write invalidations (WIs) to assure program correctness. In conventional snoop-based protocols, writers broadcast invalidations to all nodes as soon as possible. In this work we show that this approach, while protecting correctness, is inefficient due to two reasons. First, many of the invalidated blocks are not accessed after invalidation making the invalidation unnecessary. Second, among the invalidated blocks many are not accessed anytime soon, making immediate invalidation unnecessary. While invalidating the first group could be avoided altogether, the second group's invalidation could be delayed without any performance or correctness cost. Accordingly,... 

Many problems in applied machine learning deal with graphs (also called networks), including social networks, security, web data mining, protein function prediction, and genome informatics. The kernel paradigm beautifully decouples the learning algorithm from the underlying geometric space, which renders graph kernels important for the aforementioned applications. In this article, we give a new graph kernel, which we call graph traversal edit distance (GTED). We introduce the GTED problem and give the first polynomial time algorithm for it. Informally, the GTED is the minimum edit distance between two strings formed by the edge labels of respective Eulerian traversals of the two graphs.... 

Graph Traversal Edit Distance (GTED) is a measure of distance (or dissimilarity) between two graphs introduced. This measure is based on the minimum edit distance between two strings formed by the edge labels of respective Eulerian traversals of the two graphs. GTED was motivated by and provides the first mathematical formalism for sequence coassembly and de novo variation detection in bioinformatics. Many problems in applied machine learning deal with graphs (also called networks), including social networks, security, web data mining, protein function prediction, and genome informatics. The kernel paradigm beautifully decouples the learning algorithm from the underlying geometric space,... 

The impulsive synchronization has been employed to synchronize two different hyperchaotic (chaotic) systems. Conditions on impulse distances are given in order to obtain stable synchronization in the nominal case and robust stability in the case that we experience uncertainties in the systems dynamic and/or measurement noise. Under the given conditions, it is guaranteed that the error dynamics is asymptotically stable for the nominal case and convergent to a predetermined level for uncertain and/or noisy circumstances. Computer simulations are provided to assess results of the given theorems in the paper. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved  

NoC is an efficient on-chip communication architecture for SoC architectures. It enables integration of a large number of computational and storage blocks on a single chip. NoCs have tackled the SoCs disadvantages and are scalable. In this paper, we compare two popular NoC topologies, i.e., mesh and torus, in terms of different figures of merit e.g., latency, power consumption, and power/throughput ratio under different routing algorithms and two common traffic models, uniform and hotspot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in comparing mesh and torus topologies under different routing algorithms and traffic models with respect to their performance and power consumption.... 

In this paper, we integrate an assertion-based verification methodology with our object-oriented system-level synthesis methodology to address the problem of HW/SW co-verification. In this direction a system-level assertion language is defined. The system-level assertions can be used to monitor the current state of system or flow of transactions. These assertions are automatically converted to "monitor hardware" or "monitor software" during the system-level synthesis process depending on their type and also synthesis style of their corresponding functions. The synthesized assertions are functionally equivalent to their original system-level assertions, and hence, can be reused to verify the... 

Cell formation and cellular layout design are the two main steps in designing a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). In this paper, we will present an integrated methodology based on a new concept of similarity coefficients and the use of simulated annealing (SA) as an optimization tool. In comparison with the previous works, the proposed methodology takes into account relevant production data, such as alternative process routings and the production volumes of parts. The SA-based optimization tool is parallel in nature and, hence, can reduce the computation time significantly, so it is capable of handling large-scale problems. Finally, the SA-based procedure is compared with a genetic... 

Analytical and numerical system identification (system ID) techniques of smart structures with piezoelements are introduced and compared in this paper. Simplicity and low cost of numerical system ID methods developed here make them beneficial in control design and implementation as well as in optimization of location and size of actuators and sensors of the smart structure. The accuracy of these techniques is then verified using analytical system ID, which derives the dynamic model of the structure from differential equations. In the first numerical system ID technique, Finite Element Method (FEM) is employed to model the dynamic system and to obtain the Frequency Response Function (FRF).... 

The ODYSSEY design methodology is an object-oriented design methodology which models a system in terms of its constituting objects and their corresponding method calls. Some of these method calls are implemented in hardware functional units, while others are simply executed by a general-purpose processor. There is a communication overhead because functional units must communicate with each other and with the processor core. In this paper we utilize the custom instructions capability of Nios II processor to enhance the performance of our ASIP. Since these instructions are in the processor itself, there will be no communication overhead for using them. We analyze the performance of the... 

Network Survivability is defined as the ability of a network to support the committed Quality of Services (QoS) continuously in the presence of different failure scenarios. Both availability and performance degradation of a system in presence of failure are integral components of survivability evaluation. Therefore, a composite model is presented for network survivability that includes system availability analysis to find out the cost due to system downtime, and system failure impact analysis to find out the transient performance degradation when failure occurs. A new analytical technique is presented to evaluate the excess loss due to failure (ELF) as the transient performance degradation... 

In this paper, a fuzzy based controller is developed in order to control the braking action of the rear axle of a series hybrid city bus. The controller's target is to recapture the kinetic energy of the bus as much as possible during braking, while still maintaining its stability. The bus under study Is one of the Iran-Khodro Company's productions called O457 which is currently undergoing a procedure of hybridization. The hybrid type used is a series hybrid configuration in which an internal combustion engine and a battery pack supply Its electric traction motors in order to propel the bus. The implemented fuzzy controller takes the bus speed, batteries SOC level and the brake-pedal... 

An LQ-based tracker is designed in this paper, using output feedback. For performing the design, at first, a structured controller is introduced for a set of equations. The controller is obtained by mini-mizing a cost function which has some penalties on both the system's inputs and states. After that, an estimator is introduced and combined with the controller to close the loop. Running the nonlinear simulation at the end verifies the superiority of Extended Kalman Estimator (EKF)to the Linear Kalman Estimator (LKF). © 2005 IEEE