Sharif Digital Repository

This paper deals with the robust finite time tracking of desired trajectories for a wide group of robotic manipulators in spite of unknown disturbances, uncertainties, and saturations of actuators while only manipulator's positions are available and its velocities are not measurable physically. A new form of chattering-free second order fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode control scheme is introduced to design input torques for fulfilling the determined tracking objective in the adjustable total finite settling time. The proposed control algorithm is incorporated with two nonlinear observers to estimate disturbances and velocities of joints within finite settling times. The global finite... 

The present study aims to present a guidance algorithm based on the relative motion prediction for orbital rendezvous, in which a coast phase is allowed between two powered phases. In both powered phases, the solution of the Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire equations is used to find the required state variables at each time instant. To track the required trajectory and compensate for any orbital perturbations and uncertainties, a non-singular terminal sliding mode method is utilized as the steering law. Then, the finite time convergence of the state variables is mathematically proved. In addition, the starting time of the second powered phase is adapted to perturbations and uncertainties by another... 

The design of a novel Continuous Fractional-Order Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode controller is the focus of this study. Time Delay Estimation technique is incorporated into the controller. The proposed method is responsible for controlling the human knee joint neuromusculoskeletal model via Functional Electrical Stimulation. A second-order nonlinear model with time-varying coefficients is used for characterizing the FES-stimulated neuromusculoskeletal model. The presence of time-varying coefficients often complicates precise control of knee joint through FES and impairs the performance of conventional methods. To this end, the TDECFONTSM has been proposed consisting of three components, a... 

Bus terminal assignment with the objective of maximizing public transportation service is known as bus terminal location problem (BTLP). We formulate the BTLP, a problem of concern in transportation industry, as a p-uncapacitated facility location problem (p-UFLP) with distance constraint. The p-UFLP being NP-hard (Krarup and Pruzan, 1990), we propose evolutionary algorithms for its solution. According to the No Free Lunch theorem and the good efficiency of the distinctive preserve recombination (DPX) operator, we design a new recombination operator for solving a BTLP by new evolutionary and memetic algorithms namely, genetic local search algorithms (GLS). We also define the potential... 

In this paper we consider the content distribution to a set of mobile users interested in the same content. We use the concept of mobile clouds, which exploits cooperation between mobile terminals over the low-power short-range links. We propose, formulate and investigate the energy efficiency and delay of four realistic cooperative content delivery strategies. The derived results, through analysis of mathematical models and simulations, demonstrate around 65% to 95% energy saving gain in mobile cloud strategies compared to conventional multicasting. We also show that using mobile clouds, content distribution delay can be reduced for up to 85%  

A heterogeneous polymeric catalyst was synthesized by immobilization of copper ions in a graphene oxide/poly(vinyl imidazole) nanocomposite. This catalyst has proven to be highly active in a practical protocol for click synthesis of 1,2,3-triazole via one-pot three-component cycloaddition of halides, terminal alkynes and sodium azide. The reaction was carried out in water medium and good to excellent yields of products were obtained using only 1.0 mol% of catalyst. The catalyst can be readily recovered and reused eight times under the described reaction conditions without significant loss of activity. The reaction also proceeded well with only 0.002 mol% of catalyst, which shows the high... 

The facility placement in supply chain management entails suppliers and consumers along with the terminals in between for distributing commodities. This study seeks to find the best terminal placement by taking into consideration the costs for both transportation and terminal construction. We call this a supplier-terminal-consumer (STC) problem and show that the STC is an NP-hard quadratic assignment problem. The NP-hard problems in real-size are proven to be intractable; hence, we develop a two-fold heuristic method for solving the STC problems. First, we identify the commodity flow by using a logit-based mathematical programming (Logit-MP) methodology based on the demand for the commodity... 

In this paper we consider a single-cell downlink scenario where a multiple-antenna base station delivers contents to multiple cache-enabled user terminals. Based on the multicasting opportunities provided by the so-called Coded Caching technique, we investigate three delivery approaches. Our baseline scheme employs the coded caching technique on top of max-min fair multicasting. The second one consists of a joint design of Zero-Forcing (ZF) and coded caching, where the coded chunks are formed in the signal domain (complex field). The third scheme is similar to the second one with the difference that the coded chunks are formed in the data domain (finite field). We derive closed-form rate... 

The extended gate concept aims to reduce the pressure on international ports by postponing administrative processes from these border gates to inland terminals. At present, this approach is used mainly in the container transport industry in European and Asian ports. In this paper we study an extended gate concept, where inland customs services are made available from all entry points of a country. Our aim is to predict the portion of the current flow through border gates that is diverted to these inland customs zones. We propose a time-series gravity models to predict these changes and estimate the parameters of this model using publicly available data for different cargo groups. The focus... 

In recent decades, multistate two-terminal reliability problem has attracted several researchers, and accordingly many exact and approximation approaches have been proposed in the literature in terms of minimal cuts (MCs) or minimal paths (MPs) to address this problem. Here, an MP-based approximation approach is developed based on exact algorithms. With all the MPs at hand, the approach rearranges the MPs ascendingly with respect to their lengths and then sets the flow on some MPs to be zero which turns to reduce the computing cost in solving the problem. We provide the complexity results, and by employing some benchmarks and one thousand randomly generated networks illustrate that not only... 

A single cell downlink scenario is considered, where a multiple-antenna base station delivers contents to cache-enabled user terminals. Depending on the available degrees of freedom, several multicast messages are transmitted in parallel to distinct subsets of users. In the multicast beamformer design, we restrict ourselves to linear receiver implementation, which does not require successive interference cancellation unlike in the more optimal baseline scheme. With a small loss in performance, the complexity of both the receiver and transmitter implementation can be significantly reduced. © 2018 IEEE  

Transient internal ballistics of a solid propellant rocket motor during rapid depressurization due to opening of an auxiliary nozzle for active thrust termination has been considered in this work. Prediction of thrust termination and reversing dynamics is required for successful stage separation in multi-stage rockets. Quasi one-dimensional unsteady Euler equation with a transient propellant burning model that accounts for the effects of time rate of change of the chamber pressure on the burning rate have been used to simulate the internal ballistics of a rocket motor. The compressible convective flow solver used in this study is based on Roe's scheme. The effects of rapid chamber pressure... 

This paper investigates a reliability-centered approach for the placement procedure of remote terminal units (RTUs) in power distribution systems. Entire attempt is contributed to incorporate the practical aspects interrelated with the problem, e.g. the accessibility to the candidate substations, the load point criticality, as well as the load probabilistic behavior and consequently the inevitable variation in the electricity price. The placement process is done through an optimization problem wherein the common reliability indices, as the decisive factors in the placement process, are going to be minimized. The approach is successfully applied to a real power distribution feeder of Iran's... 

Multimedia multicast with two servers based on the mul- titerminal source coding is studied in some previous researches. Due to the possibility of providing an approach for practical code design for more than two correlated sources in IMTSC/CEO setup, in this paper, the framework of Slepian-Wolf coded quantization is extended and a practical code design is presented for IMTSC/CEO with the number of encoders greater than two. Then the multicast system based on the IMTSC/CEO is applied to the cases with three, four and five servers. Since the underlying code design approach for the IMTSC/CEO problem has the capability of applying to an arbitrary number of active encoders, the proposed MMBMSC... 

This paper investigates the finite-Time landing of a spacecraft on a celestial target subjected to disturbances and air drag forces. Based on nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control, a novel guidance law is designed to accomplish the landing goal within a specified finite time while the upper bound of disturbances is assumed to be known. Finally, a numerical example of the spacecraft landing problem is simulated by applying the proposed scheme. The obtained results illustrate that the designed guidance law can achieve the landing goal in the specified finite time  

Zinc binding to β-amyloid structure could promote amyloid-β aggregation, as well as reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, as suggested in many experimental and theoretical studies. Therefore, the introduction of multifunctional drugs capable of chelating zinc metal ion and inhibiting Aβ aggregation is a promising strategy in the development of AD treatment. The present study has evaluated the efficacy of a new bifunctional peptide drug using molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. This drug comprises two different domains, an inhibitor domain, obtained from the C-terminal hydrophobic region of Aβ, and a Zn2+ chelating domain, derived from rapeseed meal, merge with a...