Search

Previously, robots were mainly used by big companies in high volume manufacturing (i.e.: car industry). Industrial robots were perfect to execute procedures simplified to tiny (angular) movements. Today robots have appeared in small and medium enterprises, and they will appear rapidly in non-engineering fields as well, like offices, hospitals, and even in our homes. Robotics grains ground in newer and newer fields and it is too wide to overview it in one paper. This paper tries to summarize the nowadays robotics trends from the point of view of industrial electronics and industrial informatics.

Distribution Grid is evolving into the Smart Grid and users are playing a key role more and more. An efficient network is the aim and Energy Management Systems are being utilized in residential areas in order to contribute to reach this final mentioned goal. The Local Energy Management Unit is presented in this paper, which allows an optimized constant power demand to the Grid, demanding sinusoidal currents to the Grid which are in phase with the Grid voltage. Communications by using TCP and X10 protocols are used to control the whole system and a prototype, which is presented in this paper together with the obtained experimental results, is built to demonstrate the presented efficient energy management conclusions.

The major tasks of Battery Management Systems (BMS) are to guaranty safe operation conditions and to maintain every single cell of the hole battery pack. These tasks require measurements and balancing processes for each cell. Modern BMS take advantage of the wealth of information to estimate hardly measurable conditions like State of charge (SoC) or State of Health (SoH). This paper describes a method to estimate the State of Charge for every single cell in a battery pack using an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) running on an electronic control unit of the BMS. The verification of the developed algorithms on the control unit takes a long time on a real battery system. For that purpose a real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) test bench is developed. In this test bench a LiFePO4 cell model was implemented by Matlab/Simulink®. So the developed and embedded algorithm can be verified by means of various test cases. In this paper the results are presented on signal level. Future work will include a HiL test bench on power level together with an cell emulator. Beside this the test bench offers the opportunity to develop models and sophisticated algorithms for further beneficial state variables like the SoH or the inner temperature of each single cell of the battery pack.

Pickup systems for optical disks operate in the horizontal and vertical directions for tracking and focusing, respectively. Conventional optical disk control systems are designed for each operated direction. On the other hand, in this paper, we consider the operation trajectory to implement a method for concurrent control of focusing and tracking of optical disks. This paper proposes a two-dimensional feedforward control system. The proposed control system consists of a feedforward controller and a two-dimensional feedforward compensator. The error vector is a combination of the focusing error and the tracking error of the compensator. The feedforward controller based on a zero phase error tracking control (ZPETC) regulates the error vector. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed control system.

This paper presents the analysis and study of high dc/dc boost converters; boost converters have become important in applications for energy generation and even more if they have high gain. High efficiency, few components, low voltage and current stress on switches are features desired in these kinds of converters, but also its complexity to be controlled. In this paper three boost converters are analyzed: the traditional one, the tapped boost converter and specially a hybrid one: the analysis is made from the control point of view. The steady-state analysis and the small signal model of the topologies are shown. But also experimental results of one converter are presented to illustrate the behavior of the system for an output power of 50W.

JADE is a multiagent-based framework widely used for prototyping agent-oriented mechatronic architectures. JADE's messaging performance is normally rated unsuitable for real time operation in a mechatronic context and there are a few papers in the literature backing up this claim. The author's share this view however the main purpose of this paper is to highlight that distinct message exchange coding patters influence the round trip time (RTT) of the messages quite substantially. The paper presents a comparative performance analysis, based on the RTT, of these coding patterns. The majority of the published tests is focused in the evaluation of the RTT when pairs of communicating agents are added to the platform. The analysis presented in this work is focused on the efficiency of each method as the responder agent receives messages continuously.

This paper presents multiple open-switch faults detection and faults tolerant methods for the 3-level 3-phase neutral point clamped (NPC) active rectifier. The 3-level 3-phase NPC active rectifier is comprised of many switching elements, which is increased the probability of open-switch faults compared to conventional 3-phase AC/DC PWM converter. These open-switch faults generate the imbalance of the input AC currents and output DC-link voltage pulsation. As a result, system performance and efficiency are reduced. Therefore, accurate and quick fault detection is required. Further fault tolerant is needed. In this paper suggests the multiple open-switch faults detection method and fault tolerant without additional component. The proposed faults detection method is getting by combination of grid angle and output DC-link voltage ripple component. The fault tolerant is implemented by changing voltage reference. The usefulness of the proposed methods is verified through the simulation results.

In this paper, the case of symmetrical grid fault when using the multi-MW wind turbine of partial-scale and full-scale two-level power converter are designed and investigated. Firstly, the different operation behaviors of the relevant power converters under the voltage dip will be described and analyzed. Simulations of different configurations regarding the loss distribution and the junction temperature of the power device are presented in respect to the various voltage dips. It is concluded that for both systems the power loss will change dramatically during the Low-Voltage Ride Through (LVRT) condition as well as the junction temperature. For the full-scale wind turbine system, the most thermal stressed power device in the grid-side converter will appear at the grid voltage below 0.5 pu, and for the partial-scale wind turbine system, the most thermal stressed power device in the rotor-side converter will appear around 0.6 pu grid voltage. In this paper, the case of symmetrical grid fault when using the multi-MW wind turbine of partial-scale and full-scale two-level power converter are designed and investigated. Firstly, the different operation behaviors of the relevant power converters under the voltage dip will be described and analyzed. Simulations of different configurations regarding the loss distribution and the junction temperature of the power device are presented in respect to the various voltage dips. It is concluded that for both systems the power loss will change dramatically during the Low-Voltage Ride Through (LVRT) condition as well as the junction temperature. For the full-scale wind turbine system, the most thermal stressed power device in the grid-side converter will appear at the grid voltage below 0.5 pu, and for the partial-scale wind turbine system, the most thermal stressed power device in the rotor-side converter will appear around 0.6 pu grid voltage.

This paper presents a new thermal protection approach for permanent magnet synchronous motor. Usually the thermal protection model is built based on two parameters which are thermal resistance and thermal capacitance of motor. But the stator core loss is increased significantly when the motor frequency and the motor winding temperature are increased. If the motor runs at high speed, the eddy current loss, the hysteresis loss and the harmonic current loss dominate the stator core loss. If only the thermal resistance and thermal capacitance are used for the thermal protection without considering the motor frequency, the protection model cannot response the temperature rising when the motor runs at high speed, so the motor could not be protected effectively. In this paper, the motor frequency is included in the new thermal protection approach, and the whole working speed range will be protected, and the motor lifetime will be increased.

This paper proposes the new frequency model of haptic information focused on the vibration component in friction force. Recently, haptic information is attracting attention from many areas as the tertiary media following the audio and visual information. However, due to the characters of the bidirectionality and self-reference, treatment is difficult as compared to the other sensory information. Unified representation method still not been established. Therefore, this paper focuses on the vibration components of friction force in rubbing motion against environmental surface in particular. The friction force in rubbing motion is measured for broadband by using the 2-DOF system constructed by two linear motors. For the quantitative evaluation of the frequency domain, cepstral analysis which is the method for voice-print analysis is applied. The effectiveness of the proposed model is shown by performing experiments and analysis with three different environmental surfaces. Moreover, this paper presents the identification for each parameters of the model from the acquired data, and construct a accurate model of the friction force for each environment.