Research on the drilling winch control system for clean sampling of Antarctic Subglacial Lakes

Antarctica, with a large number of ice sheets, is among the last unexplored places on Earth. The subglacial lakes beneath these ice sheets have been isolated from the outside world for up to 35 million years, containing a diverse group of marine organisms and other materials. Its unique hydrological environment provides insights regarding microbial evolution and past climates on Earth, which have become central to interpreting the process of landscape evolution and assessments of possible future climate change. Clean sampling of subglacial lake water without introducing surface biological or other type of contamination has long been a goal of the international scientific community. The overlying ice thickness can reach thousands of meters and in conventional deep ice drilling, drilling fluids are employed while the boreholes exposed to the atmosphere. The only method for penetration is thermal drilling with the rate proportional to the vertical diameter of the drilling rig, which requires the drill body to be as thin as possible. The melted ice/water in the upper borehole will refreeze immediately once penetrating into the ice layers. Cables, thereby, need to be configured inside the drilling rig since separate cables from the external surface are not applicable in such cases. The drill rig comprises the motor-driven winch, outer surface heating system, control system as well as sampling system, totaling 600 kg in weight. Gear reducers are required during the cable lowering/lifting operations with a maximum outer diameter of the winch of 140 mm and a high-precision automatic synchronization between the reducers and cable lowering/lifting system is required. An automatic tension sensor along with a winch control system is designed to realize thee automatic synchronization between the gear reducers and the cable lowering/lifting system through servo control.

Run-time interpretation of information system application models in mobile cloud environments

Application models are commonly used in the development of information systems. Recent trends have introduced techniques by which models can be directly transformed into execution code and thus become a single source for application design. Inherently, it has been challenging for software developers to become proficient in designing entire systems due to the complex chain of model transformations and the further refinements required to the code generated from the models. We propose an architectural framework for building the distributed information system applications in which the application models are directly interpreted during execution. This approach shortens the evaluation cycles and provides faster feedback to developers. Our framework is based on a holistic application model represented as a graph structure complemented with a procedural action scripting language that can express more complex software behavior. We present the implementation details of this framework architecture in a mobile cloud environment and evaluate its benefits in eleven projects for different customers in the retail, supply-chain management and merchandising domain involving 300 active application users. Our approach allowed engaging end-users in the software development process in the phase of specifying executable application models. It succeeded in shortening the requirements engineering process and automating the configuration and deployment process. Moreover, it benefited from the automatic synchronization of application updates for all active versions at the customer sites.

An Effective and Efficient Genetic-Fuzzy Algorithm for Supporting Advanced Human-Machine Interfaces in Big Data Settings

In this paper we describe a novel algorithm, inspired by the mirror neuron discovery, to support automatic learning oriented to advanced man-machine interfaces. The algorithm introduces several points of innovation, based on complex metrics of similarity that involve different characteristics of the entire learning process. In more detail, the proposed approach deals with an humanoid robot algorithm suited for automatic vocalization acquisition from a human tutor. The learned vocalization can be used to multi-modal reproduction of speech, as the articulatory and acoustic parameters that compose the vocalization database can be used to synthesize unrestricted speech utterances and reproduce the articulatory and facial movements of the humanoid talking face automatically synchronized. The algorithm uses fuzzy articulatory rules, which describe transitions between phonemes derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), to allow simpler adaptation to different languages, and genetic optimization of the membership degrees. Large experimental evaluation and analysis of the proposed algorithm on synthetic and real data sets confirms the benefits of our proposal. Indeed, experimental results show that the vocalization acquired respects the basic phonetic rules of Italian languages and that subjective results show the effectiveness of multi-modal speech production with automatic synchronization between facial movements and speech emissions. The algorithm has been applied to a virtual speaking face but it may also be used in mechanical vocalization systems as well.

PULSE-PHASE CONTROL SYSTEM WITH AUTOMATIC SYNCHRONIZATION

The simulation of a pulse-phase control system with automatic synchronization is presented. The simulation results are given.

SYSTEM OF AUTOMATIC SYNCHRONIZATION OF TEMPORAL POSITION OF EMITTED SIGNALS OF A SUBNANOSECOND PULSED PHASED ANTENNA ARRAY

The structure of a pulsed phased antenna array (PPAA) of the sub nanosecond range with an automatic synchronization system (ASS) of the temporal position of the emitted ultra‑wideband (UWB) pulses is presented. Considered aspects of the implementation of the components of the ASS. Particular attention is paid to the implementation of the temporary discriminator. The possibility of implementing the ASS sub nanosecond time discriminator as a binary time comparator based on a high‑speed D‑trigger CMOS series has been proved. It is shown that in the presence of jitter of the output pulse of the generator, the nonlinear model of the system of automatic stabilization of the parameter with the characteristics of a relay type discriminator is reduced to a linear model, which makes it possible to simply determine the main parameters and characteristics of the ASS. The results of the above analysis were confirmed by laboratory and bench tests of the ASS elements and PPAA mock‑up samples.