Cooperation of Two Robot Tractors to Improve Work Efficiency

Many efforts have been made by engineers in advanced countries to reduce labor and work time in agriculture due to the decreasing agricultural labor forces. Global demand for higher productivity in agriculture field has led to the need for more cooperation between agricultural machines. Advances in industrial mechanization and automation have inspired engineers todevelop robots that can perform various agriculture field tasks. There are two major categories of research on agricultural robotics: ground sensing systems that use machine vision, odometers, accelerometers, etc. and satellitebased system that use GPS for navigation. The error in accuracy of a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS system is now only 1 to 2 cm per 10 km. Generally, the error in accuracy of a guidance system using RTK-GPS is 3 to 5 cm.

As for robot technology, many researchers have developed sweep coverage algorithm for multi-agent robot system. The agriculture robottractor is similar to the sweep coverage robot. Both of them need to cover the whole area using the minimum time. The difference between the robot tractor and sweep coverage robot is that the robot tractor need to cover each place only one time.

Structural Stability Crack Analysis of Thermoplastic Composites

Failure of the engineering structures is caused by cracks, which is depending on the design and operating conditions that extend beyond a safe size. Cracks present to some extent in all structures, either as a result of manufacturing defects or localized damage in service. The crackgrowth leads to a decrease in the structural strength. Thus, when the service leading to the failure of the structure. Fracture, the final catastrophic event takes place very rapidly and is preceded by crack growth, which develops slowly during normal service conditions.

It is of particular interest to investigate the structure-property of rubber-rich TPO blends reinforced with rigid nanofillers. The effect of nanoclay additions on the structure and property of rubber-rich TPO blends has been investigated by Mishra et al.and Tjong and Ruan more recently.

Universal Bioanalyte Signal Amplification for Electrochemical Biosensor

While many techniques are currently employed to detect biological analytes, electrochemical detection is very appealing because of its low cost, ease of use, and rapid time for producing a quantitative result. Electrochemical signals are generated by a redox method when redox analytes arepresent in a sample in measureable quantities, such as ~1014 glucose molecules associated with 1.1 mmol/L glucose in blood.However, most clinical and environmental bioanalyte applications require much lower quantities to be measured such as ~106 guanine molecules associated with 5,000 copies/mL of HIV RNA. This is below the detection limit of electrochemical biosensors.

Various approaches have applied to reduce biosensor detection limit. Nanostructured biosensor working electrodes improvesignal-tonoise resolution by reducing the active surface area of the electrode, but encountered challenges with reliably measuring low nanoamp signals, and in fabricating nanoscale structures with poor batch to batch consistency, limited throughput, low production yields, and high unit costs.

QoS LowPan for Internet of Things

An Internet of Things (IoT) system connects the physical world into Internet via radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensors, and mobile devices. IoT is an intelligent collaboration of tiny sensors and devicesgiving new challenges to the end to end communication of things. 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) is a promising IoT IETF standard for connecting sensors across IPv6 clouds. Some sensing applications are time sensitive and may require bounded delay in sending the sensed data. 

In particular, military, mission critical and safety domains generally require rapid and/or real time data transfer. Therefore, some QoS feature would be required to give sensor network administrators the ability to control the overall network performance. 6LoWPAN offers a QoS feature based on two prioritybits. So far, no implementation of these priority bits was done. In this paper, using simulation, we evaluate the effectiveness of these priority bits in various scenarios. We show that under very heavy or very low network loads, these bits have a limited effect on the delay. However, in most realistic scenarios where the network is reasonably loaded (between 40 to 60 %), it is straightforward to apply ahpriority-based QoS priority in 6LoWPANs.

Orthostatic Stress Induced Changes in Heart Rate Variability, Pulse Transit Time and QRS Duration

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in United States. Various parameters can provide useful insight into the health of cardiovascular system. Heart rate variability (HRV) can be used to determine the level of stress during daily activity. QRS complex width has beenshown to predict risk of sudden cardiac death and increased mortality inpatients with congestive heart failure.Pulse transit time (PTT) can provide information about arterial stiffness, and pulse transit time variability (PTTV) can be used as a marker of blood pressure variability (BPV). Both arterial tone and BPV are risk factors for CVD.

Previous studies had looked at these parameters independently and there is no information about their interaction. Our objective is to studythe changes in HRV, QRS duration and PTT by orthostatic stress. We are going to study the effect of orthostatic stress and interaction of these parameters using data collected from a subject population. We will also investigative population characteristics based changed in these parameters.