Accuracy

Conventional mechanism (i.e. rigid link mechanisms) has limited accuracy and repeatability because of friction, backlash. Mechanism offers a relative motion between rigid links via joints. Conventionally these joints are pin, sliding, rolling, liquid film etc. These joints have inherent nonlinear frictional characteristics which are creating difficulty in control micro-nano positioning in precision mechanisms. To achieve high resolution and precision problems of friction, backlash in mechanism needs to be removed. These joints are replaced by flexible elements such as flexural hinge, flexural links which offers advantage of frictionless and smooth motion. Flexural mechanisms are developed using basic building blocks such as hinges and planar type. Flexural building blocks should be such that it offers lesser / zero resistance to motion in desired direction and maximum / infinite resistance in orthogonal direction. Motion generated in orthogonal direction is called parasitic motion. Double Flexural Manipulator (DFM) is a planar type building block which offers theoretically zero parasitic error motion with negligible amount of rotation of motion stage. This article presents design, development, system integration, system identification and PID control implementation on DFM. Developed flexural stage is integrated with desktop PC via dSPACE micro-controller. System identification (Static and Dynamic) is carried out and performance parameters such as stiffness, natural frequency, damping characteristics and frequency characterization of DFM are estimated and validated via due experimentations. Estimated transfer function of DFM is further used for development of control system, and PID control parameters are tuned. Real time PID implementation gives a position accuracy of few microns at high scanning speed of 2.5 mm/s.

Emotion recognition is one of the important highlights of human emotional intelligence and has long been studied to be incorporated with machine intelligence argued to make machines even more intelligent. This paper aims to contribute to this field of study by enabling machines to recognize emotion from facial electromyogram (EMG) signals. This includes a compilation of the groups attempt to recognize basic facial expressions namely happy, angry, and sad through the use of EMG signals from facial muscles. The group extracted features from the three EMG signals from the face of two human subjects, a male and a female, and analyzed these features to serve as feature templates. Using a minimum-distance classifier, recognition rates exceeded the target accuracy - 85 percent - reaching 94.44 percent for both the male and female subjects.

Thermal cameras are used in research laboratories to measure tissue temperature during laser irradiation. This study was an evaluation of the accuracy of a 3–5 μm thermal camera and two 8–12 μm cameras in detecting the maximum temperatures of small targets. The size of the targets was within the range of laser spot diameters which are used for vessel welding, angioplasty, and dermatology. The response to a sharp thermal edge was measured and analyzed for the three cameras, which had a scanning rate of 30 frames per second. The response of the 3–5 μm camera to reference black body targets of different sizes was also studied.It was found that the detector system required an average of 2.44 μs to reach 90% of maximum step response for the 8–12 μm system and 5.85 μs for the 3–5 μm system. With a 3×5 telescope and a 9.5 inch focal distance close-up lens, the 3–5 μm camera underestimated the temperature of targets smaller than 2.0 mm because of its slow detector response. Although the 8–12 μm camera provides more accurate measurements due to its faster detector response, it still underestimates the temperature of targets smaller than 900 μm, when similar magnification and focal distance are used.Methods to compensate for the inaccuracies are discussed, including empirical correction factors and the inverse filtering technique.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach of Arabic scripts web page language identification based on decision tree and ARTMAP approaches. We use the decision tree approach to find the general identities of a web document, be it an Arabic script-based or a non-Arabic-based. Then, we use the selected representations of identified pages from the decision tree approach as

The assessment of seismic design codes has become the subject of intensive research work which revealed several weak points of the codes that originated from the limitations in predicting with acceptable precision the response of a structure under a moderate or severe earthquake. Most of the seismic design codes belong to the class of prescriptive procedures, where if certain constraints are fulfilled, the structure is considered safe. Prescriptive design procedures fail to provide acceptable levels of structural performance over its life because, in most of them, the structure is assessed using only one design earthquake. Performance-based design is a different philosophy for designing against hazards; the structure is designed to meet a number of performance objectives. The objectives of this study is to compare the initial and limit state-dependent cost of an RC building designed either to meet the provisions of the Greek national seismic design code or based on a performance-based design procedure. Two were the most important findings of this study: (i) the initial cost for an RC structure, designed to permit elastic behaviour for the response spectrum of the Greek national seismic code, is not prohibitive and (ii) that an RC structure based on the proposed performance-based design procedure lead to economical designs with respect to the total cost compared to a code conforming design. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The key issue of the localization study is that how we can minimize the energy consumption of devices with guaranteeing high degree of accuracy. In this paper, we show that the collaboration among proxy devices with short range communication is helpful to energy-efficiently localize their locations in time-average sense by analyzing the device proximity including real GPS trace of students in KAIST and NCSU campuses. Next, we deliberate what is the best method for selfish mobile users to collaborate for the energy-efficient localization, and formulate an optimization problem which considers the energy efficiency and/or user fairness. However, optimizing this problem is tricky since it requires a global knowledge of sets of proxy devices and also solving a NP-hard problem to select devices which directly measure locations. This paper makes a contribution towards presenting a practical and fully distributed location sharing protocol based on competition for turning off GPS, and an opt...

Things are sold at a substantial discount on the eve of Black Friday, resulting in sales that are 30 times larger than on normal flash sale days. Customers' data from purchases made on this day can be examined, resulting in a quick declaration of their preferences for specific products. We looked at data that contained packets of clients, and also the factors that influenced their purchases and the amounts they spent. This data is analysed and forecasted purely for the purpose of providing clients with customized discounts on goods depending on individual preferences and purchase budget. Four models were employed to forecast significant variations in training and test data (50:50, 70:30, 30:70), as well as a distinct sample training and testing dataset with two additional examples of prediction: xgboost, tfidftransform, both combination, and extra trees regressor. The two scenarios involve forecasting and analysing another dataset, as well as projected on the train data and testing data on a different testing data set. The dataset would be analyzed to learn about consumer behavior and trends of product the sale's popularity. For each of the five scenarios, the feature significance and benefit importance are displayed. All of the models' accuracy in various settings has been given in the manner of accuracy graphs and the accuracy findings have been displayed in the form of an RMSE score.

Purpose To determine what research evidence exists to support the use of voice measures in the clinical assessment of patients with voice disorders. Method The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) National Center for Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorders staff searched 29 databases for peer-reviewed English-language articles between January 1930 and April 2009 that included key words pertaining to objective and subjective voice measures, voice disorders, and diagnostic accuracy. The identified articles were systematically assessed by an ASHA-appointed committee employing a modification of the critical appraisal of diagnostic evidence rating system. Results One hundred articles met the search criteria. The majority of studies investigated acoustic measures (60%) and focused on how well a test method identified the presence or absence of a voice disorder (78%). Only 17 of the 100 articles were judged to contain adequate evidence for the measures studied to ...

1. To assess the accuracy of the gestation-adjusted projection method in estimating birth weight in Thai pregnant women. 2. To determine the efficiency of the gestation-adjusted projection method for the detection of low actual birth weight, normal birth weight, and large fetus groups. Diagnostic clinical trial. The present study was conducted on 328 uncomplicated pregnancies that were monitored at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Charoenkrung Pracharuk Hospital during the period of August I to November 30, 2006. The fetal biometry was measured by ultrasound at 34 weeks' gestation or after Fetal weight was calculated according to Hadlock's formula. The extrapolation technique is based on the gestation-adjusted projection (GAP) method. The accuracy of the method was assessed by analyzing the weight predictions in relation to the actual birth weight (ABW). Main outcome measurements were simple error absolute error absolute percentage error and accuracy within 10% o...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is a technology that has been used for years with the variety of applications including the production of digital terrain models (DTMs), and high-accuracy mapping. LiDAR offers a very detailed collection of 3-D point clouds of the earth surface which can be used in generating orthophotos. Traditional orthophoto production based on the DTM has to

The increasing demand for up-to-date 3-D geographic information systems (GIS) in planning, transportation, and utility management applications poses significant challenges to the Geomatics community. Of all the challenges in acquiring, building, maintaining, and using GIS, none is more central than that of dala acquisition. Obtaining the required spatial and attribute data by conventional methods such as aerial photogrammetry and terrestrial surveying is expensive, slow, or inaccurate. These methods are, therefore, not well suited for rapid updating. Fortunately, however, the development of land-based mobile mapping systems (MMS) has opened a new avenue to meet these challenges. Land-based MMS are capable of providing fast, efficient, cost-effective and complete data acquisition. As such, they are an innovative technology for creating and updating 3-D GIS databases both quickly and inexpensively. Basically, MMS are based on integrated navigation systems, mainly the integration of GP...

This study focuses on developing methodologies to predict the service life of a pavement marking material based on its retroreflectivity. Data from the 2002 National Transportation Product Evaluation Program (NTPEP) pavement marking material test deck in Mississippi are used for model development and model validation. The smoothing spline method and time series modeling are applied to estimate the service lives of different types of materials based on the assumption of a required minimum retroreflectivity value. The same models can also predict the retroreflectivity values at future times for a pavement marking product based on its retroreflectivity values in the past. The validation of the models shows satisfactory accuracy. As demonstrated in a case study, the predicted service lives of the marking materials can be used in life-cycle cost comparisons for selecting pavement marking material.

Solar energy applications require readily available, site-oriented, and long-term solar data. However, the frequent unavailability of diffuse irradiation, in contrast to its need, has led to the evolution of various regression models to predict it from the more commonly available data. Estimating the diffuse component from global radiation is one such technique. The present work focuses on improvement in the accuracy of the models for predicting horizontal diffuse irradiation using hourly solar radiation database from nine sites across the globe. The influence of sunshine fraction, cloud cover, and air mass on estimation of diffuse radiation is investigated. Inclusion of these along with hourly clearness index, leads to the development of a series of models for each site. Estimated values of hourly diffuse radiation are compared with measured values in terms of error statistics and indicators like, R2, mean bias deviation, root mean square deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. A new me...