In this paper, the methodology of a CA (Control Allocation) based FTNCS (Fault-Tolerant Networked Control System) is proposed. Control allocation is a control surface management technique by redistributing the redundant control surfaces in overactuated systems. In modern high performance aircrafts, they adopt many redundant control surfaces to provide high performance and to satisfy various tactical requirements. Moreover, redundant control surfaces provide an opportunity to compensate performance degradation due to failures in more than one actuator by re-allocating redundant control surfaces. Simulation results with an F-18 HARV demonstrate that the proposed CA based FTNCS can achieve a fast and accurate tracking performance even in the presence of actuator faults.

As robotics systems are becoming more complex there is the need to promote component based robot development, where systems can be constructed as the composition and integration of reusable building block. One of the most important challenges facing component based robot development is safeguarding against software component failures and malfunctions. The health monitoring of the robot software is most fundamental factors not only to manage system at runtime but also to analysis information of software component in design phase of the robot application. And also as a lot of monitoring events are occurred during the execution of the robot software components, a simple data treatment and efficient memory management method is required. In this paper, we propose an efficient events monitoring and data management method by modeling robot software component and monitoring factors based on robot software framework. The monitoring factors, such as component execution runtime exception, Input/Output data, execution time, checkpoint-rollback are deduced and the detail monitoring events are defined. Furthermore, we define event record and monitor record pool suitable for robot software components and propose a efficient data management method. To verify the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach, a monitoring module and user interface has been implemented using OPRoS robot software framework. The proposed monitoring module can be used as monitoring tool to analysis the software components in robot design phase and plugged into self-healing system to monitor the system health status at runtime in robot systems.

Most engineered systems are designed with high levels of system redundancies to satisfy required reliability requirements under adverse events, resulting in high systems' LCCs (Life-Cycle Costs). Recent years have seen a surge of interest and tremendous advance in PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) methods that detect, diagnose, and predict the effects of adverse events. The PHM methods enable proactive maintenance decisions, giving rise to adaptive reliability. In this paper, we present a RAP (Resilience Allocation Problem) whose goal is to allocate reliability and PHM efficiency to components in an engineering context. The optimally allocated reliability and PHM efficiency levels serve as the design specifications for the system RBDO (Reliability-Based Design Optimization) and the system PHM design, which can be used to derive the detailed design of components and PHM units. The RAP is demonstrated using a simplified aircraft control actuator design problem resulting in a highly resilient actuator with optimally allocated reliability, PHM efficiency and redundancy for the given parameter settings.

The major goal of nuclear power industries during past 10 years has been increasing reliability and utility capacity factor. But as capacity factors crept upward, it became harder and harder to attain next percentage of improvement. Therefore, other innovative technologies and method are required. The monitoring, diagnostic and prognostic technologies have been applied to the fossil power plants and contributed a lot on improving their reliability and performance. However nuclear industries are still reluctant to apply the technology by several reasons. In this paper, current preventive maintenance status of nuclear power plants and industrial practice of monitoring, diagnostic and prognostic technologies are investigated. In addition, the restriction in the implementation of the technologies to the nuclear power plants are defined. Finally, we suggest appropriate methods of implementing the technology to nuclear industries for improving current reliability and performance.

In this paper, PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) techniques are briefly outlined. Prognostics, being a central step within the PHM, is explained in more detail, stating that there are three approaches - experience based, data-driven and model based approaches. Representative articles in the field of prognostics are also given in terms of the type of faults. Model based method is illustrated by introducing a case study that was conducted to the crack growth of the gear plate in UH-60A helicopter. The paper also addresses the comparison of the OBM (Overall Bayesian Method), which was developed by the authors with the PF (Particle Filtering) method, which draws great attention recently in prognostics, through the study on a simple crack growth problem. Their performances are examined by evaluating the metrics introduced by PHM society.

Radiation particles can introduce temporary errors in memory systems. To protect against these errors, so-called soft errors, error detection and correcting codes are used. In addition, scrubbing is applied which is a fundamental technique to avoid the accumulation of soft errors. This paper introduces an optimal scrubbing scheme, which is suitable for a system with auto error detection and correction logic. An auto error detection and correction logic can correct soft errors without CPU's writing operation. The proposed scrubbing scheme leads to maximum reliability by considering both allowable scrubbing load and the periodic accesses to memory by the tasks running in the system.

LINS (Laser Inertial Navigation System) consists of RLG (Ring Laser Gyroscopes)/accelerometers and provides real-time navigation information to the target system. Therefore it is very important to make a decision in the real time whether LINS is in the normal operation or not. That is called a fault detection method. In this paper, we propose the fault detection method of LINS based on the overlapping model. We also show that the fault detection probability is increased through overlapping the hardware model and the software model. It is verified through the long-term operation and RAM (Reliability Availability Maintainability) analysis of LINS that the fault detection method proposed in this paper is able to detect about 97% of probable system failures.

An integrated fault detection and isolation method is proposed in this paper. The main objective of this paper is development fault detection, isolation and diagnosis algorithm based on the DKF (Decentralized Kalman Filter) and the bank of IMM (Interacting Multiple Model) filters using penalty scalar for both partial and total faults and the outlier detection algorithm for preventing false alarm also included. The proposed FDI (Fault Detection and Isolation) scheme is developed in four phases. In the first phase, the outlier detection filter is designed to prevent false alarm as a pre-filter. In the second phases, two local filters and master filter are designed to detect sensor faults. In the third phases, the proposed FDI scheme checks sensor residual to isolate sensor faults and 11 EKFs actuator fault models are designed to detect wherever actuator faults occur. In the last phases, four filters are designed to identify the fault type which is either the total fault or partial fault. The developed scheme can deal with not only sensor and actuator faults, but also preventing false alarm. An important feature of the proposed FDI scheme can decreases fault isolation time and figure out not only fault detection and isolation but also fault type identification. To verify the proposed FDI algorithm performance, the Simulator is also developed under the Matlab/Simulink environment.

This paper presents a control theoretic approach to realizing fault tolerance in asynchronous sequential circuits. The considered asynchronous circuit is assumed to work in space environment and is subject to faults caused by total ionizing dose (TID) effects. In our setting, TID effects cause permanent changes in state transition characteristics of the asynchronous circuit. Under a certain condition of reachability redundancy, it is possible to design a corrective controller so that the closed-loop system can maintain the normal behavior despite occurrences of TID faults. As a case study, the proposed control scheme is applied to an asynchronous arbiter implemented in FPGA.

Critical systems with high reliability feature fault tolerant redundancy. Conventional analytical reliability analysis methods that use the Reliability Block Diagram do not adequately reflect characteristics of the redundancy management system and are not suitable for this applications. This paper uses Monte-Carlo method to calculate the reliability of complicated redundant systems. The method was first validated for cases with analytical solutions. Then, the tool was successfully applied to analyze reliability of the flight control systems with a voter as redundancy management system.

This article deals with the problem of fault detection of a spacecraft's actuators. The authors introduce an extended unknown input observer for nonlinear systems. This is an extended form of unknown input observers which are used for linear systems. Since faults are not available, those are considered as unknown inputs. Unknown input observers can estimate states without full information of inputs if some conditions are satisfied. The authors suggest a continuous-time extended UIO (eUIO) and prove the convergence of state estimation errors. Since the dynamic equation of a spacecraft is nonlinear, an extended UIO can be applied. Three eUIOs are designed to monitor three reaction wheels. The moving averages of each eUIO's residuals are selected for decision logic. The proposed method is verified by numerical simulations.

EMB (Electro-Mechanical Brake) systems can provide improved braking and stability functions such as ABS, EBD, TCS, ESC, BA, ACC, etc. For the implementation of the EMB systems, reliable and robust fault detection algorithm is required. In this study, a model-based fault detection algorithm is designed based on the analytical redundancy method in order to monitor current and force sensor faults in EMB systems. A state-space model for the EMB is derived including faulty signals. The fault diagnosis algorithm is constructed using the analytical redundancy method. Observer is designed for the EMB and the fault detectability condition is examined based on the residual analysis. The performance of the proposed model-based fault detection algorithm is verified in simulations. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in various faulty cases.

In this paper, we discuss an observer-based fault tolerant controller design for the T-S (Takagi-Sugeno) fuzzy system with exogenous disturbance. To derive robust controller design conditions, we use $H_{\infty}$ design technique. The design conditions are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities. An illustrative example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

A novel 3D tube scanning technique is proposed. The proposed tube scanning technique is developed for a special tube inspection module which consists of four line-lasers and one camera. Using the scanning module, we can reconstruct the 360 degree shapes of the inner surfaces of a cylindrical tube. From an image frame captured by the camera, we reconstruct a partial tube model based on four laser triangulations. Then by aligning such partial models with respect to a reference tube axis, a complete 3D shape of the tube is reconstructed. The tube axis in each reconstructed frame is aligned with a 3D Euclidean transformation to the reference axis. Several experiments show that the proposed method can align multiple tube axes very accurately and reconstruct 3D shapes of a tube with very low shape distortion.

Beam projector is popularly used for presentation. In order to pay attention to local area of the beam projector display, a laser pointer is used together with a pointing device(Mouse). Simple wireless presenter has limited functions of a pointing device such as "go to next slide" or "back to previous slide" in a specific application(Microsoft PowerPoint) through wireless channel; thus, there is inconvenience to do other tasks e.g., program execution, maximize/minimize window etc. provided by clicking mouse buttons. The main objective of this paper is to implement a multi-functional laser-pointer mouse that has the same functions of a computer mouse. In order to get position of laser spot in the projector display, an image processing to extract the laser spot in the camera image is required. In addition, we propose a transformation of the spot position into computer display coordinates to execute mouse functions on computer display.

The power generated by wind turbines changes rapidly because of the continuous fluctuation of wind speed and direction. It is important for the power industry to have the capability to predict the changing wind power. In this paper, neural network based wind power prediction scheme which uses wind speed and direction is considered. In order to get a better prediction result, compression function which can be applied to the measurement data is introduced. Empirical data obtained from wind farm located in Kunsan is considered to verify the performance of the compression function.

RC servos are electro-mechanical devices that respond to a control signal, which instructs them to move their output shaft to a certain position. A servo is normally plugged into a radio receiver with a three pin connector. The three wires are a power (usually 4.8V to 6.0V), a ground, and a signal wire. The signal wire carries a PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) signal consisting of a 1-2msec pulse repeated 50 times a second. A 1.5msec pulse will tell the servo to move to its output shaft to the center position, 0 degrees. For a servo with a 180 degree of motion, a 1msec pulse will move the servo to -90 degrees, and a 2msec pulse will move the servo to +90 degrees. In order to development a humanoid robot, mechanical design, fixtures design, analysis of kinematics, implementation moving program, selection of RC servo motor and controller are required. This study was performed to experimentally compare the rotation range of RC servo motors according to change of a periods.