A remote control strategy for vehicles in Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS) is considered. An optimal scheduling of a limited communication channel is proposed for lead vehicle control in a platoon. The optimal scheduling problem is to find the optimal communication sequence that minimizes the cost obtained inherently by an optimal control without the communication constraint. In this paper, the PID control law which guarantees the string stability is used for the lead vehicle control. The fact that the PID control law is equivalent to the approximately linear quadratic tracker allows to obtain the performance measure to find an optimal sequence. Simulations are conducted with five maneuvering platoons to evaluate the optimality of the obtained sequence.

An output feedback stabilizing controller far non-minimum phase nonlinear systems is presented. We first perform the standard input-output linearization of the system and then transform the zero dynamics into a special normal form in which the antistable part is not affected by the stable part and the antistable part is given in approximately linear form. Under the assumption that the nonlinear system satisfies the observability rank condition, we can design an observer f3r the extended system that is made of the augmentation of a chain of integrators. The proposed output feedback stabilizing controller can then be designed by combining the observer and the state feedback controller.

In Gravure printing process, there are a lot of printing errors caused by expansion and contraction of printing materials and difficulty of printing of small letters, accordingly we cannot detect those errors with eyes. In this paper, we describe the algorithm which can detect small errors automatically in Gravure printing process and a real-time detection system adopting the algorithm. We present the Perimetric Mask algorithm that can eliminate tiny errors occurring near the contour of printing objects to achieve accurate inspection, and also construct an algorithm utilizing symmetry transform which can emphasize tiny errors to make a robust inspection system. We have made a system running in real-time and verified the efficiency of the algorithm.

A new relative motion control methodology for a following system to an independent leading system is proposed for controlling relative position, velocity, and tension etc. It is based on maintaining minimum relative error between two independent systems. The control command of the following system to a leading system is generated by adding the current command and the output of the relative error compensation. The proposed control method is implemented on the experimental equipment which is a wire winding-unwinding system to control the tension of the line. The results show the unwinding system(follower) following the independent motion of the winding system(leader) to control the constant tension of the line in order to keep the roller dancer in reference position. The relative motion control method proposed in this paper can be applied to high precision equipment for unwinding and winding fine wire, fine fiber, and tape etc.

A time-delay compensation method for vector control system is proposed that can compensate for voltage and current distortions resulting from a time delay in the overall system due to the low pass filter, hysteresis control inverter, microprocessor program computation time, and so on. The proposed scheme estimates the time delay using the difference between the Q-axis stator current command and the time-delayed actual Q-axis stator current in a synchronous reference frame, then compensates the time delay in the voltage and current using the angular displacement of a DQ transformation. Accordingly, the proposed scheme can accurately compensate for the time delay related to the overall system, thereby significantly improving the performance of the vector control system, as verified by simulation and experiment.

In a park or street, we can see many people Jogging or walking with their dogs chasing their masters. In the previous study, an entertainment robot, CARTRI that imitates the dog's behavior was created. The robot's task was chasing a moving goal that was recognized as the master. The physical structure of the CARTRI robot was three-wheel type locomotion system. The sensor system which could detect the position of the master in the outdoor space, was consists of a signal transmitter which was held by the master and five ultrasonic receivers which were mounted on the robot. In the experiment, the robot could chase a human walking in outdoor space like a park. But it could not avoid obstacles and its behavior was only goal-chasing behavior because of the limit of the sensor system. In this study, an improved RF-ultrasonic sensor system which can detect both goal and obstacle is developed in order to enable the CARTRI robot to carry out various behavior. The sensor system has increased angle resolution by using eight ultrasonic receivers instead of five in the previous study. And it can detect obstacle by using reflective type ultrasonic sensors. The sensor system is designed so that detection of goal and obstacle could be conducted in one sampling period. The Performance of the developed sensor system is evaluated through experiments.

We introduce a new auto-calibration/simulation method for a strain gage type transducer/signal-conditioner which guarantees the output linearity and compensates the error automatically. We design a micro voltage supply which is able to interface either AC or DC type excitation voltage. A new strain gage simulator is also designed. We make linearity output of the signal conditioner and can compensate error automatically with this new auto calibration/simulation method. The experimental results show that the error between the real value and the expected one is less than 1%.

A biped walking robot which is developed as a platform for researching walking algorithm is briefly introduced. The developed walking robot has 6 degrees of freedom per one leg. The origins of the last three axis do not intersect at a point, so the kinematic analysis is cubmersome with the conventional method. In the former version of the robot, Jacobian-based inverse kinematics method is used. However, the Jacobian-based inverse kinematics method has drawbacks for the application in which knee is fully extended such as stair-case walking. The reason far that is the Jacobian becomes ill-conditioned near the singular points and the method is not able to give adequate solutions. So, a method for giving a closed-form inverse kinematics solution is proposed. The proposed method is based on careful consideration of the kinematic structure of the biped walking robot.

A new visual tracking scheme is proposed for a mobile robot that tracks a moving object in 3D space in real time. Visual tracking is to control a mobile robot to keep a moving target at the center of input image at all time. We made it possible by simplifying the relationship between the 2D image frame captured by a single camera and the 3D workspace frame. To precisely calculate the input vector (orientation and distance) of the mobile robot, the speed vector of the target is determined by eliminating the speed component caused by the camera motion from the speed vector appeared in the input image. The problem of temporary disappearance of the target form the input image is solved by selecting the searching area based on the linear prediction of target motion. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme can make a mobile robot successfully follow a moving target in real time.

The goal of this research is to implement a PC-based remote control system of ion implanter using Visual Basic programming. Presently, skilled process engineers are required to regularly setup and adjust implanter parameters. Any reduction in the number of production hours devoted to ion beam implanter setup or recalibration after a species change would represent substantial improvements in both manpower and equipment utilization. An optical communication system for the remote control and telemetry in the operation of the 50kev potential was designed and constructed. This system enables continuous and safe operation of the ion implanter and can be the basis for the automation. The isolation characteristics of optical fiber were 10kV/cm, and performance tests of the system under the intense noise environment during the implanter operations showed satisfactory results. This system is designed to completely replace the existing human-machine interface with many new functions. This paper describes the important components of the system including system architecture and software development. It is expected that this system can be used for the communication and control purpose in the high noise environments such as the operation of the MeV energy implanter or other high power, high noise systems.

In laser surface hardening processes, the geometrical parameters such as the depth and the width of a hardened layer can be utilized to assess the hardened layer quality. However, accurate monitoring of the geometrical parameters for on-line process control as well as for on-line quality evaluation is very difficult because the hardened layer is formed beneath a material surface and is not visible. Therefore, temperature monitoring of a point of specimen surface has most frequently been used as a process monitoring method. But, a hardened layer depends on the temperature distribution and the thermal history of a specimen during laser surface hardening processing. So, this paper describes the estimation results of the geometric parameters using multi-point surface temperature monitoring. A series of hardening experiments were performed to find the relationships between the geometric parameters and the measured temperature. Estimation results using a neural network show the enhanced effectiveness of multi-point surface temperature monitoring compared to one-point monitoring.

In many automated systems, such as manufacturing systems and process plants, a fieldbus is a very important component for the exchange of various and sometimes crucial information. Some of the information has a tendency to rapidly lose its value as time elapses after its creation. Such information or data is called real-time data that includes sensor values and control commands. In order to deliver these data in time, the fieldbus network should be tailored to have short delay with respect to the individual time limit of various data. Fine-tuning the network for a given traffic requires the knowledge on the relationship between the protocol parameters such as timer values and the performance measure such as network delay. This paper presents a mathematical performance model to calculate communication delays of the Profibus-FMS network when the timer value and the traffic characteristics are given.

We present a power control with variable state feedback gain (VFPC) to improve outage convergence rate of distributed constrained power control. The variable state feedback gain includes the information of the desired SIR changes and must be a decreasing sequence for the convergence. The proof of the convergence is given. The proposed algorithm can improve the outage convergence rate and SIR (Signal to Interference Ratio) response at transient as well as at steady state. The simulation results are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.