This article demonstrates an application of a microcomputer in the area of automated manufacturing, in particular to the measurement and control of a positioning device with the accuracy level of less than 1 mu m. The positioning device is generally used for calibration or testing purposes to check the dimensional accuracy of manufactured parts. Here, however, it is utilized for calibration of artifacts like scales, grid plates, calipers, etc. The artifacts are widely used in industry as a referencing device to determine whether the manufactured product meets dimensional quality requirements whilst maintaining high reliability and speeding up quality control operations. The critical challenge here is to develop an automated two-dimensional precision grid plate testing system which measures an array of grid points premarked on a grid plate. The grid plates discussed in this paper are generally glass plates with some type of symmetric marks placed on the glass surface. The goal is to use off-the-shelf type of equipment such as laser interferometer, precision positioning stage, computer controlled machine vision system and a host microcomputer, and integrate them to build a low-cost, practical system usable for the grid plate calibration services. This requires the development of compatible hardware and software protocols. The initial assessment of the test setup indicates that the present system can measure locations of grid points with an accuracy of 0.5 mu m. Further improvements to the system are also suggested.
The concept of circular economy (CE) is of great interest for manufacturing companies since it provides a framework which allows them to align organisational objectives with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Corporate CE entails the adoption of several value-retention options (R-strategies) throughout companies’ operations, which aim at creating, preserving and recovering the value of assets and products. The sustainable product development (SPD) process, in which around 80% of the total environmental impact of a product is determined, is employed to translate R-strategies into new product requirements. This study is aimed at investigating the implications of R-strategy adoption for decision-making in SPD. The research follows an empirical approach, combining a literature review and in-depth semi-structured interviews with product developers and sustainability experts working in companies operating in the technical material cycles of the CE. Thus, implications for product dimensions, inter- and intraorganisational actors, decision-making support types and lifecycle information flows so that SPD processes further accommodate CE principles into products are investigated. This study reveals new directions to adjust the contextual factors of SPD to further align existing processes with widely expanding CE organisational cultures.
This paper describes the development of a digital real-time speed control system based on a single-chip microcontroller, Intel 80C196KC. The speed measurement is achieved with accuracy and high resolution over the entire speed range. Calibration shows that +/- 0.04% measurement accuracy is obtained based on a 360 pulses/rev shaft encoder. The developed system is characterized using both simulation and practical tests. The system performance has been assessed using both laboratory and industrial test rigs. Typical results are given and discussed in this paper.
Plasma display panels, or PDPs, are widely used in industry. Special-purpose switches called rotary pulse generators (RPG) are used to control the various parameters of a picture on a plasma display panel: such as color, contrast, A/D rail and dot clock, which generate two different pulse patterns. When any control parameter needs to be increased or decreased, the corresponding RPG is rotated in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction, resulting in the generation of two different kinds of patterns of pulses on the two channels. The width of pulses is typically 8 ms and the time difference between the two pulses is 3 ms. In this paper, a cost-effective technique to replace these switches using the MC68HC11E9 microcontroller is presented.The MC68HC11E9 is an advanced eight-bit microcontroller (MCU) with highly sophisticated on-chip peripheral capabilities. The input capture (IC) and output compare (OC) features of the MCU are used for the control logic. The control circuitry consists of an input block, MCU and an output selection block. The input block has debounced switches for each of the control parameters. A logic 'high' is detected on one of the IC lines, whenever the related switch is pressed, which results in the generation of a unique pulse pattern on the OC lines. The paper presents the hardware interface and the control software developed for MC68HC11E9 to implement the plasma display control.
This paper presents the structural design and the functional characteristics of a RISC processor called Hermes-RISC. The design of the Hermes-RISC processor is based on the study and evaluation of a variety of assembly instruction sets. The Hermes-RISC is a pipeline superscalar RISC processor with four superscalar units. The first stage evaluation of the Hermes-RISC performance is also presented here. This evaluation is based on the execution of a set of primitive processing tasks, such as summation, multiplication of numbers, multiplication of matrices, sorting, finding maximum values among a set of numbers, procedure calls, etc. Moreover, the performance of Hermes-RISC is compared with a variety of RISC processors.
A novel method of electrically emulating an area array charge coupled device (CCD) using a personal computer is described in this paper. A dual port memory is used to simulate the photosensitive area of the CCD. Suitable clocks are also generated as is done in the actual CCD system.The CCD emulation system is useful for the development of any hardware and software which interfaces with a CCD. This system is used to test the on-board microprocessor used in the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS-1C) satellite.
Some people have impairments which made their speech quite difficult for other people to understand. However, it may be that computers could be trained to reliably recognize their speech. This paper will present the results of a preliminary, small-scale experiment which produced encouraging results to support this proposition.This project used the technique of Time Encoded Speech and was tested using a person with cerebral palsy. It showed a sufficiently high level of recognition to suggest that the technique could be applied, though it might be restricted to applications involving a limited vocabulary. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
Children use drawing as a primary means of communicating. Not all children have this ability and, therefore, do not benefit from the drawing and use of symbols. This seems to be a major deterrent to their communicating with other people. However, autistic children and, perhaps, other intellectually handicapped children sometimes have seemingly inherent skills that we find difficult to understand and even more difficult to develop. And yet, just as deaf children benefit from the use of hearing aids, autistic children - who seem to have an inherent ability in mathematics but often not the use of symbols to benefit from it - can use microcomputers as a means of gaining satisfaction from it and, perhaps, communicating with and, hence, integrating into the society of which they are not normally an integral part. However, software development, to date, has aimed at satisfying the needs of non-autistic people. If software is to be developed to enable autistic people to join the human tribe, it will have to be artificially intelligent. It will have to respond to them in the way that we respond to one another with one major exception. It must not be illogical. Further, it will need to be available in microcomputer-run form. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
This paper presents an analysis of the characteristics a neural network (NN) simulator has to possess, providing a generally valid modular approach to its design. The hardware architecture proposed for the neural network simulator is a multiprocessor common bus architecture with centralized control. Several processing units (PEs) are connected to a common bus and comprise a DSP, a work memory and a hardware communication interface for access to the common bus. Particular attention will be paid to the fault tolerance capabilities the architecture has to possess. More specifically, the paper will deal with the problem of recovering the system from a coherent state of knowledge and reconfiguring it. Finally, the paper presents an analysis of the performance of the architecture, highlighting how the performance is affected by the diagnostic tests needed to locate and detect faults.
This paper describes an application of the TMS320C30 Evaluation Module (EVM) in the generation of three-dimensional (3-D) scenes in real-time. It also discusses how complex structures which are commonly used in the generation of 3-D scenes should be passed from a main program in C to TMS320C30 assembly language subroutines; and describes in detail the layout of relevant memory maps. Finally, there is a discussion of various approaches for passing parameters from one assembly language subroutine to another, which is very important in real-time applications. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
A product-oriented teaching and training system has been developed for speech handicapped persons which helps to control their speech production by visual feedback. This method helps teachers to obtain better and quicker results. Futhermore, this interactive feedback system has a game-like strategy, which gives the patients a new motivation to practice alone. This speech therapy method is built up in four different steps: (1) sound preparation, (2) sound development, (3) practice in words, (4) practice in sentences (automation).The method is mainly useful for patients who are hard of hearing or deaf, but serves for dyslalic cases too. With the help of a special processor the speech is analysed by an auditory model and visualizes it in an illustrative and playful way. The therapy program has been developed for use in several different cases of aetiological background (such as hearing problems, cleft palate, disorders of auditory perception, etc.), and for various languages. There is a set of modules in it for building dictionaries according to the language and/or the kind of the defective pronunciations. This paper presents both the general methodological steps and the results of the correction of sygmatism. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
There is a considerable interest in designing automatic systems that can scan a given paper document and store it on electronic media for easier storage, manipulation and access. Most documents contain graphics and images, in addition to text. Thus, the document image has to be segmented to identify text and image regions, so that appropriate techniques may be applied to those regions. in this paper, we have presented a new technique for image segmentation in which text and image regions, in a given document image, are automatically identified. Technique is based on Differential-Processing Text Extraction Concept. The proposed technique is capable of analysing complex document image layouts. Document image is processed by using textural feature analysis. Results of the proposed method are presented with test images which demonstrate the robustness of the technique.
A technique for evaluating the performance of an Am29300 microprogrammable computer board in comparison to a host (an MC68020 single-board computer) is presented. The Am29300 microprogrammable computer board in this application is used as a coprocessor to a general-purpose MC68020 single-board computer. The Am29300 microprogrammable coprocessor board is used for speeding up the highly-repetitive and time-consuming floating point processing functions involved in three-dimensional image generation. The performance analysis of the Am29300 microprogrammable coprocessor is evaluated in terms of MC68020 processor clock cycles. A mathematical expression, containing floating-point operations is chosen as an application example. The analysis in this application has shown that the Am29300 microprogrammable coprocessor is eight times faster than the MC68020, six times faster than the MC68030, and twice as fast as the MC86040 processor.
This paper describes an implementation method for object-oriented applications. In the common practice the base address of the current object instance is passed on the stack as a pointer from one virtual method to another. The way suggested in this paper uses a global pointer pointing to the currently active object. This pointer is implemented by using some of the CPU registers exclusively for this purpose, thus saving the time of reloading it. Provided that some instructions manipulate on the same object instance before the program switches to another object a smaller and faster executing code can be achieved and at the same time some stack space can be saved.
In this paper we investigate parallel implementation of feedforward neural networks on a transputer array when the networks are trained by the backpropagation algorithm. Two methods of transputer implementations are considered: namely, the processor farming method and the pipelining method. The performance of the parallel implementations are compared with a serial implementation on a 486 machine using the N-X-N encoder/decoder as the benchmark problem. Simulation results show that for small networks serial implementation out-performs the parallel implementations, but, as the network and training set size becomes large, parallel implementations produce shorter training times than the serial implementation. Among the two methods of transputer implementations, the pipelining method always produced shorter training times than the processor farming method.
During the past few years the mobility of blind and partially sighted persons has been significantly improved, but an information gap still remains because a great deal of information cannot be conveyed through tactile or simple acoustical means. This paper describes IRIS, an infrared system for transmitting data and orientation information in a language-independent way to blind users who thereby have access, e.g. to traffic lights, bus line indicators on public transport systems, street names at crossings and orientation information inside public buildings. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
A fuzzy logic control scheme based on the variable structure system concept is presented. This scheme is introduced to eliminate the necessity of relying on the mathematical description of the system. The rule-based fuzzy model is developed in a linguistic description of the dynamic characteristics of the controlled process. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme as compared with the conventional variable structure systems.
In the past, many Braille documents were produced manually on paper, and were reproduced for readers by using methods involving vacuum forming of plastic sheets. However, for some years there has been an increasing trend to use computers for entering, editing and printing Braille documents using special purpose software and printers. This paper describes some work which has been undertaken to optically read the Braille information from old paper copies, and particularly those which have become 'tired' and difficult to copy, into the computer so that they can be electronically stored and reproduced. Of specific interest are the techniques of using twin shadows (stereo-umbral), i.e, subtracting two pictures of the Braille under different illumination conditions, to overcome the problems of background texture by segmenting this unwanted noise from the important relief information. Initial results for single sided Braille have been found to be promising, and the extension of this approach into the recognition of double sided Braille is discussed. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited
Today 's requirements for computational power are still not satisfied. One answer for this demand is expensive supercomputers. Another attempt is the collection of computational power in a network. Connected workstations operate for parallel computation. Our approach for collecting unused resources in workstation clusters enables dynamic distribution of computational load over the network. Any computer individually distinguishes the amount of server resources sharing for others in the network. Our architecture is based on the client /server model —clients divide potentially hard problems into sub problems and forward them to different servers in the network. The usage of standardized remote procedure calls (rpc) as the basic mechanism for transmission of data between the workstations allows the extension of the concept for heterogeneous environments. This article gives a discussion of our implementation for Windows NT and presents the latest benchmarks with two special parallel applications.
