The increasing adoption of solar photovoltaic panels and electric vehicles is creating more challenges to the traditional electricity grid. The impact is commonly seen in local residential networks where peak demands during early evenings are increasing while net power demands during daytime are getting lower. This trend leads to a worsening system load factor where costly infrastructure upgrades are necessary despite the decreasing average utilization of distribution assets. Such a scenario translates to a higher cost of delivering power to the end-users and longer return of investments for utility companies. This study proposes a solution to this issue using Localized Demand Control. In this system, flexible loads are enabled to adjust their status automatically and flatten out the aggregated demand at the transformer level. Simulation results show that the system load factor can be increased by 75% on average when the proposed technology is adopted. The system can keep the load factor above 0.44, even with a 100% penetration of solar panels and electric vehicles. Also, system overloads, over-voltage, under-voltage, and reverse power flow scenarios can be avoided.

The growth of electric vehicle (EV) adoption is inevitable as the transport sector moves away from petrol-based cars to achieve emission reduction targets and promote energy sustainability. Since EVs can make potentially large power demands, the increasing rate of adoption creates challenges for the grid in terms of overloading and congestion. This study explores a smart grid solution to these impending issues through Localized Demand Control (LDC). The effectiveness of LDC is simulated in various cases of end-user participation and EV penetration. Recommended LDC participation rates are established for each EV adoption rate to avoid grid congestion without compromising the end-user's comfort. Based on simulations, the local grid can be fully resilient against congestion issues, even at 100% EV adoption, if there is at least 40% LDC participation rate.

In this work, we investigate the problem of estimating a rigid transform mapping between a calibrated stereo camera rig and a multi-layer lidar. Such a transform may be used to merge data between these 2 systems, addressing the colourless sparse nature of the lidar data and potentially improving depth estimation from the stereo pairs. The proposed approach features a novel planar calibration object with three circular features allowing for the robust acquisition of corresponding features between sensors. A closed-form registration of correspondences is proposed, leading to the derivation of the required transform. The main appeal of the proposed approach is its conceptually simple formulation and the fact that only a single image from each device is required for calibration. Our experiments were performed on real data captured in outdoor and indoor environments and demonstrate good performance with a Velodyne VLP-16 lidar and GOPRO HERO 3+ Stereo rig.

Lidars can be extremely useful tools for measuring outdoor geometry. However while lidar measurements are championed for their high accuracy their point clouds are individually rather sparse and lack colour information. In this work the sparse nature of lidar point clouds is addressed by merging multiple lidar scans into a single large point cloud. This is done by restricting the lidar motion to a single axis of translation and then using interpolation and iterative refinement to acquire a denser model by combining co-registered sets of point clouds. This newly constructed model is then used to guide a basic stereo SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithm in order to produce a final dense coloured point cloud that preserves the accuracy of the original lidar measurements. Our experiments were performed at various locations using a 16 channel “Puck” Velodyne lidar and a stereo acquisition system consisting of a DJI Phantom quadcopter and a synchronized pair of GoPro HERO 3+ black edition cameras. Results of these experiments demonstrate that the produced reconstructions are both ascetically sound and quantitatively consistent with a set of individual measurements taken around the scene.

Traditional stage lighting systems inherently suffer significant cost in materials/installation and can be affected by audible noise when operating at mains frequency. A new circuit for stage lighting is introduced to mitigate these issues; it comprises a series tuned IPT pickup with a new AC control topology. This topology builds on previous work by improving the waveform across the load & pickup and by lowering the switch ratings. The circuit is analyzed, simulated and a working system is measured and presented herein, including the relationship between the switch and the reactive elements for the design. A 1.2 kW 240 V Philips Broadway lamp is successfully powered by this controller. The waveforms across the load are sinusoidal which lower the peak values for a given RMS voltage or current level, reducing noise and simplifying the design. The output voltage is regulated to 1% by implementing closed loop control on the system.

An algorithm for lip contour extraction is presented in this chapter. A colour video sequence of a speaker’s face is acquired under natural lighting conditions without any particular set-up, make-up, or markers. The first step is to perform a logarithmic colour transform from RGB to HI colour space. Next, a segmentation algorithm extracts the lip area by combining motion with red hue information into a spatio-temporal neighbourhood. The lip’s region of interest, semantic information, and relevant boundaries points are then automatically extracted. A good estimate of mouth corners sets active contour initialisation close to the boundaries to extract. Finally, a set of adapted active contours use an open form with curvature discontinuities along the mouth corners for the outer lip contours, a line-type open active contour when the mouth is closed, and closed active contours with lip shape constrained pressure balloon forces when the mouth is open. They are initialised with the results of the pre-processing stage. An accurate lip shape with inner and outer borders is then obtained with reliable quality results for various speakers under different acquisition conditions.

A practical dynamic inductor-tuning circuit for a parallel resonant ICPT power pickup operating at 38.4 kHz is described. The method controls the current through a tuning inductor by varying the turn on delay of two power switches. This varies the inductor current so that the tank may be maintained at resonance. Supporting mathematical analysis, circuit simulation and prototype measurements are included. Experimental results have verified the system behaviour