Academic literature on the topic 'Vision-based motion controls'

SUMMARYThis paper presents a novel line of sight control system for a robot vision tracking system, which uses a position feedforward controller to preposition a camera, and a vision feedback controller to compensate for the positioning error. Continuous target tracking is an important function for service robots, surveillance robots, and cooperating robot systems. However, it is difficult to track a specific target using only vision information, while a robot is in motion. This is especially true when a robot is moving fast or rotating fast. The proposed system controls the camera line of sight, using a feedforward controller based on estimated robot position and motion information. Specifically, the camera is rotated in the direction opposite to the motion of the robot. To implement the system, a disturbance compensator is developed to determine the current position of the robot, even when the robot wheels slip. The disturbance compensator is comprised of two extended Kalman filters (EKFs) and a slip detector. The inputs of the disturbance compensator are data from an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and two wheel-encoders. The vision feedback information, which is the targeting error, is used as the measurement update for the two EKFs. Using output of the disturbance compensator, an actuation module pans the camera to locate a target at the center of an image plane. This line of sight control methodology improves the recognition performance of the vision tracking system, by keeping a target image at the center of an image frame. The proposed system is implemented on a two-wheeled robot. Experiments are performed for various robot motion scenarios in dynamic situations to evaluate the tracking and recognition performance. Experimental results showed the proposed system achieves high tracking and recognition performances with a small targeting error.

Although in recent years, there have been quite a few studies aimed at the navigation of robots in cluttered environments, few of these have addressed the problem of robots navigating while moving a large or heavy object. Such a functionality is especially useful when transporting objects of different shapes and weights without having to modify the robot hardware. In this work, we tackle the problem of making two humanoid robots navigate in a cluttered environment while transporting a very large object that simply could not be moved by a single robot. We present a complete navigation scheme, from the incremental construction of a map of the environment and the computation of collision-free trajectories to the design of the control to execute those trajectories. We present experiments made on real NAO robots, equipped with RGB-D sensors mounted on their heads, moving an object around obstacles. Our experiments show that a significantly large object can be transported without modifying the robot main hardware, and therefore that our scheme enhances the humanoid robots capacities in real-life situations. Our contributions are: (1) a low-dimension multi-robot motion planning algorithm that finds an obstacle-free trajectory, by using the constructed map of the environment as an input, (2) a framework that produces continuous and consistent odometry data, by fusing the visual and the robot odometry information, (3) a synchronization system that uses the projection of the robots based on their hands positions coupled with the visual feedback error computed from a frontal camera, (4) an efficient real-time whole-body control scheme that controls the motions of the closed-loop robot–object–robot system.

Computer vision technology is one of the main research directions of artificial intelligence. With the rapid growth of image or video data scale and the improvement of computing power, computer vision technology has achieved unprecedented development in recent years and is widely used in a variety of scenes. This study mainly discusses the design of student physical fitness test system and test data analysis system based on computer vision. This study is mainly based on the motion attitude determination algorithm to identify the motion. In hardware configuration, the key is CPU and GPU. The model realizes large-scale matrix computation based on the parallel computing power provided by GPU and uses CPU to realize data reading and preprocessing. The assessment controller is responsible for the transmission of instructions and status information and controls the operation of the entire pitch assessment system. It is the control center of the entire system. ZigBee wireless communication technology is adopted as the communication method of human posture measurement terminal and assessment controller. The input image is preprocessed through scaling and standardization. The image is scaled to the resolution of 224 × 224 when input, which is performed to realize data parallel training. The image was changed by means of random horizontal flip, random rotation, and color change to achieve the effect of expanding the dataset. Then, the test evaluation module was used to evaluate various test indexes of the body. During the sit-up test, nine out of 10 sit-ups can be accurately counted and the recognition rate reaches 90 percent. The results show that the system designed in this study has high accuracy and good performance, which can be used for the physical fitness test and test data analysis of students.

This paper presents a computer-vision based marker-free method for gait-impairment detection in Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PWP). The system is based upon the idea that a normal human body attains equilibrium during the gait by aligning the body posture with Axis-of-Gravity (AOG) using feet as the base of support. In contrast, PWP appear to be falling forward as they are less-able to align their body with AOG due to rigid muscular tone. A normal gait exhibits periodic stride-cycles with stride-angle around 45o between the legs, whereas PWP walk with shortened stride-angle with high variability between the stride-cycles. In order to analyze Parkinsonian-gait (PG), subjects were videotaped with several gait-cycles. The subject’s body was segmented using a color-segmentation method to form a silhouette. The silhouette was skeletonized for motion cues extraction. The motion cues analyzed were stride-cycles (based on the cyclic leg motion of skeleton) and posture lean (based on the angle between leaned torso of skeleton and AOG). Cosine similarity between an imaginary perfect gait pattern and the subject gait patterns produced 100% recognition rate of PG for 4 normal-controls and 3 PWP. Results suggested that the method is a promising tool to be used for PG assessment in home-environment.

The hallmark of modern robotics is the ability to directly fuse the platform’s perception with its motoric ability—the concept often referred to as “active perception.” Nevertheless, we find that action and perception are often kept in separated spaces, which is a consequence of traditional vision being frame based and only existing in the moment and motion being a continuous entity. This bridge is crossed by the dynamic vision sensor (DVS), a neuromorphic camera that can see the motion. We propose a method of encoding actions and perceptions together into a single space that is meaningful, semantically informed, and consistent by using hyperdimensional binary vectors (HBVs). We used DVS for visual perception and showed that the visual component can be bound with the system velocity to enable dynamic world perception, which creates an opportunity for real-time navigation and obstacle avoidance. Actions performed by an agent are directly bound to the perceptions experienced to form its own “memory.” Furthermore, because HBVs can encode entire histories of actions and perceptions—from atomic to arbitrary sequences—as constant-sized vectors, autoassociative memory was combined with deep learning paradigms for controls. We demonstrate these properties on a quadcopter drone ego-motion inference task and the MVSEC (multivehicle stereo event camera) dataset.

We present an interactive system using one RGB-D sensor, which allows a user to use bare hands to perform sand drawing. Our system supports the common sand drawing functions, such as sand erosion, sand spilling, and sand leaking. To use hands to manipulate the virtual sand, we design four key hand gestures. The idea is that the gesture of one hand controls the drawing actions. The motion and gesture of the other hand control the drawing positions. There are three major steps. First, our system adopts a vision-based bare-hand detection method which computes the hand position and recognizes the hand gestures. Second, the drawing positions and the drawing actions are sent to a sand drawing subsystem. Finally, the subsystem performs the sand drawing actions. Experimental results show that our system enables users to draw a rich variety of sand pictures.

In this paper, a robotic system dedicated to remote wrist rehabilitation is proposed as an Internet of Things (IoT) application. The system offers patients home rehabilitation. Since the physiotherapist and the patient are on different sites, the system guarantees that the physiotherapist controls and supervises the rehabilitation process and that the patient repeats the same gestures made by the physiotherapist. A human-machine interface (HMI) has been developed to allow the physiotherapist to remotely control the robot and supervise the rehabilitation process. Based on a computer vision system, physiotherapist gestures are sent to the robot in the form of control instructions. Wrist range of motion (RoM), EMG signal, sensor current measurement, and streaming from the patient’s environment are returned to the control station. The various acquired data are displayed in the HMI and recorded in its database, which allows later monitoring of the patient’s progress. During the rehabilitation process, the developed system makes it possible to follow the muscle contraction thanks to an extraction of the Electromyography (EMG) signal as well as the patient’s resistance thanks to a feedback from a current sensor. Feature extraction algorithms are implemented to transform the EMG raw signal into a relevant data reflecting the muscle contraction. The solution incorporates a cascade fuzzy-based decision system to indicate the patient’s pain. As measurement safety, when the pain exceeds a certain threshold, the robot should stop the action even if the desired angle is not yet reached. Information on the patient, the evolution of his state of health and the activities followed, are all recorded, which makes it possible to provide an electronic health record. Experiments on 3 different subjects showed the effectiveness of the developed robotic solution.

This paper work presents a new method of controlling the robot arm. The control system is the most important part of industrial robot. In industrial robot arms, it is very important to control the desired path and direction. In this paper, the presented control method is a multilayer neural network. Which controls and compares the location of the joins at the end point of the path relative to the zero position (the beginning of the path-static state). And try to learn the ultimate position of each joints due to changes in angles and direction of movement to carry out the motion process. The superiority of this method is that it can operate without considering 3D space (working space), the dynamic equations, and have Cartesian coordinates of the points on the desired path. Innovating this method of controlling the choice of the route is based on feedback from the vision system and human intelligence. This way, the operator selects and applies how to move the joints and the links of the robot and the method of walking the path. Applying the path through the movement of links and motion of joints and changing their angles in order to reach the end effector to the end point of the path. In this system, using the potentiometers (volumes) as an encoder connected to the axis of the joints, it is possible to obtain the location of the joints on the basis of variations in the voltage range and convert it to the equivalent digital 1024-0 values as has been used the MLP neural network input.

Year after year, technologies are evolving in an incredible rapid pace, becoming faster, more complex, more accurate and more immersive. Looking back just a decade, especially interaction technologies have made a major leap. Just two years ago in 2013, after being researched for quite some time, the hype around virtual reality (VR) arouse renewed enthusiasm, finally reaching mainstream attention as the so called head-mounted displays (HMD), devices worn on the head  to grant a visual peek into the virtual world, gain more and more acceptance with the end-user. Currently, humans interact with computers in a very counter-intuitive two dimensional way. The ability to experience digital content in the humans most natural manner, by simply looking around and perceiving information from their surroundings, has the potential to be a major game changer in how we perceive and eventually interact with digital information. However, this confronts designers and developers with new challenges of how to apply these exciting technologies, supporting interaction mechanisms to naturally explore digital information in the virtual world, ultimately overcoming real world boundaries. Within the virtual world, the only limit is our imagination. This thesis investigates an approach of how to naturally interact and explore information based on open data within an immersive virtual reality environment using a head-mounted display and vision-based motion controls. For this purpose, an immersive VR application visualizing information as a network of European capital cities has been implemented, offering interaction through gesture input. The application lays a major focus on the exploration of the generated network and the consumption of the displayed information. While the conducted user interaction study with eleven participants investigated their acceptance of the developed prototype, estimating their workload and examining their explorative behaviour, the additional dialog with five experts in the form of explorative discussions provided further feedback towards the prototype’s design and concept. The results indicate the participants’ enthusiasm and excitement towards the novelty and intuitiveness of exploring information in a less traditional way than before, while challenging them with the applied interface and interaction design in a positive manner. The design and concept were also accepted through the experts, valuing the idea and implementation. They provided constructive feedback towards the visualization of the information as well as emphasising and encouraging to be even bolder, making more usage of the available 3D environment. Finally, the thesis discusses these findings and proposes recommendations for future work.

In the field of control systems, testbeds are a pivotal step in the validation and improvement of new algorithms for different applications. They provide a safe, controlled environment typically having a significantly lower cost of failure than the final application. Vision systems provide nonintrusive methods of measurement that can be easily implemented for various setups and applications. This work presents methods for modeling, removing distortion, calibrating, and rectifying single and two camera systems, as well as, two very different applications of vision-based control system testbeds: deflection control of shape memory polymers and trajectory planning for mobile robots. First, a testbed for the modeling and control of shape memory polymers (SMP) is designed. Red-green-blue (RGB) thresholding is used to assist in the webcam-based, 3D reconstruction of points of interest. A PID based controller is designed and shown to work with SMP samples, while state space models were identified from step input responses. Models were used to develop a linear quadratic regulator that is shown to work in simulation. Also, a simple to use graphical interface is designed for fast and simple testing of a series of samples. Second, a robot testbed is designed to test new trajectory planning algorithms. A template-based predictive search algorithm is investigated to process the images obtained through a low-cost webcam vision system, which is used to monitor the testbed environment. Also a user-friendly graphical interface is developed such that the functionalities of the webcam, robots, and optimizations are automated. The testbeds are used to demonstrate a wavefront-enhanced, B-spline augmented virtual motion camouflage algorithm for single or multiple robots to navigate through an obstacle dense and changing environment, while considering inter-vehicle conflicts, obstacle avoidance, nonlinear dynamics, and different constraints. In addition, it is expected that this testbed can be used to test different vehicle motion planning and control algorithms.
M.S.A.E.
Masters
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Engineering and Computer Science
Aerospace Engineering; Space Systems Design and Engineering

A review of aeroplane spin literature is presented, including early spin research history and lessons learned from spinning trials. Despite many years of experience in spinning evaluation, it is difficult to predict spin characteristics and problems have been encountered and several prototype aeroplanes have been lost. No currently published method will reliably predict an aeroplane’s spin recovery characteristics. Quantitative data is required to study the spin motion of the aeroplane in adequate detail. An alternative method, Vision Based State Estimation, has been used to capture the spin motion. This alternative method has produced unique illustrations of the spinning research aeroplane and data has been obtained that could possibly be very challenging to obtain using traditional methods. To investigate the aerodynamic flow of a spinning aeroplane, flights have been flown using wool tufts on wing, aft fuselage and empennage for flow visualization. To complement the tuft observations, the differential pressure between the upper and lower horizontal tail and wing surfaces have been measured at selected points. Tufts indicate that a large-scale Upper Surface Vortex forms on the outside wing. This USV has also been visualized using a smoke source. The flow structures on top of both wings, and on top of the horizontal tail surfaces, have also been studied on another aeroplane model. The development of these rotational flow effects has been related to the spin motion. It is hypothesized that the flow structure of the turbulent boundary layer on the outside upper wing surface is due to additional accelerations induced by the rotational motion of the aeroplane. The dynamic effects have been discussed and their importance for the development of the spin considered. In addition, it is suggested that another dynamic effect might exist due to the additional acceleration of the turbulent boundary layer due to the rotational motion of the aeroplane. It is recommended that future spin recovery prediction methods account for dynamic effects, in addition to aerodynamic control effectiveness and aeroplane inertia, since the spin entry phase is important for the subsequent development of the spin. Finally, suggestions for future research are given.

Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au problème de l’atterrissage lunaire autonome et nous proposons une méthode innovante amenant une alternative à l’utilisation de capteurs classiques qui peuvent se révéler encombrants, énergivores et très onéreux.La première partie est consacrée au développement et à la construction de capteurs de mouvement inspirés de la vision des insectes volants et mesurant le flux optique.Le flux optique correspond à la vitesse angulaire relative de l’environnement mesurée par la rétine d’un agent. Dans un environnement fixe, les mouvements d’un robot génèrent un flux optique contenant des informations essentielles sur le mouvement de ce dernier. En utilisant le principe du « temps de passage », nous présentons les résultats expérimentaux obtenus en extérieur avec deux versions de ces capteurs.Premièrement, un capteur mesurant le flux optique dans les deux directions opposées est développé et testé en laboratoire. Deuxièmement un capteur adapté à la mesure des faibles flux optiques similaires à ceux pouvant être mesurés lors d’un alunissage est développé, caractérisé et enfin testé sur un drone hélicoptère en conditions extérieures.Dans la seconde partie, une méthode permettant de réaliser le guidage, la navigation et la commande (GNC pour Guidance Navigation and Control) du système est proposée. L’innovation réside dans le fait que l’atterrissage en douceur est uniquement assuré par les capteurs de flux optique. L’utilisation des capteurs inertiels est réduite au maximum. Plusieurs capteurs orientés dans différentes directions de visée, et fixés à la structure de l’atterrisseur permettent d’atteindre les conditions finales définies par les partenaires industriels. Les nombreuses informations décrivant la position et l’attitude du système contenues dans le flux optique sont exploitées grâce aux algorithmes de navigation qui permettent d’estimer les flux optiques ventraux et d’expansion ainsi que le tangage.Nous avons également montré qu’il est possible de contrôler l’atterrisseur planétaire en faisant suivre aux flux optiques estimés une consigne optimale au sens de la consommation d’énergie. Les simulations réalisées durant la thèse ont permis de valider le fonctionnement et le potentiel de la solution GNC proposée en intégrant le code du capteur ainsi que des images simulées du sol de la lune
In this PhD thesis, the challenge of autonomous lunar landing was addressed and an innovative method was developed, which provides an alternative to the classical sensor suites based on RADAR, LIDAR and cameras, which tend to be bulky, energy consuming and expensive. The first part is devoted to the development of a sensor inspired by the fly’s visual sensitivity to optic flow (OF). The OF is an index giving the relative angular velocity of the environment sensed by the retina of a moving insect or robot. In a fixed environment (where there is no external motion), the self-motion of an airborne vehicle generates an OF containing information about its own velocity and attitude and the distance to obstacles. Based on the “Time of Travel” principle we present the results obtained for two versions of 5 LMSs based optic flow sensors. The first one is able to measure accurately the OF in two opposite directions. It was tested in the laboratory and gave satisfying results. The second optic flow sensor operates at low velocities such as those liable to occur during lunar landing was developed. After developing these sensors, their performances were characterized both indoors and outdoors, and lastly, they were tested onboard an 80-kg helicopter flying in an outdoor environment. The Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) system was designed in the second part on the basis of several algorithms, using various tools such as optimal control, nonlinear control design and observation theory. This is a particularly innovative approach, since it makes it possible to perform soft landing on the basis of OF measurements and as less as possible on inertial sensors. The final constraints imposed by our industrial partners were met by mounting several non-gimbaled sensors oriented in different gaze directions on the lander’s structure. Information about the lander’s self-motion present in the OF measurements is extracted by navigation algorithms, which yield estimates of the ventral OF, expansion OF and pitch angle. It was also established that it is possible to bring the planetary lander gently to the ground by tracking a pre-computed optimal reference trajectory in terms of the lowest possible fuel consumption. Software-in-the-loop simulations were carried out in order to assess the potential of the proposed GNC approach by testing its performances. In these simulations, the sensor firmware was taken into account and virtual images of the lunar surface were used in order to improve the realism of the simulated landings

碩士
國立臺北科技大學
電機工程系所
98
This thesis presents vision-based compliance control of robots including two dual-arm mobile robots and an industrial manipulator. Two approaches have been accomplished for compliance motion control. One is for object grasping task by two cooperative mobile robots both equipped with dual arms. The two mobile robots, master and slave, are controlled under an visual intelligent space with compliance motion of the arms for cooperatively moving an object to a target. A compliance control strategy without any force sensor is proposed for the arms of the slave robot to react against impact during the task. The other approach is for an industrial 6-DOF manipulator. The manipulator is equipped with a 6-axis force sensor. A vision-based compliance control law with force sensing is proposed. The tasks of interacting with unknown surfaces have been experimented for verifying the effectiveness of the proposed controller. Both approaches have been successfully validated by experiments. In particular, two Dr Robot i90 mobile robots have been used for implementing cooperative object grasping and a Mitsubishi RV-1A manipulator has been utilized for performing compliance motion control.

碩士
國立臺灣科技大學
機械工程系
94
A servo control IC for robot arm using SOPC technology is presented in this thesis. A gobang game is implemented in the system by using vision feedback to recognition pieces in the board. In the proposed servo control IC, there are two modules. One module is implemented by hardware circuit. Its functions are five quadrature encoder pulse process, ten limit switches detect, five pulse width modulation generator and CMOS image sensor signal capture. The other module is implemented by software using Nios II micro processor. Its functions are an UART to connection with PC, inverse kinematics of robot arm, point to point motion control, continuous motion trajectory control, sequential control, self organization fuzzy control, fuzzy sliding mode control, digital image processing and gobang game AI algorithm. The digital hardware circuits are design by Verilog language and programs in Nios II micro processor is coded in C language. The FPGA chip adopts ALTERA Statrix II EP2S60F672C5ES on the development board. The CMOS color image sensor adopts PIXART PAS106BCB283 which resolution is 356×292 pixels. At last, an integrated experimental system which includes Nios II development board, five axis robot arm, DC motor drivers and CMOS image sensor has been constructed. Some experimental results have been provided and demonstrated the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed servo control system.

碩士
大葉大學
機械與自動化工程學系
106
This thesis developed vision-based motion control of parallel robot for pick and place. A personal computer, a CCD, a Delta robot, a Micro-Box controller and servo drive system were integrated in the thesis. The image processing, trajectory planning and motion control program were written to achieve the control picking and placing motion using Matlab software development platform. Firstly, the forward and reverse kinematics was derived for the Delta robotic arm. A CCD was used to capture the image of the unknown object on the work surface. the image processing program was then developed to determine its position in the Cartesian coordinates. Accordingly, the trajectory was planned to obtain the shortest motion path of the robot arm. The angle values of the three- axe robot arm were calculated by inverse kinematics. The motion control program was written using the Simulink software development platform. The Micro-Box controller was used to control the movement of the arm's three-axis actuators, and completed the precise and fast pick-and-place operation of objects in unknown positions. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified by various software and hardware simulations and experiments.

碩士
國立高雄第一科技大學
機械與自動化工程所
93
In this paper, the punching machine is made up by a toggle mechanism driven by a permanent magnet (PM) synchronous servomotor. First, Hamilton’s principle, Lagrange multiplier, geometric constraints and partitioning method are employed to derive its dynamic equations. The system parameters are difficult to obtain if the mechanism’s components can not be taken apart. The recursive least-squares (RLS) method is implemented to identify these parameters. This paper presents the comparisons of the visual servoing feedback motion control with the fuzzy logic control (FLC) and adaptive controller by using the stability analysis with inertia-related Lyapunov function to the punching machine. The main purpose of the punching machine is to transport the work pieces to a fixed position for manufacture. To satisfy the demand of the machine performance, three controllers including the FLC and adaptive controller are designed to control the slider responses. Distinguish from the previous studies, the vision servo system of an non-contact measurement of a charge coupled device (CCD) camera is employed in this paper to control the color pattern output state instead of using the expensive linear scale or encoder of the motor-mechanism coupled system. Finally, from the well agreements between numerical simulations and experimental results, it is convinced that the proposed controller by using of machine vision is robust to external disturbances for a punching machine system.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Predictive control and intermittent setpoints are proposed to overcome the dead time that problem occurs in a new class of high precision position sensor for manufacturing equipment. In place of a rotary encoder or linear glass scale, a combination of a digital camera and a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screen is used to actively monitor two dimensional position changes on an XY table. In order to achieve precise spatial resolution, an actively-controlled planar pixel matrix is used as the tracking target for the system. A digital camera senses the location of the moving image displayed on the LCD screen and provides 2 dimensional position feedback. Thus, the timing and the quality of the visual feedback to the controller are the significant factors to determine the accuracy of the system. Due to the long image processing time, the vision feedback of the actual position of the stage is delayed. At the same time, with the slow frame capturing rates of the camera, dead time occurs between consecutive acquisitions of feedback signals from the vision system to the motion controller, which is detrimental to the performance of the system. Hence, studies and detailed analysis on different dead time compensation strategies and path planning algorithms have been performed to select the optimal strategy to address these challenges. Based on simulation results, a proposed method for integrating predictive control with virtual intermittent setpoints algorithm to mitigate dead time problem is presented in the final section of the paper.

This paper presents the vision system and visual processing for a biomimetic elastic cable-driven quadruped robot—RoboCat. The paper is geared towards selection of appropriate visual servoing techniques for RoboCat such as vision algorithms, high-level cognition algorithms, software architecture and hardware implementation. The system uses two video cameras for stereo vision data acquisition and a SUMIT-ism form factor embedded computer for vision data processing. The vision system employs a color based target recognition algorithm, a neural network based shape recognition algorithm and a Color and Zernike moment based face detection algorithm. The paper presents the vision algorithms, vision guidance and motion tracking algorithms, rule-based decision making algorithms and the open architecture of the autonomous vision tracking system. Experimental testing results (including video clips) are also presented.

Abstract A real-time and effective double-loop feedback control system for underwater flexible manipulators is raised in this paper. The research object is a kind of underwater flexible manipulator driven by McKibben water hydraulic artificial muscle (WHAM) that can grasp, swallow, and disgorge target objects in its interior space. To make up for the lack of flexibility, an underwater flexible manipulator collaborative working strategy is proposed. A more flexible and smaller flexible manipulator is placed inside the flexible manipulator to assist it in performing difficult underwater works. The control system feeds back the position of internal objects through a built-in binocular camera and the working state of the manipulator through displacement sensors. The control system setups including underwater flexible manipulator subsystem, hydraulic drive subsystem, PLC control subsystem, displacement sensor subsystem, built-in binocular vision subsystem, and upper computer subsystem is built. PYTHON-based built-in binocular vision software and C++-based underwater flexible manipulator control software are also developed to facilitate observation and recording. The underwater flexible manipulator collaborative experiment is designed to verify the performance of the control system and the control algorithm.

Modern automobiles contain various mechatronical components to support the task of driving. To enhance driver vision and driving safety at night time, advanced lighting systems, such as a predictive advanced front lighting system (PAFS) enhance automotive lighting by swiveling the headlights horizontally into approaching curves on a winding road. In addition to this, basic leveling light systems tilt the headlights vertically, in order to adjust to the vehicle chassis pitch due to the vehicle load or suspension effects based on the vehicle dynamics from driving on a rough road. More advanced leveling systems even account for the vertical course of an undulating road using GPS-data to locate the vehicle’s position plus digital map data to predict the vertical course of the road in front of the vehicle. That way, the headlights follow the road curvature and illuminate the road ahead of the vehicle without glaring oncoming traffic. In order to design, evaluate, and optimize the control algorithm within the electronic control unit (ECU) of the leveling light system, various control parameter values need to be adjusted and fine-tuned to ensure an optimal response of the system to the current road scenario. For this task, numerous time-consuming and costly test drives at night are necessary. This paper proposes to use a Virtual Reality-based night driving simulator as tool to simulate and evaluate an advanced leveling light system. The PC-based night drive simulator visualizes the complex beam patterns of automotive headlights in high detail and in real-time. The user drives a simulated vehicle over a virtual test track at night, while the vehicle motion directly affects the lighting direction of headlights. Thus, the effect of the vehicle dynamics on the lighting can be evaluated directly in the simulator. The system is connected to the control algorithm of the advanced leveling light system, which controls the headlights tilting angle. This provides a close-to-reality simulation of the advanced leveling light system during a simulated drive at night. That way, within the virtual prototyping process of the advanced leveling light system, good combinations of control parameter values can be indentified, based on virtual test drives in the night driving simulator, and the number of real test drives can be reduced significantly. Promising combinations of the control parameter values then can be validated during a real test drive a night.