IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072081
H. Lund
{"title":"Modular robotics in an African context","authors":"H. Lund","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072081","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we review the concept, development and use of modular robotic devices for education, health improvements, and business in Africa. The modular robotics inspired technology has the advantage of allowing any user easy access to a physical construction of new and advanced technology. We conceptualized several educational tools inspired by modular robotics for contextualized IT education in Tanzania, leading to a novel IT degree program and the development of East Africa's first science and business park in Iringa, Tanzania. The prototypes inspired by modular robotics were developed in the local, rural context and tested by local users in hospitals and rehabilitation centres. In this paper, we review the development of both modular building blocks for education and modular robotic tiles for rehabilitation in Tanzania.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130331215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072134
A. Halinka, P. Sowa, M. Szewczyk
{"title":"Adaptive decision-taking of protection systems in networks with dispersed power generating sources","authors":"A. Halinka, P. Sowa, M. Szewczyk","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072134","url":null,"abstract":"Incorporating renewable energy sources into the power system is connected with a number of new challenges, i.e. for the power system protections. Thus, several problems have been identified in addition to the factors which occur in such systems without the connected i.e. wind farms. Taking the presence of wind farms into account, the selectivity and the speed of decisions of distance protection will probably be very limited. One of the possible solutions will be creating protection systems which use data from the selected area of the power system network to increase the correctness of decision-taking by adapting settings of protection functions to the changing conditions. This paper will discuss the proposal of such a solution as well its simulation results.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130532983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072054
A. Senn, A. Peter, J. Korvink
{"title":"Analog circuit synthesis using two-port theory and genetic programming","authors":"A. Senn, A. Peter, J. Korvink","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072054","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a novel approach for analog electronic circuits synthesis using two-port theory and genetic programming. In contrast to other approaches, circuits are modeled as two-port networks which enables a straight forward encoding and evaluation of the circuit's structure. In this way, a number of active and passive linear circuits were synthesized and optimised for multiple objectives. The algorithm output comprises both evolved topologies and the corresponding component values.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123846485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072037
M. Tsoeu, M. Esmail
{"title":"Unconstrained MPC and PID evaluation for motion profile tracking applications","authors":"M. Tsoeu, M. Esmail","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072037","url":null,"abstract":"Motion porfile tracking control forms an integral part of most industrial applications ranging from manufacturing, where planned motion robots perform assebly tasks, medical applications for position patients and moving scanners across patient bodies and unmanned vehicle applications such as automated parking. In all these applications, the challanges are keeping the tracking error as low as possible, using as low a control effort as can be afforded. Numerous control methods ranging from PID, to Sliding Mode Control (SMC) have been researched in this regard, some with great succes. With the objectives and aspects of motion profile tracking, specifically a desired trajectory that is known apriori, it is intuitive to assume that Model Predictive Control (MPC) which is heavily rooted on the use of future information would be a good candidate for such applications. In this paper we test optimally tunned MPC and PID controllers for motion profile tracking applications, and draw comparisons based on Pareto optimality. Optimal controller tunning is performed and simulation as well of experimental tests of some of the pareto optimal points are undertaken for comparisons. The results for PID control are reasonable and MPC gives unanticipated outcomes.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124375057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072061
M. Pongratz, R. Velik, J. Machajdik
{"title":"Spatio-temporal perception nets","authors":"M. Pongratz, R. Velik, J. Machajdik","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072061","url":null,"abstract":"State of the art approaches to autonomous systems face the challenge of sensor data fusion, abstraction, classification, and prediction of events. The trend is going towards the integration of more and more sensors into automation systems, which will reach a number of sensors comparable to the amount of sensory receptors in the human body in the not too distant future. While today's technical systems cannot cope with such a flood of information to be processed rapidly, these challenges are mastered exceptionally well by the human brain. Based on this observation, in prior work, a biologically inspired model for sensor data processing has been proposed [1]. This socalled neuro-symbolic information processing model is based on a functional model of the human perception system. Here, an extension of this concept to spatial and temporal aspects of perception is presented. The challenges for solving these tasks as well as the strategies to master these challenges based on perception-nets are presented.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115771959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072027
A. Jalalirad, H. Amindavar, Rodney Lynn Kirlin
{"title":"Characteristic function based method for SVM classification of maneuvering over the horizon targets","authors":"A. Jalalirad, H. Amindavar, Rodney Lynn Kirlin","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072027","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we propose a new classification method based on characteristic function (CF) and support vector machine (SVM). In order to validate the new approach, we classify three groups of airborne over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) targets. Since signal models make the basis for analysis and enhancement of OTHR performance, choosing an appropriate model has always been a matter of concern. On the other hand, the returned signal from a maneuvering target is more often a multi-component signal with time-varying frequency, hence, we model the received signal as being comprised of a chirp faded by the radar cross section (RCS) plus Gaussian white noise and K-distributed (un)correlated clutter. Little work has been done on OTHR target classification. In order to assess the new classification approach based on CF, we compare our method with discriminant analysis (DA), decision tree (DT), and multi-layer Perceptron neural network (NN). It will be depicted through extensive simulations that the proposed CF and multi-phase SVM method's error in classifying airborne targets is about 3.5% less than existing classification methods'.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115772950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072070
Krzysztof Stachowiak, J. Weissenberg, P. Zwierzykowski
{"title":"Lagrangian relaxation in the multicriterial routing","authors":"Krzysztof Stachowiak, J. Weissenberg, P. Zwierzykowski","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072070","url":null,"abstract":"Communications networks routing is not a new subject. However, with a growth of packet networks and the increase of their range and importance, the task of conveying information over the web has grown beyond its original shape and has become far more sophisticated. It is no longer computer scientists and the military that make use of the global network exclusively; it can be stated that almost every possible group from the global population has numerous representatives among Internet users. This fact is coupled with a decrease in the popularity of the original communication media such as the telephone and the e-mail. This is mainly due to them being assimilated into packet networks along with the process of network convergence. A number of different types of information streams in packet networks has been observed and classified. It turns out that careful resources management itself may lead to an increase in the information transporting efficiency. In this paper, an approach is explored - the Lagrangian relaxation - that enables incorporating multiple criteria into the routing problem solution. At the same time, the low computation complexity is maintained that enables further consideration of the technique also in practical scenarios.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132022470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072180
T. Nagaoka, Soichi Watanabe
{"title":"GPU-based 3D-FDTD computation for electromagnetic field dosimetry","authors":"T. Nagaoka, Soichi Watanabe","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072180","url":null,"abstract":"Numerical dosimetry with the computational human model using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method has recently been used for a safety assessment of electromagnetic field applications. However, the FDTD calculation runs very slowly and requires a large amount of computational memory. We focus, therefore, on general purpose programming on the graphics processing unit (GPGPU). We implemented the three-dimensional (3D) FDTD method on GPUs using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). In this study, we used the NVIDIA Tesla C2070 as a GPGPU board and tested the performance of FDTD computation on GPUs. The results indicated that while the single GPU/CPU speed ratio varies depending on the calculation domain, 3D-FDTD computation using a GPU requires significantly less run time than that using a conventional CPU. We confirmed that the FDTD computation on a multi-GPU is much faster than that on a single GPU, and we also found that eight GPUs can compute faster than a vector supercomputer.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134099607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072106
Josef Mitterbauer, H. Zeilinger, Stefan Kohlhauser, T. Turek, Michael Kreilmeier
{"title":"Reliable data distribution in voice communication environments","authors":"Josef Mitterbauer, H. Zeilinger, Stefan Kohlhauser, T. Turek, Michael Kreilmeier","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6072106","url":null,"abstract":"Due to lowering equipment and maintenance costs as well as optimization towards fast failure detection and convergence time, Ethernet based technologies have found their way into safety critical communication systems. This article focuses on message-oriented transfer of data packets matching ordering, reliability, and group membership criteria. Messaging systems, available under open source licenses, are discussed with respect to a specified use case; two of them - Corosync and Spread Toolkit - are analyzed regarding their scalability within a loss-free Local Area Network. A functionality analysis in case of network partitions is out of focus for this work. The results show slight advantages of Spread over Corosync for the defined use case. Even though, Corosync enables sending significantly higher message rates for a low number of recipients, Spread catches up and succeeds in case these numbers increase.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130739621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE Africon '11Pub Date : 2011-11-10DOI: 10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6071990
Joseph Wamicha, S. Winberg
{"title":"IEEE 802.11 OFDM Software Defined Radio beacon frame transmission","authors":"Joseph Wamicha, S. Winberg","doi":"10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6071990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2011.6071990","url":null,"abstract":"A transmit chain test bed is used in the project presented in this paper to test an 802.11g OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) Software Defined Radio (SDR) base station beacon frame transmitter. Several prior Gnuradio test bed setups show how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to communicate with another Gnuradio SDR. This paper additionally shows how a Gnuradio SDR Transmitter is able to visibly communicate with off-the-shelf 802.11 WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) off-the-shelf chips. Results of the implementation show that a SDR base station is successfully able to communicate with traditional WLAN off-the-shelf communication chips found inside devices such as laptops, netbooks and mobile phones, which were used as the OFDM beacon frame receptors.","PeriodicalId":125684,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Africon '11","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133568031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}