Dither signal effects on the resolution of nonlinear quantizers

The consequences of dithering on nonlinear quantizers are analyzed. A model of the nonlinear quantizer is considered, and a model of the same quantizer with dither is proposed. By means of this approach, relationships are given for the total quantization error in the case of discrete binary, uniform, and Gaussian dither signals     

Estimating thermal stress in BIPV modules

The thermal stress on building‐integrated photovoltaic modules (BIPV) in Espoo, Finland, was studied with field‐testing of amorphous silicon modules. Based on these results, the thermal stress at two other European locations (Paris and Lisbon) was estimated. The estimation procedure entailed thermal modelling of heat transfer in the façade with meteorological data as input. The results indicate that the thermal stress on BIPV modules in Lisbon is, in this case, approximately 50% higher that in Espoo and between 80 and 200% higher than in Paris, depending on the activation energy of the degradation process. The difference in stress between a BIPV module and a free‐standing module in Espoo was 50–200%. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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Adsorption of mercaptopropionic acid onto Au(1 1 1): Part II. Effect on copper electrodeposition

Copper deposition in the presence of an organic additive (3-mercaptopropionic acid, MPA) was studied by cyclic voltammetry and in situ scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and the results are compared to those for additive-free solutions. It is shown that underpotential deposition (upd) of copper onto a fully MPA-covered electrode produces a defect-rich substrate, but the defects are blocked by the dense organic film for bulk deposition, resulting in a low number of nuclei. A grain-refining effect of MPA, however, was found, when Cu deposition was initiated shortly after addition of MPA to the solution, i.e., for a low-coverage MPA adlayer.     

PIXHAWK: A micro aerial vehicle design for autonomous flight using onboard computer vision

We describe a novel quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) system that is designed to use computer vision algorithms within the flight control loop. The main contribution is a MAV system that is able to run both the vision-based flight control and stereo-vision-based obstacle detection parallelly on an embedded computer onboard the MAV. The system design features the integration of a powerful onboard computer and the synchronization of IMU-Vision measurements by hardware timestamping which allows tight integration of IMU measurements into the computer vision pipeline. We evaluate the accuracy of marker-based visual pose estimation for flight control and demonstrate marker-based autonomous flight including obstacle detection using stereo vision. We also show the benefits of our IMU-Vision synchronization for egomotion estimation in additional experiments where we use the synchronized measurements for pose estimation using the 2pt+gravity formulation of the PnP problem.     

Breaking Symmetries and Constraints: Transitions from 2D to 3D in Passive Walkers

The inherent dynamics of bipedal, passive mechanisms are studiedto investigate the relation between motions constrained to two-dimensional (2D)planes and those free to move in a three-dimensional (3D) environment. Inparticular, we develop numerical and analytical techniques usingdynamical-systems methodology to address the persistence and stabilitychanges of periodic, gait-like motions due to the relaxation ofconfiguration constraints and the breaking of problem symmetries. Theresults indicate the limitations of a 2D analysis to predictthe dynamics in the 3D environment. For example, it is shownhow the loss of constraints may introduce characteristically non-2Dinstability mechanisms, and how small symmetry-breaking terms may result inthe termination of solution branches.