Astral Body: A Virtual Reality Game for Body Ownership Investigation

As one of the most disruptive human-computer interaction techniques, Virtual Reality (VR) provides a novel way to examine human movements, e.g. when investigating Body Ownership (BO) in the field of cognitive sciences, especially when the visual output diverges from real-world actions. Previous research in BO uses questionnaires and brain...

Control for Bipolar DC Microgrid and DC/DC Bidirectional Converter in Energy Access Context

Rural electrification remains a significant challenge for engineers, given its intricate relationship with multiple issues, including geographical constraints and underdeveloped infrastructural provisions. As a result, with the development of Solar Home Systems (SHS) and direct current (DC) microgrids, DC systems for energy access have emerged...

Implementation of Active Damping Control Methodology on Modular Multilevel Converter(MMC)-Based Arbitrary Wave Shape Generator Used for High Voltage Testing

In order to damp the resonance in the MMC-based Arbitrary Wave shape Generator (AWG) used for high voltage testing, an active damping control methodology is proposed in this paper instead of the passive damping with an arm resistor. It is vital to ensure the system’s stability when such an active damping closed loop control is implemented....

Advanced controls on energy reliability, flexibility and occupant-centric control for smart and energy-efficient buildings

Advanced controls have attracted increasing interests due to the high requirement on smart and energy-efficient (SEE) buildings and decarbonization in the building industry with optimal tradeoff strategies between energy consumption and thermal comfort of built environment. However, a state-of-the-art review is lacking on advanced controls...

Power Disequilibrium Suppression in Bipolar DC Distribution Grids By Using A Series-Parallel Power Flow Controller

The unbalanced power between positive and negative poles in a bipolar DC distribution network (DC-DN) generates an unbalanced current at the neutral line, which enlarges the power losses of the system and the voltage deviation of DC loads. An unbalanced power suppression strategy based on a series-parallel power flow controller (SP-PFC) is...

Contour Moments Based Manipulation of Composite Rigid-Deformable Objects With Finite Time Model Estimation and Shape/Position Control

The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e., those with mixed nonhomogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has not been sufficiently studied in the literature. To deal with this issue, in this article, we propose a...

Application of abandoned wells integrated with renewables

The large thermal potentials with geothermal gradient of abandoned wells provide the possibility and opportunity for carbon-neutrality transition of district heating systems, whereas energy harvesting from abandoned geothermal wells is full of challenges, due to the considerable initial investment in economic cost, system performance...

ArduPilot-Based Adaptive Autopilot: Architecture and Software-in-The-Loop Experiments

This article presents an adaptive method for ArduPilot-based autopilots of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ArduPilot is a popular open-source unmanned vehicle software suite. We explore how to augment the PID loops embedded inside ArduPilot with a model-free adaptive control method. The adaptive augmentation, adopted for both...

Stable Spinning Deployment Control of a Triangle Tethered Formation System

The tethered formation system has been widely studied due to its extensive use in aerospace engineering, such as Earth observation, orbital location, and deep space exploration. The deployment of such a multitethered system is a problem because of the oscillations and complex formation maintenance caused by the space tether's elasticity and...

Barrier Lypunov functions-based nonsingular fixed-time switching control for strict-feedback nonlinear dynamics with full state constraints

This work proposes a nonsingular adaptive fixed-time switching control method for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear dynamics subject to full state constraints. The peculiarity of this design lies in overcoming the singularity issue that typically appears in the existing backstepping-based fixed-time control methods caused by the iterative...

Coordination Control of Power Flow Controller and Hybrid DC Circuit Breaker in MVDC Distribution Networks

The two main challenges of medium voltage direct current (MVDC) distribution network are the flexible control of power flow (PF) and fault protection. In this paper, the power flow controller (PFC) is introduced to regulate the PF and inhibit the fault current during the DC fault. The coordination strategy of series-parallel PFC (SP-PFC) and...

A Highly Linear Wideband Polar Class-E CMOS Digital Doherty Power Amplifier

This article presents the first application of a digital-intensive intrinsically linear digitally controlled class-E technique in a Doherty configuration. By careful nonlinear segmentation and multiphase RF-clocking along with overdrive-voltage control and automatic duty-cycle correction, it is shown that even the nonlinearities related to...

Relaxing the control-gain assumptions of DSC design for nonlinear MIMO systems

This work focuses on adaptive neural dynamic surface control (DSC) for an extended class of nonlinear MIMO strict-feedback systems whose control gain functions are continuous and possibly unbounded. The method is based on introducing a compact set which is eventually proved to be an invariant set: thanks to this set, the restrictive...

Online reinforcement learning control for aerospace systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are relatively new in the field of aerospace guidance, navigation, and control. This dissertation aims to exploit RL methods to improve the autonomy and online learning of aerospace systems with respect to the a priori unknown system and environment, dynamical uncertainties, and partial observability. In the...

A university building test case for occupancy-based building automation

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) units in buildings form a system-of-subsystems entity that must be accurately integrated and controlled by the building automation system to ensure the occupants' comfort with reduced energy consumption. As control of HVACs involves a standardized hierarchy of high-level set-point control and...

Adaptive spacecraft attitude control with incremental approximate dynamic programming

This paper presents an adaptive control technique to deal with spacecraft attitude tracking and disturbance rejection problems in the presence of model uncertainties. Approximate dynamic programming has been proposed to solve adaptive, optimal control problems without using accurate systems models. Within this category, linear approximate...

Wideband high-efficiency Doherty Power Amplifiers

Operation of grid-connected DFIG under unbalanced grid voltage condition

Doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) still shares a large part in today's wind power market. It provides the benefits of variable speed operation cost-effectively, and can control its active and reactive power independently. Crowbar protection is often adopted to protect the rotor-side voltage source converter (VSC) from transient overcurrent...