Sharif Digital Repository

Temporal relation extraction is one of the challenging research topics in natural language processing semantic level. The purpose of this kind of extraction is to find the temporal ordering between text events so that they can be used in various applications such as question answering and summarization systems.Most of early researches in temporal relation extractionaimed at finding a number of rules and templates for every single temporal relation in English texts. However, with the availability of temporal corpora in English and some other natural languages like Chinese, Korean, Italian, etc., the research trend in this field turned towards the use of machine learning methods. Accordingly,... 

Successful performance of forward heuristic planners in classical planning, has motivated the use of forward heuristic search in many temporal planners. Most of forward temporal planners are decision epoch planners that use an explicit representation of time and schedule actions while searching. However, decision epoch planners aren’t complete and cannot solve certain temporal problems with required concurrency. In this dissertation, we present ATFP, a forward temporal planner that does not use an explicit representation of time. In ATFP, duration of actions are temporarily ignored, and a causally valid order of beginnings and endings of actions is searched using classical forward heuristic... 

Laser ultrasonic is a novel method for measuring sheet parameters. In this technique an intense pulse is irradiated to the target which instantaneously vaporizes the surface layer into the high temperature and high pressure plasma. Expansion of plasma produces shock wave that propagates through the surface. Mechanical properties of target can be calculated by measuring and analyzing produced shock wave. In this project wave propagation is simulated using finite element and numerical-computation methods. The numerical-computation simulation was performed using lamb wave equations. ANSYS software was employed for finite element simulation. The results corroborate each other. Next, simulation... 

The reflective optical rotary encoders are used greatly in automation systems for speed and position measurements. Their approach of reading code as pulses which results in position and speed information is very similar to what a CD-ROM driver performs to read the saved data as pits and lands on the compact disc data layer. Moreover, the micron size of pits and lands in compact disc promise a high-resolution, and low cost rotary encoder based on CD-ROM technology. In this thesis, two concepts of length coding and hybrid incremental-absolute coded discs are proposed. To verify the implementation of these concepts, the rotary encoder set based on CD-ROM technology is designed and tested. It... 

The main objective of this project is to investigate modeling for a robotic swarm with suitable sensors and to analyze effect of sensory noise on the control and unity of the swarm. This project is an extension of analytical study done by S. Etemadi, A. Alasty and G. Vossoughi in Sharif University of technology. The flocking frame assumed to have a leader robot that controls over all behavior of the swarm made of agents’ robots with limited equipments and low intelligence that only obey some basic attraction and repulsion laws that will be explained. As an initial step of the analysis, we investigate proper physical model, sensors and navigation systems suitable to the model. Next, the... 

Nowadays, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are implemented to carry out various activities under water. Amongst applications of these vehicles we can mention monitoring of marine creatures, mine installation and neutralization, and many military applications. The objective of this research is designing a control algorithm for underwater vehicles such that an under actuated vehicle can reckon a moving target as a reference and whilst chasing it, vehicle can keep a fixed distance from this target. First the dynamics of underwater vehicles are modeled and in this modeling different effects due to under water motion such as drag force, buoyancy force, and also added mass are included... 

In this paper, the general research of impedance control is addressed for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base moving manipulators (FBMM) is rather new and is being considered. The dynamic of manipulator is decomposed into slow and fast dynamics using singular perturbation method. New sliding mode impedance control method (SMIC), using an element on the end effector is proposed for high precision impedance control of FBMM. The sliding mode impedance control method as a robust impedance control law is derived for the... 

Modeling and Control are fundamental issues for fish robots, which can play basic roles in design, optimization, fabrication, and eventually utilization of them. A review on the literature reveals the shortage of an analytical closed form model with little simplifications and high precision, and also control works based on such models. Studying LAEBT theory, it is shown that this theory is suitable for determining the forces produced due to the tail movements considered in the present work, and then it is used to determine the forces. Experimental investigations by means of the setup made for this purpose showed that the obtained equations for the forces have got acceptable precision.... 

Nowadays exoskeltons are developed because of improvements carried out in mechatronic technologies, to use in applications such as human rehabilitation and power augmentation. By reason of interaction between exoskeleton robot and human, an appropriate control strategy should be considered to implement regulated interaction force between them. As an example there are situations that a person wants to carry heavy load with this robot without suffering from weight of the load, so control of robot movements is of great importance. The aim of this thesis is dedicated to develop and implement a control strategy achieving minimum ineraction force in a 2 degree of freedom lower limb exoskeleton.... 

The main goal of this thesis is to develop and implement a variable Impedance control method with the ability to refine the desired gait in an online manner. For this purpose, a dataset consisting of 89 healthy gaits was utilized. Then, “Basic shapes” were driven using principal component analysis and their meaningfulness was investigated. Regarding the meaningfulness of coefficients of basic shapes, a normality metric was defined to evaluate the human gaits. Furthermore, as a reference gait refinement in Impedance control, an outer loop was added to change the desired gait, according to traversed gait. Kalman filter was used to estimate the coefficients of basic shapes in this loop. In... 

The goal of this project is to propose an algorithm to detect human motion intent during level walking. The primary aim of this algorithm should be to reduce human-robot interaction forces by combining EMG and force signals. Human gait is composed of 6 different stages. During each stage, each muscle is activated differently so it is possible to detect human intent by a pattern recognition technique. However, due to the fact that EMG signals are unrepeatable and noisy, we propose that combining EMG, motion and interaction force signals may lead to more concise and repeatable estimates of human motion intent. As a result, this control approach is expected to reduce human robot interaction... 

With the development of technology in the field of control, biomechanics and robotics, wearable robots have found many applications in the field of rehabilitation and empowerment. In the empowerment phase, due to the interaction of these robots with humans, it is necessary to manage the interaction forces between the robot and humans with the help of appropriate control methods. One of the applications of these robots is when a person wants to carry a heavy load attached to the structure of the robot and the robot should be able to transfer the force caused by this load to the ground. At this time, humans should not be exposed to this load and the relationship between the robot and humans... 

In this project, the final goal is to create a team consisting of a UGV and a quadrotor capable of relative tracking and coordinated landing, with focus on quadrotor control. What we mean by cooperative control in this project is control of quadrotor for the purpose of cooperation with a UGV; This should not be mistaken with another sense of cooperative control in which the control algorithms are developed for both of the robots or are based on the interactive dynamics of the robots.In order to accomplish this goal, an experimental testbed consisting of a quadrotor and a UGV capable of communication and data exchange was developed as a first step. The quadrotor was constructed using... 

Nowadays filtration process is increasingly used in various areas such as water purification, food industries, filtering the air dust and other separation applications. In this work, the HDPE microporous filters have been fabricated at different temperature, pressure and time conditions via sintering process and then were characterized by different techniques. It can be expected that microstructure and mechanical properties of the samples could be controlled by changing the fabrication parameters of the process and also by changing the properties of the resin such as powder shape, particle size and rheological properties. In the first step, by using DSC, MFI, rheology test and optical... 

Polyethylene is one of the most widely used industrial materials for producing water and gas pipes due to low pricing and mechanical properties and high corrosion resistance. Various parameters such as molecular weight and the short chain branches distribution strongly affect the mechanical properties of these materials. PE100 grade of this material has been introduced with bimodal molecular weight distribution, has excellent mechanical properties and especially high creep resistance and today is used for pipe production in water distribution systems. In the first part of this study, the effect of 1-butene comonomers on different properties of three PE100 and two PE80 resins produced in... 

To reduce material consumption needed in production as well as avoiding thousands of tons of contaminations produced by spent materials in the battery industry, recycling was taken into consideration. In this study silica was recycled from spent lead-acid battery separators by the pyrolysis process. silica along with high-density polyethylene (HDPE), can be used as supporting material for fabricating form-stable phase change materials (FSPCM). FSPCMs are of great ability to be used as thermal energy storage (TES) in different parts of a building e. g. wallboards to reduce energy consumption. In this line, an eutectic mixture of lauric acid, palmitic acid and paraffin with the melting point... 

This research focuses on the robust mobile robot localization exploiting motion information acquired from an optical mouse operating based on optical flow technology. Most techniques of visual motion measurement are based on the well research discipline called “optical flow”. Theoretically, optical flow as a method of localization can be highly accurate, but it is sensitive to the noise and surface texture/optical characteristics and distance variations between the CCD detector and surface. As one could not achieve acceptable results in practical situations, to handle these problems, we propose to attach an acceleration – gyro (INS) sensor on the CCD detector (optical mouse) to improve the... 

Robot navigation and guidance is an important issue in robotic. Navigation by itself includes localization, path planning and guidance. For having a successful navigation it is necessary to succeed in all of those parts. The localization precision as basic part of localization is important and having more accurate information of robot position is important. Recently, sensors which use optical flow technic and are widely used in optical mouses are so common and they are able to measure displacement with resolution of 3 to 63 micron. In this research, a localization method for micro robot localization based on optical flow and INS sensor data fusion is presented.
Two data fusion method... 

The present study deals with designing controller for Therapeutic Exercise Robots which belongs to larger group namely Rehabilitation robots. Therapeutic exercise robots are often realized in shape of exoskeleton robots. The main line of present research is involved with, designing controller for lower limb therapeutic exercise robots and offering and implementing technical rehabilitation ideas. Firstly, in order to have a reliable position-control, considering practical limitations (e.g. system uncertainties), a robust adaptive control has been designed. Adaptive control can deals with parameters uncertainties and covering unstructured uncertainties (e.g. disturbance and noise) can be... 

• Brachiation robot is a kind of under-actuated robots. A brachiating robot is a type of a mobile arm that is capable of moving from branch to branch similar to a long-armed ape. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot using neural network and geometry control. For this purpose a genetic algorithm based training Neural Network is used to produce a suitable path for the second link of the robot and then using input-output linearization method, the second link is controlled to follow the path. The simulations shows that the Nero Controller designed in this thesis is suitable. The controller can...