Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemAutomatic Detection and Classification of Convulsive Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures Using a Wearable Device(IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC, 2016-07)Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders and patients suffer from unprovoked seizures. In contrast, psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are another class of seizures that are involuntary events not caused by abnormal electrical discharges but are a manifestation of psychological distress. The similarity of these two types of seizures poses diagnostic challenges that often leads in delayed diagnosis of PNES. Further, the diagnosis of PNES involves high-cost hospital admission and monitoring using video-electroencephalogram machines. A wearable device that can monitor the patient in natural setting is a desired solution for diagnosis of convulsive PNES. A wearable device with an accelerometer sensor is proposed as a new solution in the detection and diagnosis of PNES. The seizure detection algorithm and PNES classification algorithm are developed. The developed algorithms are tested on data collected from convulsive epileptic patients. A very high seizure detection rate is achieved with 100% sensitivity and few false alarms. A leave-one-out error of 6.67% is achieved in PNES classification, demonstrating the usefulness of wearable device in the diagnosis of PNES.
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ItemCrowd Event Detection on Optical Flow Manifolds(IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC, 2016-07)Analyzing crowd events in a video is key to understanding the behavioral characteristics of people (humans). Detecting crowd events in videos is challenging because of articulated human movements and occlusions. The aim of this paper is to detect the events in a probabilistic framework for automatically interpreting the visual crowd behavior. In this paper, crowd event detection and classification in optical flow manifolds (OFMs) are addressed. A new algorithm to detect walking and running events has been proposed, which uses optical flow vector lengths in OFMs. Furthermore, a new algorithm to detect merging and splitting events has been proposed, which uses Riemannian connections in the optical flow bundle (OFB). The longest vector from the OFB provides a key feature for distinguishing walking and running events. Using a Riemannian connection, the optical flow vectors are parallel transported to localize the crowd groups. The geodesic lengths among the groups provide a criterion for merging and splitting events. Dispersion and evacuation events are jointly modeled from the walking/running and merging/splitting events. Our results show that the proposed approach delivers a comparable model to detect crowd events. Using the performance evaluation of tracking and surveillance 2009 dataset, the proposed method is shown to produce the best results in merging, splitting, and dispersion events, and comparable results in walking, running, and evacuation events when compared with other methods.
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ItemOnline optimization of spark advance in alternative fueled engines using extremum seeking control(Elsevier, 2014-08-01)Alternative fueled engines offer greater challenges for engine control courtesy of uncertain fuel composition. This makes optimal tuning of input parameters like spark advance extremely difficult in most existing ECU architectures. This paper proposes the use of grey-box extremum seeking techniques to provide real-time optimization of the spark advance in alternative fueled engines. Since practical implementation of grey-box extremum seeking methods is typically done using digital technology, this paper takes advantage of emulation design methods to port the existing continuous-time grey-box extremum seeking methods to discrete-time frameworks. The ability and flexibility of the proposed discrete-time framework is demonstrated through simulations and in practical situation using a natural gas fueled engine.
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ItemA comparison of open-loop and closed-loop stimulation strategies to control excitation of retinal ganglion cells(Elsevier, 2014-11-01)Currently, open-loop stimulation strategies are prevalent in medical bionic devices. These strategies involve setting electrical stimulation that does not change in response to neural activity. We investigate through simulation the advantages of using a closed-loop strategy that sets stimulation level based on continuous measurement of the level of neural activity. We propose a model-based controller design to control activation of retinal neurons. To deal with the lack of controllability and observability of the whole system, we use Kalman decomposition and control only the controllable and observable part. We show that the closed-loop controller performs better than the open-loop controller when perturbations are introduced into the system. We envisage that our work will give rise to more investigations of the closed-loop techniques in basic neuroscience research and in clinical applications of medical bionics.
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ItemLyapunov-Based Small-Gain Theorems for Hybrid Systems(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2014-06-01)Constructions of strong and weak Lyapunov functions are presented for a feedback connection of two hybrid systems satisfying certain Lyapunov stability assumptions and a small-gain condition. The constructed strong Lyapunov functions can be used to conclude input-to-state stability (ISS) of hybrid systems with inputs and global asymptotic stability (GAS) of hybrid systems without inputs. In the absence of inputs, we also construct weak Lyapunov functions nondecreasing along solutions and develop a LaSalle-type theorem providing a set of sufficient conditions under which such functions can be used to conclude GAS. In some situations, we show how average dwell time (ADT) and reverse average dwell time (RADT) “clocks” can be used to construct Lyapunov functions that satisfy the assumptions of our main results. The utility of these results is demonstrated for the “natural” decomposition of a hybrid system as a feedback connection of its continuous and discrete dynamics, and in several design-oriented contexts: networked control systems, event-triggered control, and quantized feedback control.
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ItemTracking Control for Nonlinear Networked Control Systems(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2014-06-01)We investigate the tracking control of nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) affected by disturbances. We consider a general scenario in which the network is used to ensure the communication between the controller, the plant and the reference system generating the desired trajectory to be tracked. The communication constraints induce non-vanishing errors (in general) on the feedforward term and the output of the reference system, which affect the convergence of the tracking error. As a consequence, available results on the stabilization of equilibrium points for NCS are not applicable. Therefore, we develop an appropriate hybrid model and we give sufficient conditions on the closed-loop system, the communication protocol and an explicit bound on the maximum allowable transmission interval guaranteeing that the tracking error converges to the origin up to some errors due to both the external disturbances and the aforementioned non-vanishing network-induced errors. The results cover a large class of the so-called uniformly globally asymptotically stable protocols which include the well-known round-robin and try-once-discard protocols. We also introduce a new dynamic protocol suitable for tracking control. Finally, we show that our approach can be used to derive new results for the observer design problem for NCS. It has to be emphasized that the approach is also new for the particular case of sampled-data systems.
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ItemStability and Persistent Excitation in Signal Sets(IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC, 2015-05)Persistent excitation (PE) conditions have been widely used to analyze stability properties of various parameter identification algorithms and to establish uniform global asymptotic stability (UGAS) for a large class of nonlinear time-varying systems. In order to generalize such conditions to a more general setting, a new PE condition is proposed with three basic ingredients: a signal set to represent a family of time functions (e.g., trajectories); a pseudo distance measure to describe the convergence; and some binary relations (e.g., state-to-output relations). Closely related to detectability, this PE condition is a necessary condition to guarantee UGAS. Under uniform global stability and an integral inequality, it becomes a sufficient condition of UGAS. A novel concept: M-pair, which aims at simplifying the checking of the PE condition, is introduced. By using M-pair, it is possible to simplify the structure of the referred signal set (in the spirit of the classic Krasovskii-LaSalle theorem) and to extend the dimension of the reference signal set (similar to the Matrosov theorem). Thus, the framework of M-pair not only unifies these well-known results, but also generates more flexibility in checking the PE conditions. When applied to nonlinear switched systems, three new tools to verify the PE condition are obtained. Finally, an example illustrates that a nonlinear time-varying switched system with arbitrary switching can be shown to be UGAS without using a common Lyapunov function.
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ItemGronwall inequality for hybrid systems(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2014-10)The Gronwall inequality, a well-known and useful result both for continuous-time and discrete-time signals, is extended to hybrid signals, namely those that combine continuous time and discrete time. An application of the result to establishing a bounded energy bounded state property for hybrid systems with inputs is provided.
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ItemMulti-agent source seeking via discrete-time extremum seeking control(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2014-09)Recent developments in extremum seeking theory have established a general framework for the methodology, although the specific implementations, particularly in the context of multi-agent systems, have not been demonstrated. In this work, a group of sensor-enabled vehicles is used in the context of the extremum seeking problem using both local and global optimisation algorithms to locate the extremum of an unknown scalar field distribution. For the former, the extremum seeker exploits estimates of gradients of the field from local dithering sensor measurements collected by the mobile agents. It is assumed that a distributed coordination which ensures uniform asymptotic stability with respect to a prescribed formation of the agents is employed. An inherent advantage of the frameworks is that a broad range of nonlinear programming algorithms can be combined with a wide class of cooperative control laws to perform extreme source seeking. Semi-global practical asymptotically stable convergence to local extrema is established in the presence of field sampling noise. Subsequently, global extremum seeking with multiple agents is investigated and shown to give rise to robust practical convergence whose speed can be improved via computational parallelism. Nonconvex field distributions with local extrema can be accommodated within this global framework.
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ItemPacketized MPC with dynamic scheduling constraints and bounded packet dropouts(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2014-03-01)We study a Networked Control System architecture which uses a communication network in the controller-actuator links. The network is affected by packet dropouts and allows access to only one plant input node at each time instant. This limits control performance significantly. To mitigate these limitations we propose a control and network protocol co-design method. Succinctly, the underlying features of the proposed method are as follows: a sequence of predicted optimal control values over a finite horizon, for an optimally chosen input node, is obtained using Model Predictive Control ideas; the entire resulting sequence is sent to the chosen input node; a smart actuator is used to store the predictions received and apply them accordingly. We show that if the number of consecutive packet dropouts is uniformly bounded, then partial nonlinear gain ℓ2 stability and also a more traditional linear gain ℓ2 stability can be ensured via appropriate choice of design parameters and the right assumptions. Whilst our results apply to general nonlinear discrete-time multiple input plants affected by exogenous disturbances, for a disturbance-free case we prove that Global Asymptotic Stability follows from our main result. Moreover, we show that by imposing stronger assumptions, Input-to-State Stability is achievable as well. Finally we demonstrate the potential of the proposed method via simulations.