Jose-Luis Sanchez-Romero

Augmented and Virtual Reality techniques for footwear

The use of 3D imaging techniques has been early adopted in the footwear industry. In particular, 3D imaging could be used to aid commerce and improve the quality and sales of shoes. Footwear customization is an added value aimed not only to improve product quality, but also consumer comfort. Moreover, customisation implies a new business model that avoids the competition of mass production coming from new manufacturers settled mainly in Asian countries. However, footwear customisation implies a significant effort at different levels. In manufacturing, rapid and virtual prototyping is required; indeed the prototype is intended to become the final product. The whole design procedure must be validated using exclusively virtual techniques to ensure the feasibility of this process, since physical prototypes should be avoided. With regard to commerce, it would be desirable for the consumer to choose any model of shoes from a large 3D database and be able to try them on looking at a magic mirror. This would probably reduce costs and increase sales, since shops would not require storing every shoe model and the process of trying several models on would be easier and faster for the consumer. In this paper, new advances in 3D techniques coming from experience in cinema, TV and games are successfully applied to footwear. Firstly, the characteristics of a high-quality stereoscopic vision system for footwear are presented. Secondly, a system for the interaction with virtual footwear models based on 3D gloves is detailed. Finally, an augmented reality system (magic mirror) is presented, which is implemented with low-cost computational elements that allow a hypothetical customer to check in real time the goodness of a given virtual footwear model from an aesthetical point of view.

Partial product reduction by using look-up tables for M×N multiplier

In this paper we present a new technique for partial product reduction in multiplication operations. The method is based on the construction of counter elements by means of look-up tables. The organization of these counters into reduction trees takes advantage of the inherent benefits of the integration of the memories and provides an alternative to classic operation methods. We show several reduction schemes that illustrate the proposed technique and describe hybrid examples that combine stored logic with classic combinational counters in order to adapt them better to each scheme. Our approach outperforms other schemes used for comparison. In this sense, not only an independent technology model has been established, but also an FPGA approximation has been implemented to measure such factors in a real-life technology platform.

Interpreting human activity from electrical consumption data using reconfigurable hardware and hidden Markov models

Human activity recognition is a promising research field in a wide variety of areas: ambient assisted living, pervasive and mobile computing, surveillance based security and context aware computing are some examples. In domestic environment, daily and frequent people activities use all kind of electric devices (appliances). Appliances connection or disconnection can provide useful data to know patterns of use, usual or unusual events and people behaviour, but smart meters only provide aggregated consumption data and cannot be used by the consumers to monitor individual actions or to know people behaviour. Furthermore, specialised systems for power load and monitoring are costly to install. This work proposes the design and development of low cost and embedded hardware tools to obtain disaggregated power consumption with the aim to interpret human activity. Non-intrusive load monitoring, design based on Wavelet Transform processing and Field Programmable Gate Arrays hardware implementation provide the necessary support to develop this kind of embedded systems. Human activity is classified using Hidden Markov models.

Mathematical morphology for design and manufacturing

In general geometric models, the design of objects is usually separated from the manufacture. Some advanced models give solutions to some of the derived problems but lack a related model of representation. The proposed model addresses the process of designing objects by assimilation of the machining process. It is based on set theory and mathematical morphology and no operation between solids or surfaces is done. Mathematical morphology describes geometric shapes from simpler ones. Sets represent object shapes in a n-dimensional space and morphological operations represent geometric relationships between the points in the sets. An analogy between the design and the machining processes can be established: in the machining, the geometry of an object (piece) is also described by the geometry of another object (tool). Specifically, the specification of pieces and tools can be achieved through the use of new operations describing geometric processes of cutting and reconstruction (erosion and dilation respectively, in morphological terms). For manufacturing purposes, the new morphologic operations must be restricted to support an order that will represent the tool trajectory. As a result, the model is generic (as it can be extended to any other tool shape), robust (the set theory avoids special cases or incorrect solutions) and directly displayable.

Function approximation on decimal operands

CORDIC is a well-known method to approximate mathematical functions. It basically works as an iterative algorithm for approximating rotation of a two-dimensional vector using only shift and add operations. The method has been widely applied in the design of digital signal processors and in the computation of typical signal processing functions. It was specifically developed to process data expressed in radix-2. On the other hand, decimal computation has been gaining renewed interest over the last few years, and high performance decimal computation systems are being required on different scopes. In this paper, an improved CORDIC-based method so as to approximate functions on decimal operands is proposed. The algorithm will work with BCD operands, so no conversion to/from radix-2 is needed. An important reduction in the number of iterations in comparison to other CORDIC methods is achieved. The new algorithm is implemented on an FPGA so as to obtain results on delay and hardware resources. The experiments showing the advantages of the new method, with regard to both delay and precision, are described.

Using virtual reality for industrial design learning: a methodological proposal

ABSTRACT Nowadays, the different computer tools available enable designers to create complex industrial prototypes. The use of these tools is constrained by the limitations imposed by common devices, such as screens and displays. Recently emerged virtual and augmented reality techniques have started being used as supports in many learning and industrial environments. Beyond the new possibilities that these tools offer for designing industrial objects, the underlying question is whether these new technologies could improve the creativity of designers to enable them to get a better understanding of the designing process itself. This paper presents a methodological proposal for the deployment of an industrial design engineering course aimed not only at learning different design techniques, but also at assessing the creativity skills of students. The practical contents include the use of virtual reality devices, to help the designer overcome the limitations of prototype visualisation and make better designing decisions. Moreover, a creativity test will be performed at the beginning and at the end of the course to assess the changes in creativity skills taking place within the experiment group versus the changes in a traditional learning (control) group.

Accelerating tool path computing in CAD/CAM: A FPGA architecture for turning lathe machining

Tool path generation is one of the most complex problems in computer aided manufacturing. The algorithm called virtual digitizing avoids this problem by its own definition but its computing cost is high. Presented in the paper there is a virtual digitizing hardware/software architecture that takes advantage of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to improve the algorithm efficiency and to meet the current restrictions of the traditional no standard machines. In order to evaluate the architecture, a prototype was implemented using a commercial reconfigurable platform integrated within a numerically controlled lathe for shoe last machining. The performance of the system for tool path generation was measured for different trajectories and surface precisions using a database of real shoe models. The experiments show a significant speedup, keeping the computing error below the system tolerance.

Jaya optimization algorithm with GPU acceleration

Optimization methods allow looking for an optimal value given a specific function within a constrained or unconstrained domain. These methods are useful for a wide range of scientific and engineering applications. Recently, a new optimization method called Jaya has generated growing interest because of its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper, we present the Jaya GPU-based parallel algorithms we developed and analyze both parallel performance and optimization performance using a well-known benchmark of unconstrained functions. Results indicate that parallel Jaya implementation achieves significant speed-up for all benchmark functions, obtaining speed-ups of up to

Smart Sensor Design for Power Signal Processing

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