Mohamad Shukri Zainal Abidin

Design and Control of a Quad-Rotor Flying Robot For Aerial Surveillance

This paper presents the control of a quad-rotor VTOL (vertical take off and landing) flying robot as an experimental flying platform. The flying robot is to be controlled by a pilot using radio frequency. A wireless CCTV camera is installed on the robot to perform aerial surveillance and inspection operation. Due to the naturally unstable behavior of the flying robot, PID control system is implemented with the aid of accelerometer, compass sensor and gyro sensors to stabilize the flying robot and make it easier to be controlled by the operator. The fusion between the accelerometer, compass sensor and also the gyro sensors is done by the complementary filter.

Design And Development of Two Wheeled Autonomous Balancing Robot

In this paper, the control of two-wheeled autonomous balancing robot is presented. The system is based on distance measuring sensor to detect the lean of the robot. PID control system is implemented to pilot the motors so as to keep the system in equilibrium. The navigation of the robot is controlled by operator by using RC remote controller. The robot has the ability to balance itself while moving and turning on a flat terrain.

Intelligent control of capillary irrigation system for water-saving cultivation

Subsurface micro irrigation techniques such as capillary irrigation has long been proven to provide higher water saving for cultivation. Advancement of the capillary irrigation system has been made by using a high capillarity fibrous medium to transfer water directly to the rooting zone of plant. Wicking of water through the fibrous medium depends on the distance from a water source which known as water supply depth. The irrigation system is being managed by manipulating the water supply depth. However it is difficult to determine the optimum depth due to the dynamic water requirement which depends on the plant growth stage and climatic change. In this study an adaptive method was introduced to manage the irrigation system based on water balance and energy balance model. Using the estimated data the optimum depth was determined by using fuzzy expert system. An experimental set-up was built using the fibrous-capillary irrigation system that allowed the change of water supply depth in real time. The optimum water supply depth obtained based on the adaptive method was analyzed based on water usage and plant yield which showed significant amount of water saving. The results suggested the feasibility of the water and energy control model as an irrigation scheduling index for the fibrous-capillary irrigation system.

PC-Based Vision System with Pan-Tilt Platform for Face Tracking

Face tracking has emerged as an area of research with exciting possibilities. This paper describes a fully tested prototype system for face tracking which uses a web-cam as sensor, incorporated with a closed-loop visual feedback control system for the pan-tilt mechanism. Continuous adaptive mean shift (CamShift) algorithm, has been adopted to perform the face tracking task. The algorithm, which is simple and computationally efficient, operates on a 2D colour probability distribution image produced from histogram back-projection and it is designed for dynamically changing distributions. The performance of the prototype has been very satisfactory and can be implemented in real-time application.

Modelling and Parameters Identification of a Quadrotor Using a Custom Test Rig

Efficiency, reliability, high power quality and continuous operation are important aspects in electric vehicle attraction system. Therefore, quick fault detection, isolation and enhanced fault-tolerant control for open-switches faults in inverter driving systems become more and more required in this filed. However, fault detection and localization algorithms have been known to have many performance limitations due to speed variations such as wrong decision making of fault occurrence. Those weaknesses are investigated and solved in this paper using currents magnitudes fault indices, current direct component fault indices and a decision system. A simulation model and experimental setup are utilized to validate the proposed concept. Many simulation and experimental results are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed fault detection approach.The inverter with critical loads should be able to provide critical loads with a stable and seamless voltage during control mode change as well as clearing time. The indirect current control has been proposed for providing stable voltage with critical load during clearing time and seamless control mode transfer of inverters. However, the islanding detection is difficult since with the indirect current control the magnitude and frequency of voltage do not change when the islanding occurs. The conventional anti-islanding method based on the magnitude and frequency of voltage variation cannot apply to the indirect current control. This paper proposes an islanding detection method for the indirect current control. The proposed islanding detection method can detect the islanding using reactive power perturbation and observation when the frequency and magnitude of voltage don’t vary during clearing time. In order to verify the proposed anti-islanding method, the experimental results of a 600W three-phase inverter are provided.

Enhanced Fertigation Control System Towards Higher Water Saving Irrigation

With the rapid growth of communications via the Internet, the need for an effective firewall system which has not badly affect the overall network performances has been increased. In this paper, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) -based firewall system with high performance has been implemented using Network FPGA (NetFPGA) with Xilinx Kintex-7 XC7K325T FPGA. Based on NetFPGA reference router project, a NetFPGA-based firewall system was implemented. The hardware module performs rule matching operation using content addressable memory (CAM) for higher speed data processing. To evaluate system performance, throughput, latency, and memory utilization were measured for different cases using different tools, also the number of rules that an incoming packet is subjected to was varied to get more readings using both software and hardware features. The results showed that the designed firewall system provides better performance than traditional firewalls. System throughput was doubled times of the one with Linux-Iptables firewalls.

Biased Robust Composite Nonlinear Feedback Control of Under Actuated Systems

This paper proposes a method of designing composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control for under actuated systems. By biasing the output error feedback of the nonlinear part of CNF, a state that is not the reference state but also important, can be given attention not only in the linear part but in the nonlinear part of CNF as well. The proposed scheme is tested on two wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) mobile robot which is highly under actuated robot, and shows a better performance in balancing the robot and also in energy consumption.

Racer: A Simulated Environment Driving Simulator to Investigate Human Driving Skill

The identification and the quantification of human skill is one of the major characteristics to be considered in designing an algorithm for Human Adaptive Mechatronics (HAM) application. This paper focuses on studying the Racer software, as well as the relationship of data gained and the simulated environment. The fact that Racer is chosen as the tool is described. This paper discusses the details about the software used; Racer as the driving simulator environment during the experiment. The experimental setup, data extraction process and data conversion are explained further in this paper. The experimental results meet the purpose of data collection which provides variety set of data, including many options for cars and tracks. As a conclusion, Racer is a suitable software to be used. The utmost important, the further study of this research will help during the development of car assistance system.

Development of an autonomous crop inspection mobile robot system

In this paper, an autonomous crop inspection mobile robot has been developed for greenhouse application using vision system. This project offers low cost vision system that is applicable in agriculture field. By using two units of low cost webcam, a robot vision system was developed for this project. Robot vision is used for two purposes: navigation and inspection. Users will be able to control this system by using Graphical User Interface that was designed. Aforge.Net image processing library has been selected as image processing library for this system. This project was written in C# language. As the outcome, the mobile robot was able to navigate in the path created and able to capture, process and store the crop image in the computer for further inspection.