Department Publications

This paper focuses on wireless energy transfer (WET) to a pair of low complex energy receivers (ER), by only utilizing received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values that are fed back from the ERs to the energy transmitter (ET). Selecting the beamformer that maximizes the total average energy transfer between the ET and the ERs, while satisfying a minimum harvested energy criterion at each ER, is studied. This is a non-convex constrained optimization problem which is difficult to solve analytically. Also, any analytical solution to the problem should only consists of parameters that the ET knows, or the ET can estimate, as utilizing only RSSI feedback values for channel estimation prohibits estimating some channel parameters. Thus, the paper focuses on obtaining a suboptimal solution analytically. It is proven that if the channels between the ET and the ERs satisfy a certain sufficient condition, this solution is in fact …

Personal and medium scale farming has been showing a downward trend throughout the past few decades. Individuals are demotivated to engage in farming activities, due to lack of time, and the higher efficiency in large-scale farming. However, there is a significant health concern arising from the consumption of these products, as they are grown using artificial fertilizers and contain residues of insecticides and pesticides. Automation can motivate personal and medium scale farming, through cutting down the time requirements for farming and by increasing the farming efficiency. Our solution - Scalable Autonomous Agronomical Smartbot (SAASbot) aims at automating farming activities (planting seeds, watering, fertilizing, weed removal) while providing a scalable robotic platform for personal to medium scale farming. In this paper, design and implementation of the SASSBot and testing and validation of the system …

Fitness related wearables have become ubiquitous in the recent past. Nevertheless, short battery life of these devices is still a pressing issue. Limited battery capacity in small form factor and power hungry continuous monitoring of accelerometer have been significant concerns in this regard. To address these issues we propose a novel low-power step counting solution based on an Electromagnetic energy harvesting mechanism. Extremely simple nature of the step counter removes the requirement of any step detection algorithm, thereby reducing the power consumption, while the energy harvester generates a portion of energy requirement prolonging the battery life.

It is a vital requirement to have passive noise control enclosure in order to depress air borne noise of reciprocating engine type power generators. The design of these enclosures needs to be optimized in terms of the sound pressure level and the designing cost. We have used the existing acoustic equations to obtain the optimization based on the objective functions derived for the sound pressure level and enclosure design cost. Metaheuristic optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms and particle swarm algorithm are capable of solving these optimization problems which have constraints for different parameters. The results obtained for a real world design problem confirms that particle swarm optimization provides better results than genetic algorithm in terms of optimality of the solutions and also the computational efficiency. Furthermore, it was observed that there is a significant linear relationship (R …

Voice Controlled Robot (VCR) is a mobile robot whose motions can be controlled by the user by giving specific voice commands. The speech recognition software running on a PC is capable of identifying the 5 voice commands ‘Run’,‘Stop’,‘Left’,’Right’and ‘Back’issued by a particular user. After processing the speech, the necessary motion instructions are given to the mobile platform via a RF link. Following is the system overview. The speech recognition software is speaker dependant. The special feature of the application is the ability of the software to train itself for the above voice commands for a particular user. The graphical user interface running along with the software provides a very convenient method for the users to train. It also provides many other facilities in operating the robot.

Dielectric heaters are mainly used in industry for various applications. Due to generation of near field energy from stray electromagnetic fields, these machines were selected for analysis as a source for RF energy harvesting. In this research, the energy harvester was designed using a ferrite core loop antenna, rectifying and smoothing circuit and an ultra-low power management system in order to provide energy to a temperature and humidity sensor node. This application was tested within the footwear manufacturing industry due to availability of dielectric heaters (RF Welding Machine) and temperature and humidity are continuously measured during the production process.

Consumers and companies alike require to make countless informed decisions in the context of commercial activities. Going beyond the trivial purchase of a substandard good or service, the informed decision is a choice made after a comprehensive evaluation of the reasonably predicted possible outcomes of each potential option. A typical example would be a consumer without expert knowledge in energy, investing in a solar power system. Under such circumstances the consumer has to be aware if there will be a benefit compared to the no action alternative which requires both information provided by the manufacturer and possible reliance on expert opinion. Venture capitalists and hedging fund managers face similar circumstances where they need to invest based upon informed decisions of the subject as well as the risks. This paper investigates the available legal remedies in both local and foreign jurisdictions for consumers and companies when deprived of an informed decision due to restriction of information, deception or perfidy. Based on this, a judicial test is formulated to allow a generalized protection of the informed decision in business transactions.

We present a simulation study of a cooperate car following application implemented by the Wireless Access for Vehicular Environ-ments (WAVE) protocol stack, which uses the MAC and Physical lay-ers defined by the IEEE 802.11 p protocol. This is a simple Intelligent