Publication9

We present a hardware-directed robotic exploration algorithm for an indoor environment in this paper. The robot is equipped with eight ultrasonic sensors. The algorithm has optimal (linear) time complexity. An important feature of the algorithm is the acquisition of distance information by the eight sensors in parallel. A novel architecture based on Content Addressable Memory (CAM) has been developed. An FPGA implementation has also been developed. Experiments with an FPGA-based robot have been successfully conducted for exploration of static as well as dynamic environments. © 2008 IEEE.

The application of physics based distributed models in watershed analysis has increased in the last few decades due to increased availability special data and advanced special analysis tools. These models have the advantage of better representation of the system which produces more accurate and reliable outputs. However, they are characterized by their large parameter size, which causes lot of uncertainty in the model output. The calibration of such models is also typically complex due to the large number of parameters. Sensitivity analysis of the parameters is performed prior to calibration in order to simplify the calibration procedure; nonetheless the commonly employed sensitivity analysis methods generally do not consider the nonlinear relationship between the parameters and the output. The current study focuses on performing the nonlinear sensitivity analysis on a distributed watershed model. The method utilizes the Sobol's sensitivity approach, which is based on decomposing the total variance of the model output in terms of individual parameter's contribution. The parameter sampling is performed by Latin hypercube sampling in this study. The output of the analysis help ranking the parameters of the model in terms of their sensitivity towards the model output, thereby help pruning the parameters that are to be calibrated. The method is demonstrated using soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) developed for St. Joseph watershed, USA.

Selected organic and inorganic nitrogen sources were evaluated for growth of Pseudomonas putida PGA1 and its production of medium-chain-length poly-(3-hydroxyalkanoates) (PHAMCL). The effect of these nitrogen sources on the cells growth, PHAMCL yield, monomer composition and molecular weight when this bacterium was cultivated on saponifed palm kernel oil (SPKO) as the major carbon source was investigated. It was found that bacto-peptone gave signifcantly higher yield of residual biomass (PHA-free biomass) and PHAMCL as compared to ammonium salt, urea, yeast extract and beef extract. No signifcant difference in the monomer composition of the PHAMCL produced was observed with the different nitrogen sources. All the PHAMCL produced had high molecular weight, with the weight average (Mw) ranging from 90,000 to 127,000 and polydispersities (Mw/Mn) ranging from 1.7 to 1.9.

This article explores the role of human capital in determining labour productivity and earnings in the unorganised manufacturing sector by focusing on the coir yarn manufacturing units in the Indian state of Kerala. The study is based on primary survey data collected from 188 co-operative, private and household enterprises. By using an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function, the impact of education and firm level characteristics on labour productivity has been examined. The influence of education and experience on labour earnings has also been analysed by estimating an earnings function from the reported wages of workers in household enterprises. The study has established that there is a positive relationship between education, labour productivity and earnings and the sector would stand to benefit from a more educated labour force.

A contact fatigue phenomenon is most common failure seen in the structural components, which are under high-cyclic fatigue loads. Rail wheels, mating gears, ball bearing and wherever the formal contact between the two structural elements, are affected by contact fatigue failure, is commonly referred as pitting of surface. It can be seen that those structural elements are manufactured by powder metallurgy technology since it has more technical as well as commercial advantages over the conventionally made structural parts. Development in powder metallurgy manufacturing technologies, will give us confident to use of more powder metallurgy structural parts in place of conventional parts. Rolling-sliding contact fatigue (RSCF) experiments on powder metallurgy (PM) steels have been carried out in the laboratories with available experimental set-up. The lubrication oil is collected for regular interval and ferrography test is involved to predict the wear rate of the powder metallurgy steels. Wear morphology of porous steel is predicted.