High-Precision Low-Cost Gimballing Platform for Long-Range Railway Obstacle Detection

Increasing demand for rail transportation results transportation by rail, resulting in denser and more high-speed usage of the existing railway network, making makes new and more advanced vehicle safety systems necessary. Furthermore, high traveling speeds and the greatlarge weights of trains lead to long braking distances—all of which necessitates Long braking distances, due to high travelling speeds and the massive weight of trains, necessitate a Long-Range Obstacle Detection (LROD) system, capable of detecting humans and other objects more than 1000 m in advance. According to current research, only a few sensor modalities are capable of reaching this far and recording sufficiently accurate enoughdata to distinguish individual objects. The limitation of these sensors, such as a 1D-Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), is however a very narrow Field of View (FoV), making it necessary to use ahigh-precision means of orienting to target them at possible areas of interest. To close this research gap, this paper presents a novel approach to detecting railway obstacles by developinga high-precision pointing mechanism, for the use in a future novel railway obstacle detection system In this work such a high-precision pointing mechanism is developed, capable of targeting aiming a 1D-LiDAR at humans or objects at the required distance. This approach addresses To address the challenges of a low target pricelimited budget, restricted access to high-precision machinery and equipment as well as unique requirements of our target application., a novel pointing mechanism has been designed and developed. By combining established elements from 3D printers and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines with a double-hinged lever system, simple and cheaplow-cost components are capable of precisely orienting an arbitrary sensor platform. The system’s actual pointing accuracy has been evaluated using a controlled, in-door, long-range experiment. The device was able to demonstrate a precision of 6.179 mdeg, which is at the limit of the measurable precision of the designed experiment.

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Low Cost Lightweight Obstacle Detection System for Micro Aerial Vehicles

2019 IEEE 6th International Conference on Engineering Technologies and Applied Sciences (ICETAS) ◽

10.1109/icetas48360.2019.9117303 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Mohammad Salah Uddin

Keyword(s):

Detection System ◽

Low Cost ◽

Obstacle Detection ◽

Micro Aerial Vehicles ◽

Aerial Vehicles

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A Low-Cost, High-Precision Method for Ripple Voltage Measurement Using a DAC and Comparators

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics8050586 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (5) ◽

pp. 586

Author(s):

Jincheng Liu ◽

Jiguang Yue ◽

Li Wang ◽

Chenhao Wu ◽

Feng Lyu

Keyword(s):

High Precision ◽

High Speed ◽

Low Cost ◽

Estimation Method ◽

Electronic System ◽

Voltage Measurement ◽

Pass Filter ◽

Switched Mode Power Supply ◽

Dc Component ◽

Microcontroller Unit

As the core of electronic system, the switched-mode power supply (SMPS) will lead to serious accidents and catastrophes if it suddenly fails. According to the related research, the monitoring of ripple can acquire the health degree of SMPS indirectly. To realize low-cost, high-precision, and automatic ripple measurement, this paper proposes a new ripple voltage (peak-to-peak value) measuring scheme, utilizing a DAC and two high-speed comparators. Within this scheme, the DC component of SMPS output is blocked by a high-pass filter (HPF). Then, the filtered signal and the reference voltage from a DAC together compose the input of a high-speed comparator. Finally, output pulses of the comparator are captured by a microcontroller unit (MCU), which readjusts the output of the DAC by calculation, and this process is repeated until the DAC output is exactly equal to the peak (or valley) value of ripple. Moreover, in order to accelerate the measurement process, a peak estimation method is specially designed to calculate the output ripple peak (or valley) value of buck topology through merely two measurements. Then the binary search method is utilized to obtain a more exact value on the basis of estimative results. Additionally, an analysis of the measurement error of this ripple measurement system is executed, which shows that the theoretical error is less than 0.5% where the ripple value is larger than 500 mV. Furthermore, appropriate components are selected, and a prototype is manufactured to verify the validity of the proposed theory.

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The Influence Analysis of Globular Indexing Cam Mechanism Size Parameters on Transmission Performance

Advanced Materials Research ◽

10.4028/www.scientific.net/amr.426.163 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 426 ◽

pp. 163-167 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

De Gong Chang ◽

S.M. Li ◽

Cong Feng An

Keyword(s):

High Precision ◽

High Speed ◽

Low Cost ◽

Simulation Software ◽

Dynamics Simulation ◽

Mechanical Transmission ◽

Transmission Performance ◽

Cam Mechanism ◽

Indexing Mechanism ◽

Movement Parameters

The globular indexing cam mechanism is a kind of high-speed and high-precision indexing mechanism, widely used in the field of mechanical transmission, which has the character of smooth transmission, high-precision indexing, large transfer torque, wider choice of dynamic and static ratio, simple structure and low cost, etc. In this paper, the working principle and the main movement parameters of globular indexing cam mechanism are analyzed, and the dynamics simulation of this mechanism is done by using ADAMS dynamic simulation software to analyze the influence of size parameters on the transmission performance, which provides reliable theoretical basis for understanding the property and designing the parameter of globular indexing mechanism.

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Recent Patents on the Structure of High-Speed Motorized Spindle

Recent Patents on Mechanical Engineering ◽

10.2174/2212797612666190319154640 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 125-137

Author(s):

Ye Dai ◽

Wen-Qiang Wei ◽

Xue-Liang Zhang ◽

Yun-Shan Qi

Keyword(s):

Research And Development ◽

Machine Tool ◽

High Precision ◽

High Speed ◽

Numerical Control ◽

Cnc Machine Tool ◽

Cnc Machine ◽

Motorized Spindle ◽

The Core ◽

Spindle Structure

Background: As one of the core components of high-speed CNC machine tool, high-speed motorized spindle is the core functional component of high precision CNC machine tool, which has become the key research and development object of the world. Objective: By comparing and discussing the patents of high-speed motorized spindle, some valuable conclusions have been drawn to predict the future research and development of high-speed motorized spindle. Methods: By analyzing the characteristics of high-speed motorized spindle structure, the influence of high-speed motorized spindle on high-speed machining technology was explicated. Combining with the key technology of high-speed motorized spindle, the patents related to high-speed motorized spindle structure were used for investigation. Results: With the rapid development of high-speed cutting and numerical control technology and the need of practical application, the requirement for high-speed spindle performance has increased. Motorized spindle technology has the characteristics of high speed, high strength, high power, high torque and low speed, high precision, high reliability and long life, offering diversified bearing and lubrication cooling methods and serving as an intelligent system. Conclusion: The different levels of improvement and renovation of the structure with high-speed motorized spindle, by adding lubrication and cooling device to the spindle have improve the performance of spindle, addressing the loopholes in the technology and making it more practical.

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SMART on-board multi-sensor obstacle detection system for improvement of rail transport safety

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part F Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit ◽

10.1177/09544097211032738 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 095440972110327

Author(s):

Danijela Ristić-Durrant ◽

Muhammad Abdul Haseeb ◽

Milan Banić ◽

Dušan Stamenković ◽

Miloš Simonović ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Long Range ◽

Environmental Conditions ◽

Detection System ◽

Distance Estimation ◽

Obstacle Detection ◽

Rail Transport ◽

Night Vision ◽

Light Illumination ◽

Project Smart ◽

Night Illumination

This paper presents an on-board multi-sensor system which is able to detect obstacles and estimate their distances in railway scenes in different illumination conditions. The system was developed within the H2020 Shift2Rail project SMART (Smart Automation of Rail Transport) and aims at increasing the safety of rail transport by detecting obstacles on the rail tracks ahead of a moving train in order to reduce the number of collisions. The system hardware consists of cameras of different types integrated into a specially designed housing, mounted on the front of the train. Multiple vision sensors complement each other in order to handle different illumination and environmental conditions. The system software uses a novel machine learning-based method that is suited to a particular challenge of railway operations, the need for long-range obstacle detection and distance estimation. The development of this method used a long-range railway dataset, which was specifically generated for this project. Evaluation results of reliable obstacle detection in various environmental conditions using the SMART RGB camera in day light illumination conditions and using the SMART Night Vision sensor in poor (night) illumination conditions are presented. The results demonstrate both the potential of the on-board SMART obstacle detection system in the operational railway environment and the benefit of the use of different cameras to be more independent of light and environmental conditions.

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Application Research on Precision Detection of Small Gear with Composite Edge Detection Method

Applied Mechanics and Materials ◽

10.4028/www.scientific.net/amm.333-335.1123 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 333-335 ◽

pp. 1123-1128

Author(s):

Xin Luo ◽

Li Ming Wu ◽

De Zhi Zeng

Keyword(s):

Edge Detection ◽

Real Time ◽

High Speed ◽

Dynamic Range ◽

Detection Method ◽

Detection System ◽

Structural Characteristics ◽

Low Cost ◽

Edge Image ◽

Edge Detection Method

Vision-based measurement method can be widely used for a variety of real-time and online precision measurements, and particularly well suited for dynamic real-time precision measurement of geometry parameters of the part, which has advantages of non-contact, high-speed, big dynamic range, rich amount of information, and relatively low cost. After the study of vision-based online detection system of small gear, we propose a composite subpixel edge detection method, which combines the four-way weighted differential algorithm based on the classic Sobel operator and OFMM (Orthogonal Fourier-Mellin Moment), aiming at achieving the precision location of the subpixel edge firstly. And then detect tooth profile defects rapidly through scanning circularly the edge image, according to the structural characteristics of gears. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the detection method has so high accuracy and speed that it can meet the industrial online tests requirements.

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High-speed and high-precision online detection system of the tile smoothness

Proceedings of 2012 International Conference on Measurement, Information and Control ◽

10.1109/mic.2012.6273400 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Bo You ◽

Jintao Hu ◽

Jiazhong Xu ◽

Yanan Miao

Keyword(s):

High Precision ◽

High Speed ◽

Detection System ◽

Online Detection

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Autonomous long-range drone detection system for critical infrastructure safety

Multimedia Tools and Applications ◽

10.1007/s11042-020-10231-x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Xindi Zhang ◽

Kusrini Kusrini

Keyword(s):

Long Range ◽

Situation Awareness ◽

Critical Infrastructure ◽

Detection System ◽

Focal Length ◽

Low Cost ◽

System Logs ◽

Continuous Stream ◽

Hardware Component ◽

Fully Connected

AbstractThe development of unmanned aerial vehicles has been identified as a potential source of a weapon for causing operational disruptions against critical infrastructures. To mitigate and neutralise the threat posed by the misuse of drones against malicious and terrorist activity, this paper presents a holistic design of a long-range autonomous drone detection platform. The novelty of the proposed system lies in the confluence between the design of hardware and software components to effective and efficient localisation of the intruder objects. The research presented in the paper proposes the design and validation of a situation awareness component which is interfaced with the hardware component for controlling the focal length of the camera. The continuous stream of media data obtained from the region of vulnerability is processed using the object detection that is built on region based fully connected neural network. The novelty of the proposed system relies on the processing of multi-threaded dual-media input streams that are evaluated to mitigate the latency of the system. Upon the successful detection of malicious drones, the system logs the occurrence of intruders that consists of both event description and the associated media evidence for the deployment of the mitigation strategy. The analytics platform that controls the signalling of the low-cost sensing equipment contains the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 for detecting drones. The experimental testbeds developed for the validation of the proposed system has been constructed to include environments and situations that are commonly faced by critical infrastructure operators such as the area of protection, drone flight path, tradeoff between the angle of coverage against the distance of coverage. The validation of the proposed system has resulted in yielding a range of intruder drone detection by 250m with an accuracy of 95.5%.

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On-chip nanophotonic broadband wavelength detector with 2D-Electron gas

Nanophotonics ◽

10.1515/nanoph-2021-0365 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Vishal Kaushik ◽

Swati Rajput ◽

Sulabh Srivastav ◽

Lalit Singh ◽

Prem Babu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Integrated Circuits ◽

Detection System ◽

Low Cost ◽

Electron Gas ◽

Fabrication Process ◽

Novel Approach ◽

Efficient Alternative ◽

Wavelength Detector ◽

On Chip ◽

Wavelength Detection

Abstract Miniaturized, low-cost wavelength detectors are gaining enormous interest as we step into the new age of photonics. Incompatibility with integrated circuits or complex fabrication requirement in most of the conventionally used filters necessitates the development of a simple, on-chip platform for easy-to-use wavelength detection system. Also, intensity fluctuations hinder precise, noise free detection of spectral information. Here we propose a novel approach of utilizing wavelength sensitive photocurrent across semiconductor heterojunctions to experimentally validate broadband wavelength detection on an on-chip platform with simple fabrication process. The proposed device utilizes linear frequency response of internal photoemission via 2-D electron gas in a ZnO based heterojunction along with a reference junction for coherent common mode rejection. We report sensitivity of 0.96 μA/nm for a broad wavelength-range of 280 nm from 660 to 940 nm. Simple fabrication process, efficient intensity noise cancelation along with heat resistance and radiation hardness of ZnO makes the proposed platform simple, low-cost and efficient alternative for several applications such as optical spectrometers, sensing, and Internet of Things (IOTs).

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