An Investigation of Exoskeleton Robotic Systems in Assisting Construction Tasks*

Whilst industrial robots have been widely used in many industrial sectors, they are predominantly used in a structured factory environment. In recent years, off-site robotics have been investigated extensively and there are some promising candidates emerging. One such category of robots is exoskeleton robots and this paper provides an in-depth assessment of their suitability in assisting human operators in undertaking manual operations typically found in the construction industry. This work aims to objectively assess the advantages and disadvantages of these two suits and provide recommendations for further improvements of similar system designs. The paper focuses on the passive exoskeleton robotic suits which are commercially available. Three types of activities are designed and a mechatronic methodology has been designed and implemented to capture visual data in order to assess these systems in comparison with normal human operations. The study suggests that these passive suits do reduce the effort required by human operators to undertake the same construction tasks as evidenced by the results from one focused study, though a number of improvements could be made to improve their performance for wider adoption.

List-Serial Pipelined Hardware Architecture for SCL Decoding of Polar Codes

For polar codes,the performance of successive cancellation list(SCL)decoding is capable of approaching that of maximum likelihood decoding.However,the existing hardware architectures for the SCL decoding suffer from high hardware complexity due to calculating L decoding paths simultaneously,which are unfriendly to the devices with limited logical resources,such as field programmable gate arrays(FPGAs).In this paper,we propose a list-serial pipelined hardware architecture with low complexity for the SCL decoding,where the serial calculation and the pipelined operation are elegantly combined to strike a balance between the complexity and the latency.Moreover,we employ only one successive cancellation(SC)decoder core without L×L crossbars,and reduce the number of inputs of the metric sorter from 2L to L+2.Finally,the FPGA implementations show that the hardware resource consumption is significantly reduced with negligible decoding performance loss.

Seismic rock physics modeling of fractures and fluids in a tight gas sandstone reservoir

Tight sandstone gas reservoirs have characteristics of low porosity and low permeability,complex pore structure.In the paper,we consider the pore and micro-fracture systems in tight sandstone reservoir and perform rock physics modeling of sandstone gas reservoirs based on Chapman.Then we analyze the effects of relaxation time,and difference fluid types on dispersion and attention,and seismic responses.We found that the magnitude of the relaxation time is related to the gas saturation and the viscosity coefficient of the fluid.The magnitude of the relaxation time affects the frequency range of the velocity dispersion and attenuation,and the type of fluid affects the magnitude of the velocity dispersion and attenuation.As the relaxation time decreases,the calculated amplitude deceases.And the amplitude and the waveform of the synthetic seismic record are related to different fluid types and formation thickness.

Control-oriented modeling of a high-aspect-ratio flying wing with coupled flight dynamics

The flight-structural dynamics of a high-aspect-ratio wing challenge the flight control design.This paper develops a reduced model of coupled dynamics with stability consideration.The structural dynamics are formulated with dihedrals,and the central loads drive the deformation.The control-oriented model with essential coupled dynamics is formulated.Modal sensitivity anal-ysis and input–output pairing are performed to identify the control structure.Besides,an example of flight control design is provided to discuss the necessity of considering structural dynamics in controller design.Analytical coupled flight dynamics provide a system-theoretic approach for sta-bility and facilitate model-based control techniques.Simulation results reveal the characteristics of flight-structural coupled dynamics and demonstrate that the influence of flexible modes should be considered in control design,especially in lateral dynamics.