Flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulators can offer many attractive features over rigid manipulators, including light weight, safe operation, and high power efficiency. However, the tracking control of the FJR is challenging due to its inherent problems, such as underactuation, coupling, nonlinearities, uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances. In this article, a terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) is proposed for the FJR system to guarantee the finite-time convergence of the systems output, and to achieve the total robustness against the lumped disturbance and estimation error. By using two coordinate transformations, the FJR dynamics is turned into a canonical form. A cascaded finite-time sliding mode observer (CFTSMO) is construct

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Concrete filled steel tube (CFST) columns are being popular in civil engineering due to their superior structural characteristics. This paper investigates enhancement in axial behavior of CFST columns by adding steel fibers to plain concrete that infill steel tubes. Four specimens were prepared: two square columns (100*100 mm) and two circular columns (100 mm in diameter). All columns were 60 cm in length. Plain concrete mix and concrete reinforced with steel fibers were used to infill steel tube columns. Ultimate axial load capacity, ductility and failure mode are discussed in this study. The results showed that the ultimate axial load capacity of CFST columns reinforced with steel fibers increased by 28% and 20 % for circular and square c

As one type of resistance furnace, the electrical tube furnace (ETF) typically experiences input noise, measurement noise, system uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances, which significantly degrade its temperature control performance. To provide precise, and robust temperature tracking performance for the ETF, a robust composite control (RCC) method is proposed in this paper. The overall RCC method consists of four elements: First, the mathematical model of the ETF system is deduced, then a state feedback control (SFC) is constructed. Third, a novel disturbance observer (DO) is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance with one observer parameter. Moreover, the stability of the closed loop system including controller

This study aims to compare the response of reinforced concrete (RC) T-beams strengthened with carbon fibre-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composite with that of non-strengthened control beams when subjected to monotonic two-point loading until failure for flexural once and shear again. The experimental programme tested eight RC T-beams, which included two reference beams without strengthening and six strengthened beams. The eight beams were divided into two main groups according to strengthening (flexural and shear). Experimental analysis was performed to study the effect of the CFRP laminate width in the flexural group and the spacing of CFRP U-wrap sheets in the shear group on the ultimate load capacity, load-strain relationship, and l

The applications of hot plasma are many and numerous applications require high values of the temperature of the electrons within the plasma region. Improving electron temperature values is one of the important processes for using this specification in plasma for being adopted in several modern applications such as nuclear fusion, plating operations and in industrial applications. In this work, theoretical computations were performed to enhance electron temperature under dense homogeneous plasma. The effect of   power and duration time of pulsed Nd:YAG laser   was studied on the heating of   plasmas  by inverse bremsstrahlung  for  several values for the electron density ratio. There results for these ca

Active Magnetic Bearings (AMBs) are progressively being implemented in a wide variety of applications. Their exclusive appealing features make them suitable for solving traditional rotor-bearing problems using novel design approaches for rotating machinery.  In this paper, a linearized uncertain model of AMBs is utilized to develop a nonlinear sliding mode controller based on Lyapunov function for the electromechanical system. The controller requires measurements of the rotor displacements and their derivatives. Since the control law is discontinuous, the proposed controller can achieve a finite time regulation but with the drawback of the chattering problem. To reduce the effect of this problem, the gain of the uni

Audio classification is the process to classify different audio types according to contents. It is implemented in a large variety of real world problems, all classification applications allowed the target subjects to be viewed as a specific type of audio and hence, there is a variety in the audio types and every type has to be treatedcarefully according to its significant properties.Feature extraction is an important process for audio classification. This workintroduces several sets of features according to the type, two types of audio (datasets) were studied. Two different features sets are proposed: (i) firstorder gradient feature vector, and (ii) Local roughness feature vector, the experimentsshowed that the results are competitive to

In this research، a comparison has been made between the robust estimators of (M) for the Cubic Smoothing Splines technique، to avoid the problem of abnormality in data or contamination of error، and the traditional estimation method of Cubic Smoothing Splines technique by using two criteria of differentiation which are (MADE، WASE) for different sample sizes and disparity levels to estimate the chronologically different coefficients functions for the balanced longitudinal data which are characterized by observations obtained through (n) from the independent subjects، each one of them is measured repeatedly by group of  specific time points (m)،since the frequent measurements within the subjects are almost connected an