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A Labview Research Projects A LabVIEW Research Projects The brief description of research projects collected from IEEE journals, Research Labs and Universities are given in this appendix. A.1 An Optical Fibre Sensor Based on Neural Networks for Online Detection of Process Water Contamination It is often required to know the contamination of process water systems from known contaminants e.g., oil, heavy metals, or particulate matter. Most of the governments are forcing rules to monitor the output water from all industrial plants before they may be discharged into existing steams or waterways. There is therefore a clear need for a sensor that is capable of effectively monitoring these output discharges. Optical fibers provide a means of constructing such sensors in an effective manner. Optical fibers are passive and therefore do not them selves contaminate the environment in which they are designed to work. The proposed sensor system is to be operated from and LED or broad- band light source and the detector will monitor changes in the received light spectrum resulting from the interaction of the fibre sensor with its environ- ment. The signals arising from these changes are often complex and require large amounts of processing power. In this proposed project it intended to use Artificial Neural Networks to perform the processing and extract the true sensor signal from the received signal. A.2 An Intelligent Optical Fibre-Based Sensor System for Monitoring Food Quality It is proposed to develop an intelligent instrument for quality monitoring and classification of food products in the meat processing and packaging industry. The instrument is intended for use as an effective means of testing food prod- ucts for a wide range of parameters. Such parameters may range from simple 658 A LabVIEW Research Projects external appearance e.g., color to degree of cooking internally in the case of pre-cooked products. The proposed instrument will incorporate two new tech- nology areas namely Optical Fibre Sensors and Artificial Neural Networks and is intended for used on high volume food processing production lines. A.3 Networking Automatic Test Equipment Environments Automatic test equipment (ATE) is a term that, in its broadest meaning, indicates a generic system capable of performing measurements in an au- tomatic or semiautomated (human-assisted) way. Years ago, this term was used specifically to refer to an automated measurement system employed to test the functionality of some electronic Device Under Test (DUT). Typi- cal applications were in the manufacturing area, where ATE had a twofold nature: in-circuit testing and functional testing. For in-circuit testing, ATE often were stand-alone complex programmable machines, equipped with a bed-of-nails adapter specifically designed as a fixture to provide signal inputs and meaningful test-points of the DUT. The test engineer had the responsibility of writing code that determined the exact sequence of stimulus signals, response measurements, and go/no- go decisions. For this aim, a switch matrix and the ATE itself were suitably controlled and coordinated by a workstation. For functional testing, ATE consisted of off-the-shelf instruments connected to the DUT by some kind of front-end adapter. In the latter case, most of the effort of the test engineer consisted of designing a program to control the various instruments to assess DUT performances. When planning the use of a dedicated testing machine as opposed to a test bench, other factors were taken into account: measurement speed, cost, and fault coverage. A.4 Using LabVIEW to Prototype an Industrial-Quality Real-Time Solution for the Titan Outdoor 4WD Mobile Robot Controller In the Titan project researchers applied a new approach to prototyping mobile robots by choosing tools which are commonly used by leading aerospace man- ufacturers and many other industries. Researchers have gained substantial experience when using the LabVIEW real-time programming environment coupled with the industrial quality data acquisition cards, both made by National Instruments. The methodology of virtual instruments software tools combined with the graphical programming environment was found to be very efficient for interactive cycles of design and testing, which are at the core of robotics prototyping. A.7 Secure Two-Way Transfer of Measurement Data 659 A.5 Intelligent Material Handling: Development and Implementation of a Matrix-Based Discrete-Event Controller A supervisory controller for discrete-event (DE) systems is presented that uses a novel matrix formulation. This matrix formulation makes it possible to directly write down the DE controller from standard manufacturing tools such as the bill of materials or the assembly tree. The matrices also make it straightforward to actually implement the DE controller on a manufacturing work cell for sequencing the jobs and assigning the resources. It is shown that the DE controller equations plus the Petri net marking transition equation to- gether provide a complete dynamical description of a DE system. This means that a computer simulation can be performed to check the DE performance of the controller before it is implemented. In this research, the DE controller is implemented on an actual three-robot intelligent material handling cell at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute, University of Texas at Arlington, USA. Then, the actual implementation is performed and the sim- ulated system produces commensurate results. The versatility of the system developed with this DE controller permits implementing different methodolo- gies for conflict resolution, as well as optimization of the resource assignment and part throughput. Technical information given includes the development of the controller in LabVIEW and its simulation using MATLAB. A.6 Curve Tracer with a Personal Computer and LabVIEW The circuits and programs that conform the prototype of a curve tracer, operated under the control of a personal computer (PC) are presented. The prototype uses a data acquisition board that generates the signals applied to the base and collector terminals of the tracer. This board also carries out the necessary measurements to trace the characteristic curves of the device under test. It was designed an additional board with the appropriate circuit for the base and collector terminals. A program was written in the graphical language G of LabVIEW to program the complete operation of the tracer and to control the external circuits. The developed program presents the results in a graphic indicator as a family of curves, it can store in a file the parameters of the characterization process. A.7 Secure Two-Way Transfer of Measurement Data This research introduces a measurement system architecture, which has three main qualities: secure two-way transfer of measurement data, quick adapt- ability to different kinds of measurement tasks and strong data presentation 660 A LabVIEW Research Projects capabilities through XML techniques. In the architecture, the researchers take advantage of well-tried technologies, like a commonly used visual program- ming language that offers predefined and adaptive measuring tools for man- aging measurement devices and tasks. XML is a widely adopted standard for a flexible text format and data exchange. It brings along a vast selection of readymade facilities for processing and transforming the content into any format desired. The researchers also propose a secure environment into the architecture, which can be accessed on demand using a wide range of terminal devices. A.8 Development of a LabVIEW-Based Test Facility for Standalone PV Systems To quantify the potential for performance improvement of a standalone photo- voltaic (PV) system, a test facility has been installed. This research describes this development of a prototype standalone PV system. Essentially this entire system involves the integration of a Personal computer (PC), Data Acquisi- tion (DAQ), a battery array and a solar array simulator (SAS) to create a standalone PV system and to test and simulate the system. This new system boasts of high accuracy measurements coupled with the commercial viability of low cost. The basic idea of this facility is that the SAS simulates solar power which is utilized to charge batteries. The information obtained by monitoring parameters, such as average battery’s temperature, voltage and current is fed to the PC via the DAQ for analysis. This customized control interface has been developed by utilizing LabVIEW software, which forms the program- ming backbone of interinstrument communication through IEEE-GPIB bus. The software created for this system is highly generic and can be used for other instances where different hardware is used. This project also discusses further research plan, in utilizing this standalone PV system to perform load analysis and batteries charging or discharging with the inputs to the SAS with actual meteorological data obtained from the Malaysian meteorological department. A.9 Semantic Virtual Environments with Adaptive Multimodal Interfaces Researchers present a system for real-time configuration of multimodal inter- faces to Virtual Environments (VE). The flexibility of the tool is supported by a semantics-based representation of VEs. Semantic descriptors are used to define interaction devices and virtual entities under control. Researchers use portable (XML) descriptors to define the I/O channels of a variety of interaction devices. Semantic description of virtual objects turns them into A.11 A Method to Record, Store,
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