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1 – 10 of 309
Article
Publication date: 26 June 2009

Bo Chen, Jifeng Wang and Shanben Chen

Welding process is a complicated process influenced by many interference factors, a single sensor cannot get information describing welding process roundly. This paper…

Abstract

Purpose

Welding process is a complicated process influenced by many interference factors, a single sensor cannot get information describing welding process roundly. This paper simultaneously uses different sensors to get different information about the welding process, and uses multi‐sensor information fusion technology to fuse the different information. By using multi‐sensors, this paper aims to describe the welding process more precisely.

Design/methodology/approach

Electronic and welding pool image information are, respectively, obtained by arc sensor and image sensor, then electronic signal processing and image processing algorithms are used to extract the features of the signals, the features are then fused by neural network to predict the backside width of weld pool.

Findings

Comparative experiments show that the multi‐sensor fusion technology can predict the weld pool backside width more precisely.

Originality/value

The multi‐sensor fusion technology is used to fuse the different information obtained by different sensors in a gas tungsten arc welding process. This method gives a new approach to obtaining information and describing the welding process.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 29 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 August 2010

Bo Chen and Shanben Chen

The status of welding process is difficult to monitor because of the intense disturbance during the process. The purpose of this paper is to use multiple sensors to obtain…

Abstract

Purpose

The status of welding process is difficult to monitor because of the intense disturbance during the process. The purpose of this paper is to use multiple sensors to obtain information about the process from different aspects and use multi‐sensor information fusion technology to fuse the information, to obtain more precise information about the process than using a single sensor alone.

Design/methodology/approach

Arc sensor, visual sensor, and sound sensor were used simultaneously to obtain weld current, weld voltage, weld pool's image, and weld sound about the pulsed gas tungsten‐arc welding (GTAW) process. Then special algorithms were used to extract the signal features of different information. Fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral method were used to fuse the extracted signal features to predict the penetration status about the welding process.

Findings

Experiment results show that fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral method can effectively utilize the information obtained by different sensors and obtain better prediction results than a single sensor.

Originality/value

Arc sensor, visual sensor, and sound sensor are used in pulsed GTAW at the same time to obtain information, and fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral method are used to fuse the different features in welding process for the first time; experiment results show that multi‐sensor information can obtain better results than single sensor, this provides a new method for monitoring welding status and to control the welding process more precisely.

Details

Assembly Automation, vol. 30 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-5154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 March 2010

Bo Chen, Jifeng Wang and Shanben Chen

Welding sensor technology is the key technology in welding process, but a single sensor cannot acquire adequate information to describe welding status. This paper addresses arc…

Abstract

Purpose

Welding sensor technology is the key technology in welding process, but a single sensor cannot acquire adequate information to describe welding status. This paper addresses arc sensor and sound sensor to acquire the voltage and sound information of pulsed gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) simultaneously, and uses multi‐sensor information fusion technology to fuse the information acquired by the two sensors. The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of multi‐sensor information fusion in pulsed GTAW.

Design/methodology/approach

The weld voltage and weld sound information are first acquired by arc sensor and sound sensor, then the features of the two signals are extracted, and the features are fused by weighted mean method to predict the changes of arc length. The weights of each feature are determined by optional distribution method.

Findings

The research findings show that multi‐sensor information fusion technology can effectively utilize the information of different sensors and get better result than single sensor.

Originality/value

The arc sensor and sound sensor are first used at the same time to get information about pulsed GTAW and the fusion result shows its advantages over single sensor; this reveals that multi‐sensor fusion technology is a valuable research area in welding process.

Details

Industrial Robot: An International Journal, vol. 37 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-991X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 May 2011

Shuping Wan

Multi‐sensor data fusion (MSDF) is defined as the process of integrating information from multiple sources to produce the most specific and comprehensive unified data about an…

317

Abstract

Purpose

Multi‐sensor data fusion (MSDF) is defined as the process of integrating information from multiple sources to produce the most specific and comprehensive unified data about an entity, activity or event. Multi‐sensor object recognition is one of the important technologies of MSDF. It has been widely applied in the fields of navigation, aviation, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, fuzzy control, robot, and so on. Hence, aimed at the type recognition problem in which the characteristic values of object types and observations of sensors are in the form of triangular fuzzy numbers, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new fusion method from the viewpoint of decision‐making theory.

Design/methodology/approach

This work, first divides the comprehensive transaction process of sensor signal into two phases. Then, aimed at the type recognition problem, the paper gives the definition of similarity degree between two triangular fuzzy numbers. By solving the maximization optimization model, the vector of characteristic weights is objectively derived. A new fusion method is proposed according to the overall similarity degree.

Findings

The results of the experiments show that solving the maximization optimization model improves significantly the objectivity and accuracy of object recognition.

Originality/value

The paper studies the type recognition problem in which the characteristic values of object types and observations of sensors are in the form of triangular fuzzy numbers. By solving the maximization optimization model, the vector of characteristic weights is derived. A new fusion method is proposed. This method improves the objectivity and accuracy of object recognition.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 40 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 May 2021

Haina Song, Shengpei Zhou, Zhenting Chang, Yuejiang Su, Xiaosong Liu and Jingfeng Yang

Autonomous driving depends on the collection, processing and analysis of environmental information and vehicle information. Environmental perception and processing are important…

Abstract

Purpose

Autonomous driving depends on the collection, processing and analysis of environmental information and vehicle information. Environmental perception and processing are important prerequisite for the safety of self-driving of vehicles; it involves road boundary detection, vehicle detection, pedestrian detection using sensors such as laser rangefinder, video camera, vehicle borne radar, etc.

Design/methodology/approach

Subjected to various environmental factors, the data clock information is often out of sync because of different data acquisition frequency, which leads to the difficulty in data fusion. In this study, according to practical requirements, a multi-sensor environmental perception collaborative method was first proposed; then, based on the principle of target priority, large-scale priority, moving target priority and difference priority, a multi-sensor data fusion optimization algorithm based on convolutional neural network was proposed.

Findings

The average unload scheduling delay of the algorithm for test data before and after optimization under different network transmission rates. It can be seen that with the improvement of network transmission rate and processing capacity, the unload scheduling delay decreased after optimization and the performance of the test results is the closest to the optimal solution indicating the excellent performance of the optimization algorithm and its adaptivity to different environments.

Originality/value

In this paper, the results showed that the proposed method significantly improved the redundancy and fault tolerance of the system thus ensuring fast and correct decision-making during driving.

Details

Assembly Automation, vol. 41 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-5154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 October 2021

Umair Ali, Wasif Muhammad, Muhammad Jehanzed Irshad and Sajjad Manzoor

Self-localization of an underwater robot using global positioning sensor and other radio positioning systems is not possible, as an alternative onboard sensor-based self-location…

Abstract

Purpose

Self-localization of an underwater robot using global positioning sensor and other radio positioning systems is not possible, as an alternative onboard sensor-based self-location estimation provides another possible solution. However, the dynamic and unstructured nature of the sea environment and highly noise effected sensory information makes the underwater robot self-localization a challenging research topic. The state-of-art multi-sensor fusion algorithms are deficient in dealing of multi-sensor data, e.g. Kalman filter cannot deal with non-Gaussian noise, while parametric filter such as Monte Carlo localization has high computational cost. An optimal fusion policy with low computational cost is an important research question for underwater robot localization.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the authors proposed a novel predictive coding-biased competition/divisive input modulation (PC/BC-DIM) neural network-based multi-sensor fusion approach, which has the capability to fuse and approximate noisy sensory information in an optimal way.

Findings

Results of low mean localization error (i.e. 1.2704 m) and computation cost (i.e. 2.2 ms) show that the proposed method performs better than existing previous techniques in such dynamic and unstructured environments.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work provides a novel multisensory fusion approach to overcome the existing problems of non-Gaussian noise removal, higher self-localization estimation accuracy and reduced computational cost.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 41 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 1989

Per Holmbom, Ole Pedersen, Bengt Sandell and Alexander Lauber

By tradition, sensors are used to measure one desired parameter; all other parameters influencing the sensor are considered as interfering inputs, to be eliminated if possible…

Abstract

By tradition, sensors are used to measure one desired parameter; all other parameters influencing the sensor are considered as interfering inputs, to be eliminated if possible. Hence most of existing sensors are specifically intended for measuring one parameter, e.g. temperature, and the ideal temperature sensor should be as immune to all other parameters as possible. True, we sometimes use primitive sensor fusion, e.g. when calculating heat flow by combining separate measurements of temperature difference and of fluid flow.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 9 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Article
Publication date: 14 June 2013

Wen‐Tsai Sung and Chia‐Cheng Hsu

This study aims to analyze the inertial weight factor value in the (PSO) algorithm and propose non‐linear weights with decreasing strategy to implement the improved PSO (IPSO…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to analyze the inertial weight factor value in the (PSO) algorithm and propose non‐linear weights with decreasing strategy to implement the improved PSO (IPSO) algorithm. Using various types of sensors, combined with ZigBee wireless sensor networks and the TCP/IP network. The GPRS/SMS long‐range wireless network will sense the measured data analysis and evaluation to create more effective monitoring and observation in a regional environment to achieve an Internet of Things with automated information exchange between persons and things.

Design/methodology/approach

This study proposes a wireless sensor network system using ZigBee (PSoC‐1605A) chip, sensor and circuit boards to constitute the IOT system. The IOT system consists of a main coordinator (PSoC‐1605A), smart grid monitoring system, robotic arm detection warning system and temperature and humidity sensor network. The hardware components communicate with each other through wireless transmission. Each node collects data and sends messages to other objects in the network.

Findings

This study employed IPSO to perform information fusion in a multi‐sensor network. The paper shows that IPSO improved the measurement preciseness via weight factors estimated via experimental simulations. The experimental results show that the IPSO algorithm optimally integrates the weight factors, information source fusion reliability, information redundancy and hierarchical structure integration in uncertain fusion cases. The sensor data approximates the optimal way to extract useful information from each fusion data and successfully eliminates noise interference, producing excellent fusion results.

Practical implications

Robotic arm to tilt detection warning system: Several geographic areas are susceptible to severe tectonic plate movement, often generating earthquakes. Earthquakes cause great harm to public infrastructure, and a great threat to high‐tech, high‐precision machinery and production lines. To minimize the extent of earthquake disasters and allow managers to deal with power failures, vibration monitoring system construction can enhance manufacturing process quality and stability. Smart grid monitoring system: The greenhouse effect, global energy shortage and rising cost of traditional energy are related energy efficiency topics that have attracted much attention. The aim of this paper is that real‐time data rendering and analysis can be more effective in understanding electrical energy usage, resulting in a reduction in unnecessary consumption and waste. Temperature and humidity sensor network system: Environmental temperature and humidity monitoring and application of a wide range of precision industrial production lines, laboratories, antique works of art that have a higher standard of environmental temperature and humidity requirements. The environment has a considerable influence on biological lifeforms. The relative importance of environmental management and monitoring is acute.

Originality/value

This paper improves the fixed inertial weight of the original particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. An illustration in the paper indicates that IPSO applies the Internet of Things (IOT) system in monitoring a system via adjusted weight factors better than other existing PSO methods in computing a precise convergence rate for excellent fusion results.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 33 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 July 2015

Mohammad Ghesmat and Akbar Khalkhali

There are high expectations for reliability, safety and fault tolerance are high in chemical plants. Control systems are capable of potential faults in the plant processing…

Abstract

Purpose

There are high expectations for reliability, safety and fault tolerance are high in chemical plants. Control systems are capable of potential faults in the plant processing systems. This paper proposes is a new Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) system to identify the probable fault occurrences in the plant.

Design/methodology/approach

A Fault Diagnosis and Isolation (FDI) module has been devised based on the estimated state of system. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is the main innovation of the FDI module to identify the faults. A Multi-Sensor Data Fusion algorithm is utilized to integrate the UKF output data to enhance fault identification. The UKF employs an augmented state vector to estimate system states and faults simultaneously. A control mechanism is designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of the detected faults.

Findings

The performance of the Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) without any fault compensation is compared with the proposed FTC scheme under different fault scenarios. Analysis of the simulation results indicates that the FDI method is able to identify the faults accurately. The proposed FTC approach facilitates recovery of the closed loop performance after the faults have been isolated.

Originality/value

A significant contribution of the paper is the design of an FTC system by using UKF to estimate faults and enhance the accuracy of data. This is done by applying a data fusion algorithm and controlling the system by the NMPC after eliminating the effects of faults.

Details

COMPEL: The International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, vol. 34 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0332-1649

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 June 2020

Michele Moretti, Federico Bianchi and Nicola Senin

This paper aims to illustrate the integration of multiple heterogeneous sensors into a fused filament fabrication (FFF) system and the implementation of multi-sensor data fusion

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to illustrate the integration of multiple heterogeneous sensors into a fused filament fabrication (FFF) system and the implementation of multi-sensor data fusion technologies to support the development of a “smart” machine capable of monitoring the manufacturing process and part quality as it is being built.

Design/methodology/approach

Starting from off-the-shelf FFF components, the paper discusses the issues related to how the machine architecture and the FFF process itself must be redesigned to accommodate heterogeneous sensors and how data from such sensors can be integrated. The usefulness of the approach is discussed through illustration of detectable, example defects.

Findings

Through aggregation of heterogeneous in-process data, a smart FFF system developed upon the architectural choices discussed in this work has the potential to recognise a number of process-related issues leading to defective parts.

Research limitations/implications

Although the implementation is specific to a type of FFF hardware and type of processed material, the conclusions are of general validity for material extrusion processes of polymers.

Practical implications

Effective in-process sensing enables timely detection of process or part quality issues, thus allowing for early process termination or application of corrective actions, leading to significant savings for high value-added parts.

Originality/value

While most current literature on FFF process monitoring has focused on monitoring selected process variables, in this work a wider perspective is gained by aggregation of heterogeneous sensors, with particular focus on achieving co-localisation in space and time of the sensor data acquired within the same fabrication process. This allows for the detection of issues that no sensor alone could reliably detect.

Details

Rapid Prototyping Journal, vol. 26 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2546

Keywords

1 – 10 of 309