Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia are two of the few fatal lung diseases which share common adventitious lung sounds. Diagnosing the disease from lung sound analysis to design a noninvasive technique for telemedicine is a challenging task. A novel framework is presented to perform a diagnosis of COPD and Pneumonia via application of the signal processing and machine learning approach. This model will help the pulmonologist to accurately detect disease A and B. COPD, normal and pneumonia lung sound (LS) data from the ICBHI respiratory database is used in this research. The performance analysis is evidence of the improved performance of the quadratic discriminate classifier with an accuracy of 99.70% on selected fused features after experimentation. The fusion of time domain, cepstral, and spectral features are employed. Feature selection for fusion is performed through the back-elimination method whereas empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based techniques are used to denoise and segment the pulmonic signal. Class imbalance is catered with the implementation of the adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling technique.

The robotic airship can provide a promising aerostatic platform for many potential applications. These applications require a precise autonomous trajectory tracking control for airship. Airship has a nonlinear and uncertain dynamics. It is prone to wind disturbances that offer a challenge for a trajectory tracking control design. This paper addresses the airship trajectory tracking problem having time varying reference path. A lumped parameter estimation approach under model uncertainties and wind disturbances is opted against distributed parameters. It uses extended Kalman filter (EKF) for uncertainty and disturbance estimation. The estimated parameters are used by sliding mode controller (SMC) for ultimate control of airship trajectory tracking. This comprehensive algorithm, EKF based SMC (ESMC), is used as a robust solution to track airship trajectory. The proposed estimator provides the estimates of wind disturbances as well as model uncertainty due to the mass matrix variations and aerodynamic model inaccuracies. The stability and convergence of the proposed method are investigated using the Lyapunov stability analysis. The simulation results show that the proposed method efficiently tracks the desired trajectory. The method solves the stability, convergence, and chattering problem of SMC under model uncertainties and wind disturbances.

In this paper, dynamic simulation and control of a fuel cell power plant in a power distribution system are studied using MATLAB/SIMULINK. Part I presents the dynamic models of a prototype solid oxide fuel cell and a PWM-based inverter which serves as the interface between the fuel cell and the power distribution system. The configuration of the power distribution system used to study fuel cell impact is also presented as well as the open-loop response of the fuel cell power plant and the dynamic responses in the system when disturbances occur. A supplemental control scheme to improve the dynamic stability of the power distribution system is investigated in Part II.

Autonomous flight of an aerial vehicle requires a sufficiently accurate mathematical model, which can capture system dynamics in the presence of external disturbances. Artificial neural network is known for ideal in capturing systems behaviour, where little knowledge about vehicle dynamics is available. In this paper, we explored this potential of artificial neural network for characterizing nonlinear dynamics of an unmanned airship. The flight experimentation data for an outdoor experimental airship are acquired through a series of pre-determined flight tests. The experimental data are subjected to a class of dynamic recurrent neural network model dubbed as nonlinear auto-regressive model with exogenous inputs for training. Sufficiently trained neural network model captured and demonstrated the longitudinal dynamics of the airship satisfactorily. We also demonstrated the usefulness of proposed technique for Lotte airship, wherein the performance of proposed model is validated and analysed for the Lotte airship flight test data.