The amount of light is an important issue in several scenarios ranging from scenic design, light pollution study, robots navigation, occupational health and safety, illumination engineering, agriculture, medical appliances and many more. It is typically determined by using an illumination meter. The meter, also known as lux meter is used to measure the density of light in an area which measured in lx unit. It is used in photometry as a measure of the intensity, as perceived by the human eye of light that hits or passes through a surface. As in normal meter, the lux value was obviously a displayed value, and hardly used for embedded application as well as for lighting monitoring considering its expensive price. This limits the lighting monitoring in certain critical field. Therefore, in this paper, we present our initial works on the development of a webcam based lux meter that is applicable and suitable for lighting monitoring as well as the ability to be used in embedded application. A series of controlled images are taken, and image processing is applied to the images. The results of image processing are statistically analyzed and a linear relationship between lux value and average grayscale has been obtained with satisfactory R2. The linear function is tested and the results are justified where the algorithm for low cost webcam-based digital lux meter has been successfully developed.

Many studies had been conducted in improving the performance of large scale integration circuits that heavily depends on the interconnected routing in the circuits. Strategic choice of wire placement and buffer placement for very large scale integration (VLSI) routing can improve time delay of VLSI circuit. This paper explores the use of Firefly Algorithm in VLSI routing. The location of doglegs is employed to model the firefly that represents the routing solution. The proposed approach is then compared with previous literature for benchmarking. The result indicates that it has a good potential in VLSI routing and can be further extended in future.

The problem of the blind spot zone (BSZ) for motorcycles is common, as it causes many accidents that occur between motorcycles and cars, or motorcycles with other vehicles. The problem of BSZ is occurring for many reasons, such as if the motorcyclist wants to change the lane or manoeuvre or turn without realizing the presence of other vehicle which may cause a terrible collision and leads to casualties, either because of darkness, the full dependence on side mirrors that give a limited scope of vision, or due to a malfunction in the front lights of the car that prevented the motorcyclists from recognizing it. However there were limited research on identifation of BSZ for motorcycle, even though most vehicle accidents in Malaysia involved motorcycles. This paper discusses the initial works on the identification of BSZ for motorcyles. Three types of motorcycles were used to determine the BSZ using grid-based technique. From the data collected, the BSZ was identified for the motorcycles.

This paper discusses how the strain gradient influences the fatigue life of carbon steel in the low-cycle and high-cycle fatigue regimes. To obtain fatigue data under different strain distributions, cyclic alternating bending tests using specimens with different thicknesses and cyclic tension–compression tests were conducted on carbon steel for pressure vessels (SPV235). The crack initiation life and total failure life were evaluated via the strain-based approach. The experimental results showed that the crack initiation life became short with decreasing strain gradient from 10² to 10⁶ cycles in fatigue life. On the other hand, the influence of the strain gradient on the total failure life was different from that on the crack initiation life: although the total failure life of the specimen subjected to cyclic tension–compression was also the shortest, the strain gradient did not affect the total failure life of the specimen subjected to cyclic bending from 10² to 10⁶ cycles in fatigue life. This was because the crack propagation life became longer in a thicker specimen. Hence, these experimental results implied that the fatigue crack initiation life could be characterized by not only strain but also the strain gradient in the low-cycle and high-cycle fatigue regimes.

Task assignments to team of homogenous autonomous robots are in research trends in robotic field. Autonomous homogeneous multi-robot is known to have similar architecture in terms of structure and identical control system as well as their tasking. At present, most research of multi-robot mainly focuses on motion control layer. Nevertheless, a successful control and coordination of a group of robot rely on effective inter-robot communication. In this paper, in depth investigation of the Bluetooth between two homogenous mobile robots, namely MechA and MechI, is presented. MechA is pre-programmed with dedicated movement, and upon completion the data acquired is sent to MechI for coordination. A distance-based measurement was made for comparison, giving a reliable data for crisp observation. Coordination of multi-robots can be done by controlling the movement of each mobile robot through wireless communication between mobile robots with error distance of 0.0322 ± 0.0147 m.