Ventilators are drawn to many researchers during the Covid-19 pandemic because it's essential equipment that's accustomed to treat severe Covid-19 patients. In low-income countries, there's a shortage of pricy respiratory devices resulting in exceeding the provision of taking care of Covid-19's patients in ICU. This paper attempts to design and implement an appropriate respiratory device referred to as a bag valve mask (BVM) ventilator for those who are Covid-19 patients in medical care, those patients have a requirement of safe transport and also palliative care. The BVM ventilator comprises a man-made manual breath unit (AMBU) bag and paddles for squeezing the AMBU bag which is popular in medical aid settings. The BVM ventilator is required to travel airflow through the system to the patient's lung with the specified volume for every breath cycle within a threshold air pressure. Since the AMBU bag is straightforward to be deformed over time, it's difficult to get mathematical modelling for constructing a reliable controller. Therefore, a model-free control (MFC) control approach is utilized successfully to style a controller for our BVM ventilator model with a PEEP valve and a HEPA filter. Some experimental scenarios are administered to gauge the effectiveness of the proposed controller for the BVM ventilator to control the airflow and control air pressure mode.
The demand for renewable energy sources is growing fast because of the negative impact of the utilization of fossil energy, nuclear energy, and hydroelectricity. One of the renewable energy sources, known as solar energy, which uses the photovoltaic panel (PV) to generate electricity from the sun, is a promising alternative that has great potential to deal with the power crisis. However, the power productivity and efficiency conversion are affected significantly by dust accumulation on PVs. Many researchers investigated PV panel dust cleaning methods to improve performance, yield, and profitability. Various dust cleaning and mitigation methods such as rainfall, labor-based, and mechanized cleaning are explored, and we demonstrated that dust removal could be automated with cleaning robots effectively. Due to the specified geographical site of PV panel installation, cleaning robots might work on the misalignment and uneven PV arrays, presenting huge challenges for an autonomous cleaning robot. Thus, a rubber wheel crawler robot with semi-autonomous handling provides a flexible motion that is a well-suited solution to clean rooftop PV arrays. Nevertheless, the rubber wheel crawler robot might suffer slippage on the wet glass of tilted PV arrays. This paper studies the anti-slip effect of the rubber wheel crawler equipped with a cleaning robot under the wet surface of tilted PV panels. First, a theoretical model consisting of several parameters is established to validate the slippage of the rubber wheel crawler on the wet tilted PV. Then, some parameters of the theoretical model are approximated through experimental tests. Finally, simulation results of the theoretical model are conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed theoretical model in comparison to the experimental results under the same working conditions. The merits provide the efficient design of rubber wheel crawlers, enabling the anti-slip ability of robots.
Mobile robots have played a vital role in the transportation industries, service robotics, and autonomous vehicles over the past decades. The development of robust tracking controllers has made mobile robots a powerful tool that can replace humans in industrial work. However, most of the traditional controller updates are time-based and triggered at every predetermined time interval, which requires high communication bandwidth. Therefore, an event-triggered control scheme is essential to release the redundant data transmission. This paper presents a novel parameter-adaptive event-trigger sliding mode to control a two-wheeled mobile robot. The adaptive control scheme ensures that the mobile robot system can be controlled accurately without the knowledge of physical parameters. Meanwhile, the event trigger sliding approach guarantees the system robustness and reduces resource usage. A simulation in MATLAB and an experiment are carried out to validate the efficiency of the proposed controller.
16 August 2022 in International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems
Purpose: In the COVID-19 outbreak periods, people's life has been deranged, leading to disrupt the world. Firstly, the number of deaths is growing and has the potential to surpass the highest level at any time. Secondly, the pandemic broke many countries' fortified lines of epidemic prevention and gave people a more honest view of its seriousness. Finally, the pandemic has an impact on life, and the economy led to a shortage in medical, including a lack of clinicians, facilities and medical equipment. One of those, a simple ventilator is a necessary piece of medical equipment since it might be useful for a COVID-19 patient's treatment. In some cases, the COVID-19 patients require to be treated by modern ventilators to reduce lung damage. Therefore, the addition of simple ventilators is a necessity to relieve high work pressure on medical bureaucracies. Some low-income countries aim to build a simple ventilator for primary care and palliative care using locally accessible and low-cost components. One of the simple principles for producing airflow is to squeeze an artificial manual breathing unit (AMBU) iterative with grippers, which imitates the motion of human fingers. Unfortunately, the squeezing angle of grippers is not proportional to the exhaust air volume from the AMBU bag. This paper aims to model the AMBU bag by a mathematical equation that enables to implement on a simple controller to operate a bag-valve-mask (BVM) ventilator with high accuracy performance.Design/methodology/approach: This paper provides a curvature function to estimate the air volume exhausting from the AMBU bag. Since the determination of the curvature function is sophisticated, the coefficients of the curvature function are approximated by a quadratic function through the experimental identification method. To obtain the high accuracy performance, a linear regression model and a least square method are employed to investigate the characteristic of the BVM ventilator's grippers angle with respect to the airflow volume produced by the AMBU bag.Findings: This paper investigates the correlation between the exhausting airflow of the AMBU bag and the grippers angle of the BVM ventilator.Originality/value: The experimental results validated that the regression model of the characteristic of the exhausting airflow of the AMBU bag with respect to the grippers' angle has been fitted with a coefficient over 98% within the range of 350–750 ml.