• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.190-207
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• 2015

In the combustion engineering, to decrease pollution and increase production efficiency, and to optimally keep solid burning material amount constant in a burner online, it needs a smart method to detect the amount variation of the burning materials in a high temperature environment. This paper presents an online machine vision system for automatically measuring and detecting the burning material amount inside a burner or a boiler. In the camera-protecting box of the system, a sub-system for cooling is constructed by using the cooling water circulation techqique. In addition, the key and intelligent step in the system is to detect the pile profile of the variable burning material, and the algorithm for the pile profile tracing was studied based on the combination of the gey level (color) discontinuity and similarity based image segmentation methods, the discontinuity based sub-algorithm is made on the quaternion convolution, and the similarity based sub-algorithm is designed according to the region growing with multi-scale clustering. The results of the two sub-algoritms are fused to delineate the final pile profile, and the algorithm has been tested and applied in different industrial burners and boilers. The experiements show that the proposed algorithm works satisfactorily.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.40 no.9
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• pp.807-817
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• 2012

An optical payload needs to be validated its image performance after launched into orbit. The image performance was validated by observing star because ground site contains uncertainties caused by atmosphere, time of the year, and weather. Time Delayed and Integration(TDI) technique, which is mostly used to observe the ground, is going to be used to observe the selected stars. A satellite attitude scenario was also developed to observe the selected stars. The scenario is created to enable TDI to operate. Rotation angles of optical payload are determined in order for the selected stars to properly be passed at a desired angular velocity about rotation axis. The result of this research can be utilized to validate the quality of optical payload of a satellite in orbit. In addition, a quaternion for pointing selected stars is calculated minimizing the path from a given arbitrary attitude of satellite.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.10-20
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• 2007

For spacecraft attitude control, reaction wheel (RW) steering laws with more than three wheels for three-axis attitude control can be derived by using a control allocation (CA) approach.1-2 The CA technique deals with a problem of distributing a given control demand to available sets of actuators.3-4 There are many references for CA with applications to aerospace systems. For spacecraft, the control torque command for three body-fixed reference frames can be constructed by a combination of multiple wheels, usually four-wheel pyramid sets. Multi-wheel configurations can be exploited to satisfy a body-axis control torque requirement while satisfying objectives such as minimum control energy.1-2 In general, the reaction wheel steering laws determine required torque command for each wheel in the form of matrix pseudo-inverse. In general, the attitude control command is generated in the form of a feedback control. The spacecraft body angular rate measured by gyros is used to estimate angular displacement also.⁵ Combination of the body angular rate and attitude parameters such as quaternion and MRPs(Modified Rodrigues Parameters) is typically used in synthesizing the control command which should be produced by RWs.¹ The attitude sensor signals are usually corrupted by noise; gyros tend to contain errors such as drift and random noise. The attitude determination system can estimate such errors, and provide best true signals for feedback control.⁶ Even if the attitude determination system, for instance, sophisticated algorithm such as the EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) algorithm⁶, can eliminate the errors efficiently, it is quite probable that the control command still contains noise sources. The noise and/or other high frequency components in the control command would cause the wheel speed to change in an undesirable manner. The closed-loop system, governed by the feedback control law, is also directly affected by the noise due to imperfect sensor characteristics. The noise components in the sensor signal should be mitigated so that the control command is isolated from the noise effect. This can be done by adding a filter to the sensor output or preventing rapid change in the control command. Dynamic control allocation(DCA), recently studied by Härkegård, is to distribute the control command in the sense of dynamics⁴: the allocation is made over a certain time interval, not a fixed time instant. The dynamic behavior of the control command is taken into account in the course of distributing the control command. Not only the control command requirement, but also variation of the control command over a sampling interval is included in the performance criterion to be optimized. The result is a control command in the form of a finite difference equation over the given time interval.⁴ It results in a filter dynamics by taking the previous control command into account for the synthesis of current control command. Stability of the proposed dynamic control allocation (CA) approach was proved to ensure the control command is bounded at the steady-state. In this study, we extended the results presented in Ref. 4 by adding a two-step dynamic CA term in deriving the control allocation law. Also, the strict equality constraint, between the virtual and actual control inputs, is relaxed in order to construct control command with a smooth profile. The proposed DCA technique is applied to a spacecraft attitude control problem. The sensor noise and/or irregular signals, which are existent in most of spacecraft attitude sensors, can be handled effectively by the proposed approach.