Search results for "TRACK"
showing 10 items of 975 documents
Cardiovascular disease burden from ambient air pollution in Europe reassessed using novel hazard ratio functions
2019
Abstract Aims Ambient air pollution is a major health risk, leading to respiratory and cardiovascular mortality. A recent Global Exposure Mortality Model, based on an unmatched number of cohort studies in many countries, provides new hazard ratio functions, calling for re-evaluation of the disease burden. Accordingly, we estimated excess cardiovascular mortality attributed to air pollution in Europe. Methods and results The new hazard ratio functions have been combined with ambient air pollution exposure data to estimate the impacts in Europe and the 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28). The annual excess mortality rate from ambient air pollution in Europe is 790 000 [95% confidence i…
Turtles on the trash track: loggerhead turtles exposed to floating plastic in the Mediterranean Sea
2019
Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) spend most of their life in large marine areas occupying a variety of habitats where they are exposed to different types of threats. Among these, marine litter is known to pose a risk of entanglement or ingestion. Areas of risk exposure can be identified where the species overlap with litter accumulations, but gathering data on this highly mobile species and marine litter, especially in high sea areas, is challenging. Here we analysed five years of sea turtle and marine litter data collected by a network of research bodies along fixed trans-border transects in the Mediterranean Sea. Ferries were used as observation platforms to gather systematic data on …
An EKF Based Method for Path Following in Turbulent Air
2017
An innovative use of the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is proposed to perform both accurate path following and adequate disturbance rejection in turbulent air. The tuned up procedure employs simultaneously two different EKF: the first one estimates gust disturbances, the second one estimates modified aircraft parameters. The first filter, by using measurements gathered in turbulent air, estimates both aircraft states and wind components. The second one, by using the estimated disturbances, obtains command laws that are able to reject disturbances. The predictor of the second EKF uses the estimated wind components to solve motion equations in turbulent air. Besides a set of unknown stability …
Automatic EKF tuning for UAS path following in turbulent air
2018
By using two simultaneously working Extended Kalman Filters, a procedure is implemented in order to perform in a fully autonomous way the path following in turbulent air. To guarantee the robustness of the proposed algorithm, an automatic tuning procedure is proposed to determine optimal values of Process and Measurement Noise statistics. Such a procedure is based on both the characteristics of the disturbances and the desired flight path; in particular, a specific performance index is applied to tune filters. In this way control laws are adapted to the flight condition and these lead to an optimal path-following. This research represents an upload of previous papers. It allows eliminating …
Nanohybrid for Photodynamic Therapy and Fluorescence Imaging Tracking without Therapy
2018
Theranostic upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) are ideal candidates for personalized medicine. We present a smart, easy-to-prepare nanohybrid (NH) suitable for NIR-theragnosis and imaging tracking without triggering therapy simultaneously. The photophysical features of each component have been carefully selected in order to maximize the capabilities for theragnosis, in particular, the upconversion emission and the photosensitizer absorption. In addition, NH presents a fluorescent marker with one-photon absorption in the green and two-photon absorption cross-section at NIR wavelengths where the UCNP does not absorb, thus enabling innocuous tracking. Thus, the NH consists of NaYF4:Yb, Er, Tm …
A pre-processing and network analysis of GPS tracking data
2020
Global Positioning System (GPS) devices afford the opportunity to collect accurate data on unit movements from temporal and spatial perspectives. With a special focus on GPS technology in travel surveys, this paper proposes: (1) two algorithms for the pre-processing of GPS data in order to deal with outlier identification and missing data imputation; (2) a clustering approach to recover the main points of interest from GPS trajectories; and (3) a weighted-directed network, which incorporates the most relevant characteristics of the GPS trajectories at an aggregate level. A simulation study shows the goodness-of-fit of the imputation data algorithm and the robustness of the clustering algori…
Motion and force analysis of slow-speed multi-trailer systems
2018
Comparing with the tractor-trailer systems for the road haulage, which must cope with some typical undesired trends, such as high-speed instability, over- or under-steering and off-tracking, the multi-trailer systems for the transport of luggage in the airports or in the railway stations, or for the transfer of goods in the warehouses, run at quite low speeds, but must manage to steer clear of the many obstacles encountered along their path. This type of vehicle is not subject to tire cornering phenomena, because the speed is just low and the wheels are generally stiff. Hence, the vehicle movement is in practice ruled by the non-holonomic rolling constraint of the wheels and by the steerin…
Adaptive PI Control of Bottom Hole Pressure during Oil Well Drilling
2018
Abstract In this paper, we studied the bottom hole pressure (BHP) control in an oil well during drilling. Today marginal wells with narrow pressure windows are frequently being drilled. This requires accurate and precise control to balance the bottom hole pressure between the pore and fracture pressure of the reservoir. This paper presents three control schemes to stabilize the BHP prole, including proportional-integral(PI) control, PI with feed-forward control and adaptive PI with feed-forward control. The proposed schemes are carried out through simulations on a high-fidelity hydraulic drilling simulator for flow rate changes and BHP set-point changes. In fast set-point changes and flow r…
A Multi-Scale Colour and Keypoint Density-Based Approach for Visual Saliency Detection
2020
In the first seconds of observation of an image, several visual attention processes are involved in the identification of the visual targets that pop-out from the scene to our eyes. Saliency is the quality that makes certain regions of an image stand out from the visual field and grab our attention. Saliency detection models, inspired by visual cortex mechanisms, employ both colour and luminance features. Furthermore, both locations of pixels and presence of objects influence the Visual Attention processes. In this paper, we propose a new saliency method based on the combination of the distribution of interest points in the image with multiscale analysis, a centre bias module and a machine …
On the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Visual Tracking: a Survey
2021
This paper aims at highlighting cutting-edge research results in the field of visual tracking by deep reinforcement learning. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is an emerging area combining recent progress in deep and reinforcement learning. It is showing interesting results in the computer vision field and, recently, it has been applied to the visual tracking problem yielding to the rapid development of novel tracking strategies. After providing an introduction to reinforcement learning, this paper compares recent visual tracking approaches based on deep reinforcement learning. Analysis of the state-of-the-art suggests that reinforcement learning allows modeling varying parts of the tracki…