Search results for "Urban"

Improved Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Trajectory Tracking Control of Lower Limb Robotic Rehabilitation Exoskeleton.

2020

Neurological disorders such as cerebral paralysis, spinal cord injuries[acronym](SCI), and strokes, result in the impairment of motor control and induce functional difficulties to human beings like walking, standing, etc. Physical injuries due to accidents and muscular weaknesses caused by aging [english]affectsaffect people and can cause them to lose their ability to perform daily routine functions. In order to help people recover or improve their dysfunctional activities and quality of life after accidents or strokes, assistive devices like exoskeletons and orthoses are developed. Control strategies for control of exoskeletons are developed with the desired intention of improving the qual…

Crowd-Averse Robust Mean-Field Games: Approximation via State Space Extension

2016

We consider a population of dynamic agents, also referred to as players. The state of each player evolves according to a linear stochastic differential equation driven by a Brownian motion and under the influence of a control and an adversarial disturbance. Every player minimizes a cost functional which involves quadratic terms on state and control plus a cross-coupling mean-field term measuring the congestion resulting from the collective behavior, which motivates the term “crowd-averse.” Motivations for this model are analyzed and discussed in three main contexts: a stock market application, a production engineering example, and a dynamic demand management problem in power systems. For th…

Opinion dynamics in social networks through mean field games

2016

Emulation, mimicry, and herding behaviors are phenomena that are observed when multiple social groups interact. To study such phenomena, we consider in this paper a large population of homogeneous social networks. Each such network is characterized by a vector state, a vector-valued controlled input, and a vector-valued exogenous disturbance. The controlled input of each network aims to align its state to the mean distribution of other networks' states in spite of the actions of the disturbance. One of the contributions of this paper is a detailed analysis of the resulting mean-field game for the cases of both polytopic and $mathcal L_2$ bounds on controls and disturbances. A second contrib…

Non-linear active disturbance rejection control for upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton

2020

Trajectory tracking in upper limb rehabilitation exercises is utilized for repeatability of joint movement to improve the patient’s recovery in the early stages of rehabilitation. In this article, non-linear active disturbance rejection control as a combination of non-linear extended-state observer and non-linear state error feedback is used for the sinusoidal trajectory tracking control of the two-link model of an upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton. The two links represent movements like flexion/extension for both the shoulder joint and the elbow joint in the sagittal plane. The Euler–Lagrange method was employed to acquire a dynamic model of an upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton. T…

Oligarquización, oligarquías y gobierno urbano en el Oviedo de los Austrias

2020

Outward Investments and Productivity: Evidence from European Regions

2016

Castellani D. and Pieri F. Outward investments and productivity: evidence from European regions, Regional Studies. Using a novel data set on international investment projects, this paper builds measures of outward foreign direct investments (FDIs) for 262 regions of the European Union. This allows as estimation to be made of regressions of productivity growth over the 2007–11 period as a function of the number of FDIs. The number of outward FDIs in manufacturing activities is negatively associated with productivity growth in the home region, but investments in sales, distribution and marketing are associated with a boost in local productivity. This is driven especially by investments toward…

Creating a questionnaire for a scientific study

2016

Using questionnaires has become a permanent part of collecting data in scientific studies within the sphere of human sciences as well as other disciplines. It has been utilized already for nearly a century in collecting data. The first questionnaires were carried out on paper but nowadays there are e-questionnaires alongside it which can be carried out through e-mail or published on a social media platform (for example, Facebook). An often used method is also a survey which is carried out with a research project's own web page, association or company etc. A questionnaire has been considered as an actual scientific method of data collection since 1930s. However, it was already used a little …

Does EU cohesion policy work? Theory and evidence

2017

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of European Cohesion Policy in the regions of 12 EU countries in the period 1991–2008, on the basis of a spatial growth model, which allows for the identification of both direct and indirect effects of EU funds on GDP per worker growth. We find that “Objective 1” funds are characterized by strong spatial externalities and a positive and concave effect on the growth of GDP per worker, which reaches a peak at the ratio funds/GDP of approximately 3 percent and becomes non-significant after 4 percent. “Objective 2” and “Cohesion” funds have nonsignificant effects, while all the other funds exert a positive and significant effect, but their size is very lim…

Analyzing Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

2018

International audience; Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are resources that are essential for the performance of society, including its economy and its security. Large-scale disasters, whether natural or man-made, can have devastating primary (direct) effects on some CI and significant indirect effects (cascading effects) on other CIs, because CIs are interconnected and depend on each other’s services. Recent work by Laugé et al. expressed the dependency values among CIs as dependency matrices for various durations of the primary CI failure. For better preparedness and mitigation of CI failures knowledge of the weak points in CI interdependencies is crucial. To this effect, we have developed …

The politics of Argentina today: human rights and Kirchnerismo

2016

After the effects of bloody dictatorship that whipped the region, Argentina as many other Latin American countries experienced a great trauma which not only altered the ways politics was lived, but also undermined the social trust of citizens respecting to their institutions. The rise of Kirchneristes and Kirchnerismo post stock and market crisis of 2001, initiated a new age in Argentina. Kirchnerismo opened the doors for the vindication of many claims of human rights organisations, but at the same time, the discourse of human rights was adjusted to the interests of Cristina Kirchner and her followers. As a result of this, the cause of human rights allowed government to produce a new way of…