Indoor Positioning Design for Mobile Phones via Integrating a Single Microphone Sensor and an H2 Estimator.

An indoor positioning design developed for mobile phones by integrating a single microphone sensor, an H2 estimator, and tagged sound sources, all with distinct frequencies, is proposed in this investigation. From existing practical experiments, the results summarize a key point for achieving a satisfactory indoor positioning: The estimation accuracy of the instantaneous sound pressure level (SPL) that is inevitably affected by random variations of environmental corruptions dominates the indoor positioning performance. Following this guideline, the proposed H2 estimation design, accompanied by a sound pressure level model, is developed for effectively mitigating the influences of received signal strength (RSS) variations caused by reverberation, reflection, refraction, etc. From the simulation results and practical tests, the proposed design delivers a highly promising indoor positioning performance: an average positioning RMS error of 0.75 m can be obtained, even under the effects of heavy environmental corruptions.

Speech Enhancement of Mobile Devices Based on the Integration of a Dual Microphone Array and a Background Noise Elimination Algorithm.

Mobile devices are often used in our daily lives for the purposes of speech and communication. The speech quality of mobile devices is always degraded due to the environmental noises surrounding mobile device users. Regretfully, an effective background noise reduction solution cannot easily be developed for this speech enhancement problem. Due to these depicted reasons, a methodology is systematically proposed to eliminate the effects of background noises for the speech communication of mobile devices. This methodology integrates a dual microphone array with a background noise elimination algorithm. The proposed background noise elimination algorithm includes a whitening process, a speech modelling method and an H2 estimator. Due to the adoption of the dual microphone array, a low-cost design can be obtained for the speech enhancement of mobile devices. Practical tests have proven that this proposed method is immune to random background noises, and noiseless speech can be obtained after executing this denoise process.

Nano-Scale Positioning Design with Piezoelectric Materials.

Piezoelectric materials naturally possess high potential to deliver nano-scale positioning resolution; hence, they are adopted in a variety of engineering applications widely. Unfortunately, unacceptable positioning errors always appear because of the natural hysteresis effect of the piezoelectric materials. This natural property must be mitigated in practical applications. For solving this drawback, a nonlinear positioning design is proposed in this article. This nonlinear positioning design of piezoelectric materials is realized by the following four steps: 1. The famous Bouc⁻Wen model is utilized to present the input and output behaviors of piezoelectric materials; 2. System parameters of the Bouc⁻Wen model that describe the characteristics of piezoelectric materials are simultaneously identified with the particle swam optimization method; 3. Stability verification for the identified Bouc⁻Wen model; 4. A nonlinear feedback linearization control design is derived for the nano-scale positioning design of the piezoelectric material, mathematically. One important contribution of this investigation is that the positioning error between the output displacement of the controlled piezoelectric materials and the desired trajectory in nano-scale level can be proven to converge to zero asymptotically, under the effect of the hysteresis.

Nanoscale control designs for systems.

Nanoscale control is the science of the control of objects at dimensions with 100 nm or less and the manipulation of them at this level of precision. The desired attributes of systems under nanoscale control design are extreme high resolution, accuracy, stability, and fast response. An important perspective of investigation in nanoscale control design includes system modeling and precision control devices and materials at a nanoscale dimension, i.e., design of nanopositioners. Nanopositioners are mechatronic systems with an ultraprecise resolution down to a fraction of an atomic diameter and developed to move objects over a small range in nanoscale dimension. After reviewing a lot of existing literatures for nanoscale control designs, the way to successful nanoscale control is accurate position sensing and feedback control of the motion. An overview of nanoscale identification, linear, and nonlinear control technologies, and devices that are playing a key role in improving precision, accuracy, and response of operation of these systems are introduced in this research.