Saturday, July 07, 2007

Few words on open source

3/7/07

Last weekend, IEEE student's club organized it and i happened to attend the lecture by Raju Alluri from Sun Microsys... few things i would like to mention are:
The age has been changing from Industrial to information to participation age and this is where the open source has come into light and is of great importance when the intellectual level among users are developing and they no more want to depend fully onto vendors, instead every community want to give some contribution and at user level, they want to reconfigure the softwares as per their need and understand the actual functionality rather than a black box. Yeah of course, only the intelligent minds can participate here, but then that makes a difference. You don't need to pay huge amount to the vendor and their monopoly will be controlled as well as the updates too will be at your reach and for free. All you need to do is, join a good forum and start discussion. Now something might be revolving in your mind. I will tell you, if u have missed it, what bout professional ethics in response to open-source. Well it has many advantage than very few back points.

Sun believes in 1 dollar/cpu/hr expenditure. They came up not only with SPARC processor but as well as huge memory server technologies as well. ZFS (pronounced as G file system) is a hybrid data server and uses some 24 Terra bytes of cpu but still it use compression technique. You might be thinking that this might make the speed slower as compressing-decompressing technique while write-read operation, but this is not the truth. I will tell u how? The memory size has increased from few kilobytes to terrabytes within a decade and so has the CPU clock speed increased to 3.2GHz, but the rpm of secondary device reader has hardly leaped upto 7200 rpm. So whenever a read write operation is performed, the cpu has to wait a long time retrieving the data or writing it, in searching proper track and sector. This wait state is efficiently used for compressing-decompressing the data.

The containers provide the privilege of customizing the the sharing of data capability and putting restrictions among different processes running parallel. The SPARC processors are better than dual core INTEL concept, infact they came ahead with this idea much earlier. Group of each two cores form a cache and finally a ROM. The predictive self heating and cool threading techniques used are simply great.

What will u do, if a person suffers from a disease? Will u kill him, let him born and grow again and keep checking his status and cure? so stupid right?? Then why do u keep restarting your system whenever it gets halted? Think of a system which would never need to restart, it should be able to handle any kind of interrupt or traps or deadlocks. The answer is study, keep yourself update and go for open-source. You will need when and what is happening. You have everything in your hand to take care of.

The need of autonomy has so tremendously increased. Lets take an example of cars, the BMW technology will continuously monitor onto the condition of car, which will have inbuilt sensors and that will constantly keep communicating wid the vendor. Any problem like fuel viscosity, or if u get struck into deep forest or lonely place, they will come to know round the clock time and without your request or call, they will send rescue team for such persons. Alas technology, too good. This is what can been said the information age.

Sun has open work programming environment i.e. u can work for the company by logging onto any system and anywhere with some kind of chip provided to every employee. They are less than 50% of Sun's employee who come to office and work, rest follow this. Sun concentrates on academic initiative program and they have brand ambassadors at different leading institutes. Now what can u do? Logon to Sun's site, take up byte-sized bugs. Solve them, make proper documentation or snapshots. Contribute to them as well as same thing can be practiced for the open source. Post to ur blog and communicate to others as well.

Contact mr Raju at: raju.alluri@sun.com or askraju@spurthi.com. He has been wid Sun for more than 15 years and is a senior engineer. He is a blogger and enthusiastic open-source contributor. He is greatly inspired by the book "The seven habits of highly effective people". He suggests to read the 8th habit, a book from the same writer. I suggest a book "You can win" by shiv khera, really an inspiring book on building up positive attitude. He says, "Winners don't do different things, they do things differently."

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Proxy Server, Anonimity on Internet

The internet services provided on a shared LAN have generally blocked few sites and the connection is also limited. The problem of disconnecting and unable to open sites like orkut, etc was the reason why i started haunting about it.

The best of all time what i found is JAP / JonDo. How does it work? It creates a server on local system and creates a tunnel through the gateway to the remote server and this is how you get access to internet full freedom. It also maintains anonimity. But the only stake can be, the remote server that ultimately provides you access to internet, may misuse your informations, but this is equally the stake as per dependcy on ISP.

Just google and you will come to know about it more.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Seminar on Mobile Robotics

Thanks to ECE association and HAM & EA club for giving me this opportunity to share my knowledge.
Seminar on Mobile Robotics

Karna, Amit. (2007). Seminar on Mobile Robotics

Karna, Amit. (2017). Stepper Motor based Robocar’s design and control through Parallel Port for precise mobility. 10.13140/RG.2.2.10779.67360.
Link

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Ducted fan MAV Prototype @ Indian Institute of Sciencesv(IISc), Bangalore

First of all thanks to Aerospace Engineering Dept, IISc. The project was under progress and is in part sponsorship by Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India. I am thankful to Dr. D. Ghose, Mr. K. N. Krishnanand, Mr. Sharschandra, Mr. Hasan.



19th Jul, 2006: Ducted Fan Proto I: Robotic Aerial Vehicle @ IISc, Bangalore

Ducted Fan Flyer - a MAV under development at IISc, Bangalore
In the extension of mobile robots to three dimension, aerial robots have got a increased attention in recent years and the research on this is something rare in our countries like Nepal, India, etc.

In this respect, the work on MAV is under progress in particular Ducted-fan flyer and Quadrotor concept and i am glad and feel lucky to be a part of the this project under Prof. D. Ghose of Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore where I was present for my summer internship (May 8 - July 19, 2006).

The ducted-fan flyer concept consists of a single multi-blade propeller enclosed within a shroud or duct that acts as the main structure of the vehicle; the spinning propeller sucks air into the shroud producing an upward lift. The shroud guides the air vertically down onto a series of airfoil shaped fixed angle stators, which in turn generate lift-forces perpendicular to the propeller turning-axis. The moments generated by these forces provide the anti-torque that is needed to arrest the roll moment of the body (conventional helicopter uses a tail rotor to achieve the same purpose). As the rotor starts spinning at high speed, hovering is achieved as the lift generated by rotor exactly balances the weight of the vehicle.At this instant, if the outlet air is deviated from exact vertical,the vehicle should start cruising.



22nd Dec, 2006: MAV Prototype-2 @ AE, IISc

This date was of great importance as the we (myself, Krishna, Hasan, and Sharsch) made ever first hover into our lab, the Mobile Robotics Laboratory (MRL); Guided, Control, Decisions, and Systems Laboratory (GCDSL); Aerospace Department (AE), Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc).
We were overjoyed in sharing our achievement with our Prof., D. Ghose, who has granted us this project, but he was out of station. I am thankful to you for providing this wonderful environment that made it a success. We took few snaps and videos as for record of that. In the first, you can see the MAV and in the second pic you can see it hovering, and its quite stable, no roll moment at all. Had we not provided the strings, it would have flown-off; and coz we haven't been able to achieve stability completely, it would have ruined our work. The test bench though verry simple was preety much helpful. What all, we need to work on now is stability and electronics control. Unlike the earlier one, we built MAV without duct, still using stators for anti-roll mechanism. We had taken this decision because, we could not get the AXI brushless dc motor from Singapore. So, instead, we though to go ahead for time being without duct, which itself weighed more than 50% of the total vehicle weight in the last design. The idea of using duct was to enhance the lift and safety measures. So, we came to conclusion that if we are able to achieve hover without duct; then obviously we will achieve better control and lift using duct; given an optimised duct is used. In this new prototype, we are still using the stators. The exploration of use of duct, during my last summer-project suration has been of quite help. In this new proto, we saw that it not only provided roll-moment arrest but also stability. The total weight of the vehicle is only 36 gram. Krishna sir's help, and interaction was also a great reason for this successful achievement. With this, we fell we have completed 1st phase of our project, and we should move ahead with controls for which we will soon decide the components required and place order for those.

My MAV prototype-II video
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The experiment was successfully carried out IISc, Bangalore. We achieved the first phase of the project on aerial robot.





31st Jan, 2007: Paper ppt at CASST'07


Conference on Advances in Space and Science Technology 2007(CASST’07) was held at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore between 29th-31st January, 2007 and our paper "Ducted fan aerial flyer – an overview and roll moment control" had got selected for the international conference. I did deliver the presentation with a good appreciation and everyone were more interested when they saw the video of out MAV proto - 2.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Ducted Fan Flyer - Design Overview and Roll Moment Control

Karna, Amit & Kaipa, Krishnanand & Ghose, Debasish. (2007). Ducted Fan Flyer - Design Overview and Roll Moment Control. 10.13140/RG.2.2.15523.04646.

This paper presents the preliminary design phases of a ducted-fan micro air vehicle (MAV). This vehicle concept consists of a single multi-blade propeller enclosed within a shroud/duct that acts as the main structure of the vehicle; the spinning propeller sucks air into the shroud producing an upward lift. The shroud guides the air vertically down onto a series of airfoil shaped xed angle stators, which in turn generate lift-forces in a direction perpendicular to, and offset from, the rotor turning-axis. The moments generated by these forces provide the anti-torque that is needed to arrest the roll moment of the body (conventional helicopter uses a tail rotor to achieve the same purpose). As the rotor starts spinning at high speed, hovering is achieved as the lift generated by rotor balances the weight of the vehicle. Vehicle cruising may be achieved, if the outlet air is deviated from exact vertical. In particular, we have built a small prototype of the vehicle and successfully tested the roll moment stabilization in our experiments.

Link