Anti-lock braking system based on FlexRay protocol
The anti-lock braking system is nowadays a part of almost every vehicle. This system increases safety of the people sitting in the vehicle at the moment of stopping on a slippery or unstable road surface. The point is to assure a good controllability of the vehicle even if the wheels are in slip. In order to work properly, the anti-lock braking system needs to have actual information about the rotation of every single wheel. And the up-to-dateness and certainty of an accurate information is the primary criterion of an appropriate performance. Currently, the information about the frequency of wheel rotation is being transmitted via the current loop. This solution needs a lot of wiring, which means increased purchase costs. This paper describes a method, where the information from the rotation sensors of the wheels are transmitted into the control unit through the FlexRay bus. Additional wireless acceleration sensors located on the wheel are used to improve the ABS performance.
Coupling of Multibody and Control Simulation Tools for the Desgin of Mechatronic Systems
With the increasing importance of integrating different simulation tools into concurrent design environments, the demands on model complexity and interdisciplinary have led to a growing number of interfaces between the various tools. This paper presents examples of such interfaces for the connection between multibody simulation and computer-aided control engineering tools. The interfaces introduced in this paper are classified. The application of the different interfaces is presented in two examples. Both are dealing with control of semi-active suspensions, but different methodologies are applied.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.