Browsing by Subject "Automation"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Analysis and Synthesis of Smart Wires in an Electric Power System
    (2018-12) Bekkala, Allan
    When electric current overloading on the power system occurs, utilities often rely on traditional methods such as line upgrades or other system improvements for mitigation. Traditional methods often require major capital investment, multi-year lead times, and a fixed project scope. Operating conditions can often change with less than a year notice, particularly in today’s current regulatory environment. Smart Wires offers a flexible approach to mitigate line overload conditions and congestion by means of changing the reactive impedance, granting the ability to transform the energy grid into a dynamically controlled system better positioned to deal with intermittent resources. This thesis addresses a problem shown in a power flow study that reveals overload conditions due to changes in power generation. This research presents a Smart Wires solution as an effective means to mitigate the overload conditions. Smart Wires offers three products: PowerLine Guardian, Power Guardian, and Smart Valve. The Smart Valve is the best option as a solution for the problem statement when considering weight and number of devices. In order to ensure successful implementation of this technology, it needs to be tested and simulated properly. Automation is used in order to determine how many power flow control devices are needed and to consider the longevity of the solution. Longevity is primarily influenced by load growth, and graphical evidence is given for a solution lasting up to 20 years. This thesis addresses the challenges that can arise from a transmission line whose reactive impedance varies depending on settings. Finally, the problem of time scale analysis and synthesis of the transmission line, with and without Smart Wires, is addressed.
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    Automation of Stem Cell Protocols
    (2019-12) Johnson, Blake
    Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have become a vital resource for researchers and industry due to their differentiation capacity, as well as providing access to the cell phenotypes and genotypes from any individual donor. Despite improvements in stem cell technology, maintaining iPS cell lines still requires a significant amount of time and technical skill from cell culture technicians. Such steps include consistent media changes, cell counting and confluence analyses, cell passaging, cryopreservation, and subsequent thawing and plating of those cells. For this research, these processes have been transitioned onto an automated cell culturing platform. It is shown here that the automated cell culturing platform is able to properly execute DMSO-free cryopreservation, thawing, plating, and cell maintenance. This demonstrated ability to perform these functions completely automated without a technician is a technical advancement in pluripotent stem cell culturing and may provide financial benefits within a cell culture laboratory.
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    Essays in Inequality and Heterogeneity
    (2019-07) Ocampo, Sergio
    Recent trends in both developed and developing economies show increasing inequality in income and wealth. Technological change is reshaping the nature of work for many, as automation, offshoring and other practices are adopted by firms around the globe. These changes to the type of jobs workers have are linked to changes in wages and labor earnings, in particular the adoption of new (worker-replacing) technologies has been linked to decreases in wages and increases in income inequality. Simultaneously, the trend towards higher inequality has sparked questions about the desirability (optimality) of inequality and whether governments should use the tools at their disposal to try to curb these trends. My dissertation contributes to the discussion on these topics in two distinct ways. The first two chapters deal with the effects of technological change in the nature of occupations, and its effects for wage inequality, while the third chapter deals with the implications of fiscal policy (particularly capital income and wealth taxation) in the face of wealth inequality caused by differences in the rate of return across individuals. The first part of my dissertation develops a new theory of how the specific tasks carried out by workers are determined, providing a flexible framework in which to study the implications for workers of automation, offshoring, skill-biased technological change among others. I use this framework along with U.S. occupational data to study the recent adoption of automation and its effects on the wage structure. The final chapter shows how the determinants of inequality matter for determining the optimal policy in the face of inequality. In the presence of rate of return heterogeneity wealth taxes dominate capital income taxes. Relative to capital income taxes, wealth taxes benefit the individuals who are more productive, increasing the allocative efficiency in the economy, in turn leading to potentially large welfare gains despite increases in inequality.
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    Essays On On-Demand Transportation Services: Innovative Technologies And New Business Models
    (2023-08) Yang, Xiaotang
    Technological advances in data communication, portable devices, and electronic payment have led innovative businesses to rapid growth in on-demand transportation services enabled by digital platforms. Platforms create value by facilitating communication and matching between supply (vehicles and drivers) and demand (customers). The operation of on-demand transportation services raises unique challenges, including the spatial mismatch between demand and supply and the reliance on independent drivers who act strategically. Breakthroughs in technology (automation and artificial intelligence, among others) and carefully-designed operating policies hold the promise of increasing the productivity and improving the efficiency of these services. In this dissertation, we aim to understand the impact of innovative technologies and new business models in the context of this application on multiple stakeholders, including customers, strategic drivers, and platforms.
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    HumanFIRST Driving Simulation Educational Development
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2019-05) Morris, Nichole L.; Craig, Curtis M.; Achtemeier, Jacob D.; Easterlund, Peter
    The HumanFIRST Laboratory was recently awarded a grant through the University of Minnesota Office of the Vice President for Research tomatch funds to completely overhaul the laboratory’s driving simulators. This upgrade, which includes large touchscreen displays in theimmersive simulators’ cockpit, will allow the laboratory to conduct innovative research in the fields of connected vehicles, in-vehicle technologies, and automated vehicles. In addition, the visibility of the laboratory’s increased capabilities is expected to boost an alreadyfrequent demand for educational and training partnerships (particularly around high-risk behaviors, such as distraction and speeding) fromboth government and private groups. In addition to the value in education and dissemination of knowledge regarding roadway safety tothe greater community through demonstrations using the simulator, these partnerships often foster future opportunities for research partnerships and funding. Legacy driving scenarios will be updated to new simulator specifications. The creation of this new content is expected to allow new funding opportunities and will facilitate the research team to share its knowledge through educational and training opportunities within the regional community. This research leveraged the investment in the new simulator and propel the laboratory’s capabilities through the creation of three distinct simulated demonstrations focused on controlled hand-offs with automated vehicles,distracted driving via non-driving-related in-vehicle technologies, and speeding in pedestrian populated areas. These topics are keyresearch focus areas for the Roadway Safety Institute and are core focus areas for the HumanFIRST Laboratory and its funding stakeholders.
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    Improved Computer Vision Algorithms for High-Throughput Targeting of Single Cells in Intact Tissue for Automated Microinjections
    (2021-10) O'Brien, Jacob
    Microinjection is a technique for organism-level and cellular-level manipulation of biological systems. The precise nature of microinjection permits the ability to target single cells in intact tissue which has enabled the study of cell-type related phenomena in development and disease progression. We envisioned the use of single-cellular microinjection as a tool for tagging cells with unique oligonucleotide barcodes that can be used during post-injection transcriptomic analysis to relate the transcriptomic reads with originally injected cells. For this process to be viable, we needed a system that was capable of precisely identifying the locations of cells in 3D tissue, assessing their feasibility for injection, and conducting rapid and large-scale microinjection into the identified cells. In this thesis, we report the development of such system. Our automated system uses computer vision algorithms to identify the 3D position of epifluorescent cells in intact tissue slices and assign them a quality metric to prioritize injections. The system guides a robotic micromanipulator to these cells and attempts injections while another computer vision algorithm and Kalman filter are used to improve the robot’s positioning accuracy. Additionally, cell impalement and cell filling detection algorithms were developed to evaluate injection success. We discovered, through a microinjection parameter sweep, an optimum combination of parameters to enable successful microinjection into a variety of cell types and tissue types. We used the optimized parameters to demonstrate automated tagging of single cells with a fluorescently labeled antibody targeting the nuclear pore complex proteins as a precursor step to fluorescence-based nuclei sorting and later transcriptomic analysis.
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    The Role of Implicit and Explicit Systems Feedback in Return-to-Manual Performance
    (2018-11) Fitch, Brian
    Differences in display and automation types were examined to assess their influence on the development of novice-level participants’ explicit and implicit understanding of a dynamic system. Participants operated a highly simplified nuclear power plant simulation for three simulation rounds; the first two rounds with the assistance of automated support and the third return-to-manual (RTM) round in which automated support was reduced. The combination of three Display Types (separable, configural, semantic-spatial) and two Automation Types (decision automation, no decision automation) resulted in a total of six unique conditions, with multiple performance, understanding, and workload measurements being employed. Results indicated the availability of decision automation improved performance and understanding, and reduced workload, but resulted in greater negative impacts associated with the loss of automated support in the return-to-manual round. Higher rates of errors occurred when attempting to address system damage in the RTM round for participants who previously operated the system with the assistance of decision automation and likely resulted from the availability of decision automation reducing participant experience operating the system in a damaged state. Examination of the influence of Display Types found the explicit feedback available within the semantic-spatial display improved the efficiency of meeting energy demand and reduced frustration when compared to the separable display but did not improve participants’ understanding of the system. Decision automation appeared to negate differences between individual display type conditions, whereas distinct differences were found between no-decision automation conditions. Analysis of the predictive value of workload and understanding measurements found higher levels of implicit errors, better explicit understanding, and lower workload in simulation rounds one and two predicted smaller impacts on RTM performance. These and additional findings corroborate and extend previous research pertaining to relationships between automation, displays, understanding, and return-to-manual performance for novice participants.
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    Universal robot for automated microinjection with applications in transgenesis and cryopreservation
    (2023-01) Joshi, Amey
    Microinjection is the process of injecting a small amount of solution into biological organisms at a microscopic level using a glass micropipette. It is a widely utilized technique with a wide range of applications in both fundamental research and clinical settings. However, microinjection is an extremely laborious and manual procedure, which makes it a critical bottleneck in the field and thus ripe for automation. In this thesis, we introduce a simple computer vision-guided robot that uses off-the-shelf components to fully automate the microinjection procedure in different model organisms. The robot uses machine learning models that have been trained to detect individual embryos on agar plates and serially performs microinjection at a particular site in each detected embryo with no human interaction. We deployed three such robots operated by expert and novice users to perform automated microinjections in zebrafish (Danio rerio) and Drosophila melanogaster. We conducted survivability studies to better understand the impact of microinjection on zebrafish embryos and the fundamental mechanisms by which microinjection affects zebrafish embryos. We were able to use the robot to examine the speed of the micropipette, the volume of the microinjectant, the micropipette geometry, and the rate of the volume delivered. These results helped us in determining the optimum settings for automated microinjection into zebrafish embryos. We used transgenesis studies to compare microinjection efficiency to manual microinjection utilizing optimum settings for automated microinjection. Further, we demonstrated that robotic microinjection of cryoprotective agents in zebrafish embryos significantly improves vitrification rates and post-thaw survivability of cryopreserved embryos compared to manual microinjection, opening the door to large-scale cryo-banking of various aquatic species on an industrial scale. We anticipate that this robotic microinjection can be readily adapted to other organisms and applications.