Abstract

Abstract
Fractional Calculus (FC) goes back to the beginning of the theory of differential calculus. Nevertheless, the application of FC just emerged in the last two decades, due to the progress in the area of chaos that revealed subtle relationships with the FC concepts. In the field of dynamical systems theory some work has been carried out but the proposed models and algorithms are still in a preliminary stage of establishment. Having these ideas in mind, the paper discusses FC in the study of system dynamics and control. In this perspective, this paper investigates the use of FC in the fields of controller tuning, legged robots, redundant robots, heat diffusion, and digital circuit synthesis.

Abstract
This paper presents the architecture of a climbing robot with wheeled locomotion and adhesion through permanent magnets. This machine is intended to be used in the inspection of ferromagnetic structures, in order to, for instance, detect weaknesses due to corrosion, particularly in aerogenerators towers, fuel tanks, ship hulls, etc. The vehicle is designed to have a semi-autonomous behavior, allowing a remote inspection process controlled by a technician, this way reducing the risks associated with the human inspection of tall structures and ATEX places. The particular characteristic of this robot is its dynamic adjustment system of the permanent magnets in order to assure the machine adhesion to the surfaces, even when crossing irregular and curved surfaces. ©2010 IEEE.

Abstract
In this paper, we incorporate fuzzy reasoning in fractional-order PD controllers. The resulting fuzzy fractional PD controller is investigated in terms of its digital implementation and robustness. The combined features of both algorithms will result in a better control system performance. Also, the effectiveness and robustness of the new methodology is illustrated through an application example.

Abstract
The vertical integration of the manufacturing equipments within the information infrastructure of companies is a growing demand. The use of service-oriented standard interfaces and the upcoming trend of cloud computing technologies both deserve careful attention. This paper makes a comparison of remote database access times made through service-oriented interfaces, both for a cloud computing solution and for a local server data base. The results are analyzed not only in terms of the interface used (REST or SOAP) but also within the context of a laboratorial industrial robot work-cell evaluating the effective impact of these results when compared with other automation operations. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract