Pneumatic driven system is widely used in industrial automation, mainly for relatively simple tasks with open-loop control. Because of the pneumatic system’s compressibility and few stop positions, it was considered hard to control in a precise motion control system. With the help of newly developed pneumatic servo control technology, using servo-pneumatic positioning controller now is just as easy as using electro-servo system. This article discusses Web-based servo-pneumatic manipulator control and object recognition and positioning. The authors built a three-degrees-of-freedom (3 DOF) pneumatic manipulator with a servo-pneumatic closed-loop control system and machine vision system in their lab. Web-based tele-operation was a basic ability in this experimental system. After installing a CCD camera, video capture card, and related software developed by the authors, the robot could recognize the user specified object through the Web page and find its position. The remote user could command the robot to move to the position and to grab the object. The critical issues of Web-based control are to integrate hybrid open-architecture mechatronic system through the Web and develop a software language environment characterized by the script. The authors’ experiment showed that pneumatic devices could serve as accurate position control and be controlled through the Web.

A new group signature with one time secret key is proposed. The main merits are that it only needs the trusted center issuing the partial secret key one time for each group member; and that the group member can generate his different secret key each time when he wants to sign a message. The group public key is constant and the size of the signature is independent of the number of group members. The total computation cost of signature and verification requires only 8 modular exponentiations.

This paper deals with the synchronization of chaotic systems with structure or parameters difference. Nonlinear differential geometry theory was applied to transform the chaotic discrepancy system into canonical form. A feedback control for synchronizing two chaotic systems is proposed based on sliding mode control design. To make this controller physically realizable, an extended state observer is used to estimate the error between the transmitter and receiver. Two illustrative examples were carried out: (1) The Chua oscillator was used to show that synchronization was achieved and the message signal was recovered in spite of parametric variations; (2) Two second-order driven oscillators were presented to show that the synchronization can be achieved and that the message can be recovered in spite of the strictly different model.

Oil-air two-phase flow measurement was investigated with a Venturi and void fraction meters in this work. This paper proposes a new flow rate measurement correlation in which the effect of the velocity ratio between gas and liquid was considered. With the pressure drop across the Venturi and the void fraction that was measured by electrical capacitance tomography apparatus, both mixture flow rate and oil flow rate could be obtained by the correlation. Experiments included bubble-, slug-, wave and annular flow with the void fraction ranging from 15% to 83%, the oil flow rate ranging from 0.97 kg/s to 1.78 kg/s, the gas flow rate ranging up to 0.018 kg/s and quality ranging nearly up to 2.0%. The root-mean-square errors of mixture mass flow rate and that of oil mass flow rate were less than 5%. Furthermore, coefficients of the correlation were modified based on flow regimes, with the results showing reduced root-mean-square errors.