Semiconductor manufacturing (SM) system is one of the most complicated hybrid processes involved continuously variable dynamical systems and discrete event dynamical systems. The optimization and scheduling of semiconductor fabrication has long been a hot research direction in automation. Bottleneck is the key factor to a SM system, which seriously influences the throughput rate, cycle time, time-delivery rate, etc. Efficient prediction for the bottleneck of a SM system provides the best support for the consequent scheduling. Because categorical data (product types, releasing strategies) and numerical data (work in process, processing time, utilization rate, buffer length, etc.) have significant effect on bottleneck, an improved adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) was adopted in this study to predict bottleneck since conventional neural network-based methods accommodate only numerical inputs. In this improved ANFIS, the contribution of categorical inputs to firing strength is reflected through a transformation matrix. In order to tackle high-dimensional inputs, reduce the number of fuzzy rules and obtain high prediction accuracy, a fuzzy c-means method combining binary tree linear division method was applied to identify the initial structure of fuzzy inference system. According to the experimental results, the main-bottleneck and sub-bottleneck of SM system can be predicted accurately with the proposed method.
Vision-based pose stabilization of nonholonomic mobile robots has received extensive attention. At present, most of the solutions of the problem do not take the robot dynamics into account in the controller design, so that these controllers are difficult to realize satisfactory control in practical application. Besides, many of the approaches suffer from the initial speed and torque jump which are not practical in the real world. Considering the kinematics and dynamics, a two-stage visual controller for solving the stabilization problem of a mobile robot is presented, applying the integration of adaptive control, sliding-mode control, and neural dynamics. In the first stage, an adaptive kinematic stabilization controller utilized to generate the command of velocity is developed based on Lyapunov theory. In the second stage, adopting the sliding-mode control approach, a dynamic controller with a variable speed function used to reduce the chattering is designed, which is utilized to generate the command of torque to make the actual velocity of the mobile robot asymptotically reach the desired velocity. Furthermore, to handle the speed and torque jump problems, the neural dynamics model is integrated into the above mentioned controllers. The stability of the proposed control system is analyzed by using Lyapunov theory. Finally, the simulation of the control law is implemented in perturbed case, and the results show that the control scheme can solve the stabilization problem effectively. The proposed control law can solve the speed and torque jump problems, overcome external disturbances, and provide a new solution for the vision-based stabilization of the mobile robot.
