Deals with the development of a control system for fabric pick‐and‐place operators based on the Clupicker device. Fabric mechanical properties are analysed for their influence on the motions performed in picking up fabric pieces from a stack. The performance of the picking device on various woven fabrics has been studied. A stepping motor drive to the crank of the Clupicker enabled us to control the normal force applied by the picking wheel on the fabric stack. By controlling the normal force we could make the Clupicker perform well for fabrics with very different properties. A linear regression was found between the minimum normal force required for effective performance of the picker and bending rigidity of the fabric.

Traffic burstiness results in the predictability of user activity at the individual source level, and the exploitation of such predictability in the receiver design for wireless packet switching random access/CDMA networks is investigated in this paper. It is shown that the conventional approach of assuming all users are active results in substantial performance loss when a linear multiuser detector, and in particular, a decorrelating detector is implemented. A two-stage receiver is proposed where the first stage tracks active users and prior to the second stage symbol detection. Two different user trackers are presented in this paper and it is demonstrated that, with the help of traffic predictability, accurate estimate of active set of users is possible, even with a simple matched filter bank implementation at the first stage.