A wide range of vibrating structures are characterized by variable structural dynamics resulting from changes in environmental and operational conditions, posing challenges in their identification and associated condition assessment. To tackle this issue, the present contribution introduces a stochastic modeling methodology via Gaussian Process (GP) time-series models. In the presently introduced approach, the vibration response is represented by means of a random coefficient time-series model, whose coefficients comply with a GP regression on the environmental and operational parameters. The approach may be implemented in conjunction to any type of linear-in-the-parameters time-series model, ranging from simple AR models to more complex non-linear or nonstationary time-series models. The obtained GP time-series modeling approach provides an effective and compact global representation of the vibrational response of a structure under a wide span of environmental and operational conditions. The effectiveness of the postulated GP time-series models is demonstrated through two case studies: the first involves the identification of the vertical vibration response of the Humber bridge, evaluated over a period of three years; the second considers the long-term simulated vibration response of a wind turbine featuring non-stationary dynamics stemming from the rotor speed. In both cases, the variation of the average wind speed is the main driver of uncertainty, while, through application of the proposed GP time-series models, it is possible to track the resulting variation in modal quantities.

The detection of murmurs from phonocardiographic recordings is an interesting problem that has been addressed before using a wide variety of techniques. In this context, this article explores the capabilities of an enhanced time-frequency representation (TFR) based on a time-varying autoregressive model. The parametric technique is used to compute the TFR of the signal, which serves as a complete characterization of the process. Parametric TFRs contain a large quantity of data, including redundant and irrelevant information. In order to extract the most relevant features from TFRs, two specific approaches for dimensionality reduction are presented: feature extraction by linear decomposition, and tiling partition of the t-f plane. In the first approach, the feature extraction was carried out by means of eigenplane-based PCA and PLS techniques. Likewise, a regular partition and a refined Quadtree partition of the t-f plane were tested for the tiled-TFR approach. As a result, the feature extraction methodology presented, which searches for the most relevant information immersed on the TFR, has demonstrated to be very effective. The features extracted were used to feed a simple k-nn classifier. The experiments were carried out using 45 phonocardiographic recordings (26 normal and 19 records with murmurs), segmented to extract 548 representative individual beats. The results using these methods point out that better accuracy and flexibility can be accomplished to represent non-stationary PCG signals, showing evidences of improvement with respect to other approaches found in the literature. The best accuracy obtained was 99.06 +/- 0.06%, evidencing high performance and stability. Because of its effectiveness and simplicity of implementation, the proposed methodology can be used as a simple diagnostic tool for primary health-care purposes.

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SUMMARYIn this paper, two methods are proposed and implemented for collision detection between the robot and a human based on fuzzy identification and time series modelling. Both methods include a collision detection system for each joint of the robot that is trained to approximate the external torque. In addition, the proposed methods are able to detect the occurrence of a collision, the link that collided and to some extent the magnitude of the collision without using the explicit model of the robot. Since the speed of the detection is of critical importance for mitigating the danger, attention is paid to recognise a collision as soon as possible. Experimental results conducted with a KUKALWR manipulator using two joints in planar motion, verify the validity on both methods.

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