How to model beam on elastic foundation in ABAQUS - finite-element-analysis

I am trying to model a simple 2D beam on elastic foundation in Abaqus. How to do this in ABAQUS? Any ideas or help?

Here are a few suggestions:
Model the beam as simple 2D QUAD elements.
See if ABAQUS has any infinite elements to model the foundation. If not, you'll have to discretize a large body that exhibits the "foundation" behavior (e.g. asymptotic Laplace like behavior far away from the surface).
Depending on the physics you want to capture, you'll have contact and friction defined along the contact surface between the foundation and the beam. These will make your problem non-linear and harder to solve, but may be more faithful to the physics you're trying to model. It'll allow gaps between the beam and the foundation.
I'm so glad to see so many ABAQUS questions here. No MSC, MARC, Ansys? From this perspective, HKS has 100% market share.

Related

Is programming a voxel based graphics API theoretically possible?

This is entirely a theoretical question because I understand the time it would take to do such a thing would be ridiculous
I've been working with "voxels" a lot lately and the only way I can display them to a user is to either triangulate the visible surfaces or make a CPU ray-tracer but both come with their own problems.
Simply put, if we dismiss the storage space needed for voxel meshs and targeted a very specific GPU would someone who was wanting to create a graphics API like OpenGL but with "true" voxel primitives that don't need to be converted be able to make such thing or are GPUs designed specifically for triangles with no way to introduce a new base primitive?
Its possible and it was already done many times
games like Minecraft,SpaceEngineers...
3D printing tools and slicers
MRI/PET scans tools
Yes rendering on GPU is possible with the two base methods you mention. Games usually use the transform to boundary representation 3D geometry. With rise of shaders even ray tracers are now possible here mine:
simple GLSL voxel ray tracer
using native OpenGL architecture and passing geometry as 3D texture. In order to obtain speed you need to add BVH or similar spatial subdivision of geometry...
However voxel based tools have been here for quite some time. For example many isometric games/engines are voxel based (tile is a voxel) like this one:
Improving performance of click detection on a staggered column isometric grid
Also do you remember UFO ? It was playable on x286 and it was also "voxel/tile" based isometric.

Forming conditional distributions in TensorFlow probability

I am using Tensorflow Probability to build a VAE which includes image pixels as well as some other variables. The output of the VAE:
tfp.distributions.Independent(tfp.distributions.Bernoulli(logits), 2, name="decoder-dist")
I am trying to understand how to form other conditional distributions based on this which I can use with the inference methods (MCMC or VI). Say the output above was P(A,B,C | Z), how would I take that distribution to form a posterior P(A|B, C, Z) that I could perform inference on? I have been trying to read through the docs but I am having some trouble grasping them.
The answer to your question depends very much on the nature of the joint model within which you'd like to do the conditioning. Much has been written about the topic, and in short it's a very hard problem in general :). Without knowing a bit more about the particulars of your problem, it's near impossible to recommend a useful generic inference procedure. However, we do have a bunch of examples (scripts and jupyter/colab notebooks) in the TFP repo here: https://github.com/tensorflow/probability/tree/master/tensorflow_probability/examples
In particular, there's
The Hierarchical Linear Model example, which is a sort of Rosetta stone showing how to do posterior inference using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (an MCMC technique) in TFP, R, and Stan,
The Linear Mixed Effects Model example, showing how you might use VI to solve a standard LME problem,
among many others. You can click the "Run in Google Colab" link at the top of any of these notebooks to open and run on them on https://colab.research.google.com.
Please feel free, also, to reach out on to us via email at tfprobability#tensorflow.org. This is a public Google Group where users can engage with the team that builds TFP directly. If you provide us some more info there on what you'd like to do, we're happy to provide guidance on modeling and inference with TFP.
Hope this is gives at least a start in the right direction!

How can i create a 3D modeling app? What resources i will required?

I want to create a application which converts 2d-images/video into a 3d model. While researching on it i found out similar application like Trnio, Scann3D, Qlone,and few others(Though few of them provide poor output 3D model). I also find out about a technology launched by the microsoft research called mobileFusion which showed the same vision i was hoping for my application but these apps were non like that.
Creating a 3D modelling app is complex task, and achieving it to a high standard requires a lot of studying. To point you in the right direction, you most likely want to perform something called Structure-from-Motion(SfM) or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).
If you want to program this yourself OpenCV is a good place to start if you know C++ or Python. A typical pipeline involves; feature extraction and matching, camera pose estimation, triangulation and then optimised using a bundle adjustment. All pipelines for SfM and SLAM follow these general steps (with exceptions of course). All of these steps are possible is OpenCV although Googles Ceres Solver is an excellent open-source bundle adjustment. SfM generally goes onto dense matching which is where you get very dense point clouds which are good for creating meshes. A free open-source pipeline for this is OpenSfM. Another good source for tools is OpenMVG which has all of the tools you need to make a full pipeline.
SLAM is similar to SfM, however, has more of a focus on real-time application and less on absolute accuracy. Applications for this is more centred around robotics where a robot wants to know where it is relative to its environment, but it not so concerned on absolute accuracy. The top SLAM algorithms are ORB-SLAM and LSD-SLAM. Both are open-source and free for you to implement into your own software.
So really it depends what you want... SfM for high accuracy, SLAM for real-time. If you want a good 3D model I would recommend using existing algorithms as they are very good.
The best commercial software in my opinion... Agisoft Photoscan. If you can make anything half as good as this i'd be very impressed. To answer your question what resources will you require. In my opinion, python/c++ skills, the ability to google well and a spare time to read up on photogrammetry and SfM properly.

Robot odometry in labview

I am currently working on a (school-)project involving a robot having to navigate a corn field.
We need to make the complete software in NI Labview.
Because of the tasks the robot has to be able to perform the robot has to know it's position.
As sensors we have a 6-DOF IMU, some unrealiable wheel encoders and a 2D laser scanner (SICK TIM351).
Until now I am unable to figure out any algorithms or tutorials, and thus really stuck on this problem.
I am wondering if anyone ever attempted in making SLAM work in labview, and if so are there any examples or explanations to do this?
Or is there perhaps a toolkit for LabVIEW that contains this function/algorithm?
Kind regards,
Jesse Bax
3rd year mechatronic student
As Slavo mentioned, there's the LabVIEW Robotics module that contains algorithms like A* for pathfinding. But there's not very much there that can help you solve the SLAM problem, that I am aware of. The SLAM problem consist of the following parts: Landmark extraction, data association, state estimation and updating of state.
For landmark extraction, you have to pick one or multiple features that you want the robot to recognize. This can for example be a corner or a line(wall in 3D). You can for example use clustering, split and merge or the RANSAC algorithm. I believe your laser scanner extract and store the points in a list sorted by angle, this makes the Split and Merge algorithm very feasible. Although RANSAC is the most accurate of them, but also has a higher complexity. I recommend starting with some optimal data points for testing the line extraction. You can for example put your laser scanner in a small room with straight walls and perform one scan and save it to an array or a file. Make sure the contour is a bit more complex than just four walls. And remove noise either before or after measurement.
I haven't read up on good methods for data association, but you could for example just consider a landmark new if it is a certain distance away from any existing landmarks or update an old landmark if not.
State estimation and updating of state can be achieved with the complementary filter or the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). EKF is the de facto for nonlinear state estimation [1] and tend to work very well in practice. The theory behind EKF is quite though, but it should be a tad easier to implement. I would recommend using the MathScript module if you are going to program EKF. The point of these two filters are to estimate the position of the robot from the wheel encoders and landmarks extracted from the laser scanner.
As the SLAM problem is a big task, I would recommend program it in multiple smaller SubVI's. So that you can properly test your parts without too much added complexity.
There's also a lot of good papers on SLAM.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/cs287-fa09/readings/Durrant-Whyte_Bailey_SLAM-tutorial-I.pdf
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-412j-cognitive-robotics-spring-2005/projects/1aslam_blas_repo.pdf
The book "Probabalistic Robotics".
https://wiki.csem.flinders.edu.au/pub/CSEMThesisProjects/ProjectSmit0949/Thesis.pdf
LabVIEW provides LabVIEW Robotics module. There are also plenty of templates for robotics module. Firstly you can check the Starter Kit 2.0 template Which will provide you simple working self driving robot project. You can base on such template and develop your own application from working model, not from scratch.

What frameworks for depth cameras are out there?

I want to evaluate the performance of several SDKs / frameworks for depth cameras. These cameras can either be using Time-of-Flight or structured light.
The framework should be capable (at least) of person tracking / blob detection and gesture recognition.
So far I found the following frameworks:
OpenNI (structured light only)
Microsoft Kinect SDK (Kinect only)
Beckon SDK by Omek Interactive (ToF and structured light)
iisu by SoftKinetic (ToF and structured light)
Are there any other frameworks I should be aware of?
EDIT: I found this article by Techradar that seems to indicate that these are indeed the only options currently available.
Any feedback would be very much appreciated!
I have found some interesting links on this. You can take MIT's approach using CodAC . They list lots of facts on this post, the most important ones I will post here.
9. What are limitations of this technique?
The main limitation of our framework is inapplicability to scenes with curvilinear
objects, which would require extensions of the current mathematical model.
Another limitation is that a periodic light source creates a wrap-around error
as it does in other TOF devices. For scenes in which surfaces have high reflectance
or texture variations, availability of a traditional 2D image prior to our data
acquisition allows for improved depth map reconstruction as discussed in our paper.
10. What are advantages of this technique/device and how does it
compare with existing TOF-based range sensing techniques?
In laser scanning, spatial resolution is limited by the scanning time.
TOF cameras do not provide high spatial resolution because they rely on a
low-resolution 2D pixel array of range-sensing pixels. CoDAC is a single-sensor,
high spatial resolution depth camera which works by exploiting the sparsity of natural
scene structure.
11. What is the range resolution and spatial resolution of the CoDAC system?
We have demonstrated sub-centimeter range resolution in our experiments.
This is significantly better than fundamental limit of about 10 cm that would
arise from using a detector with 0.7 nanosecond rise time if we were not using
parametric signal modeling. The improvement in range resolution comes from the
parametric modeling and deconvolution in our framework. We refer the reader to
our publications for complete details and analysis.
We have demonstrated 64-by-64 pixel spatial resolution,
as this is the spatial resolution of our spatial light modulator.
Spatially patterning with a digital micromirror device (DMD) will enable
much higher spatial resolution. Our experiments use only 205 projection patterns,
which correspond to just 5% of number of pixels in the reconstructed depth map.
This is a significant improvement over raster scanning in LIDAR, and it is
obtained without the 2D sensor array used in TOF cameras.
Also another interesting project I found on Youtube uses libfreenect and libusb
There is also dSensingNI which is described as
This work presents an approach to overcome the disadvantages of existing interaction
frameworks and technologies for touch detection and object interaction. The robust and
easy to use framework dSensingNI (Depth Sensing Natural Interaction) is described,
which supports multitouch and tangible interaction with arbitrary objects. It uses
images from a depth-sensing camera and provides tracking of users fingers of palm of
hands and combines this with object interaction, such as grasping, grouping and
stacking, which can be used for advanced interaction techniques.
So you have hit most of them out there, especially that use Kinect, but there are a few other options out there! Hope this Helps!