Current state-of-the-art walking controllers for humanoid robots use simple models, such as Linear Inverted Pendulum Mode (LIPM), to approximate Center of Mass(CoM) dynamics of a robot. These models are then used to generate CoM trajectories that keep the robot balanced while walking. Such controllers need prior information of foot placements, which is generated by a walking pattern generator. While the robot is walking, any change in the goal position leads to aborting the existing foot placement plan and re-planning footsteps, followed by CoM trajectory generation. This thesis proposes a tightly coupled walking pattern generator and a reactive balancing controller to plan and execute one step at a time. Walking is an emergent behavior from such a controller which is achieved by applying a virtual force in the direction of the goal. This virtual force, along with external forces acting on the robot, is used to compute desired CoM acceleration and the footstep parameters for only the next step. Step location is selected based on the capture point, which is a point on the ground at which the robot should step to stay balanced. Because each footstep location is derived as needed based on the capture point, it is not necessary to compute a complete set of footsteps. Experiments show that this approach allows for simpler inputs, results in faster operation, and is inherently immune to external perturbing and other reaction forces from the environment. Experiments are performed on Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot and NASA's Valkyrie R5 robot in simulation, and on Atlas hardware.

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The focus of this research is to establish control and planning management in the sewing production process of lingerie clothing to better prepare companies for demand growth. The lack of improvement tools in this sector, the lack of staff training and a lack of quality culture has led to companies, especially MYPES, not being able to meet the established delivery times and non-fulfillment of orders with the customers, which represents 80% of dissatisfied orders due to the limited production capacity and non-productive time in the plant. This problem is due to limited production capacity, deficient production planning, and lack of materials. In order to solve this problem, industrial engineering tools were used. The application of these tools improved production from 79% to 95%.

The main aim of diploma thesis "China - real threat for American hegemony?" is to answer the question whether China is trying to threaten American position of world hegemon. After the dissolution of USSR and the fall of Iron Curtain USA became the only world superpower. Balance of power theory assumes that the occurrence of leading actor in the system will invoke attempts of others to balance the power of the leader, or to weaken him. In current world political system there are powers whose power potential is growing. One of them is China, mainly because its fast growing and prospering economy. Author of the thesis works with the concept of hegemony based on hard and soft power and three types of exercising of power - three faces of power - as means of achieving its goals. Author analyses Chinese use of hard and soft power resources, that can be classified under three types of use of power. All policies are then examined from "balance of power" theory view. Author tries to find out which one of behavior "balancing" attempts to balance, weaken USA or "bandwagoning" - support of USA is prevailing in Chinese policies. According to the prevailing tendency of Chinese behavior towards USA the author is capable to state whether China can be considered as a threat for US hegemony.

This research examines the relationship between grand power strategies of revisionism and status quoism and behavior toward failed states in the Middle East. This research is driven by four interrelated questions: Do the grand strategies determine the behavior of regional powers (expansion or non-expansion) toward failed states? Do revisionist powers expand while status quo powers donot? Do status quo powers balance against revisionist powers when such expansion occurs? Do revisionist powers balance against each other over failed state(s)? Finally, do revisionist and status quo powers align together to balance against other revisionist power(s)? To examine these questions, this dissertation proposes four hypotheses. First, revisionist powers, not status quo powers, expand into failed states by taking advantage of the power vacuum created by state failure. Secondly, since this expansion by revisionist powers threatens the existing power distribution, status quo powers take balancing measures against the expanding power(s). Third, revisionist powers are also expected to balance against each other over failed states if they fail to agree on dividing the spoils. Fourth, when revisionist powers balance against each other, alliance is likely to develop between revisionist and status quo powers against the most threatening expanding power. This research examines the behavior of six regional powers of Egypt, Iran, Israel, Saudi, Syria (1970-2010), and Turkey toward four cases of state failure of Yemen 1962-1970, Lebanon 1975-1989, Yemen 2004-2020, and Syria 2011-2020).

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that do not upset the balance of an existing collectible card game. The submissions to the A.I competition include one that plays substantially better than the existing Fifth Aeon A.I with a higher winrate across multiple game formats. The balancer system also demonstrates an ability to automatically balance several types of cards against a wide variety of parameters. These results help pave the way to cheaper CCG development with more compelling A.I opponents.

Content hosted on the Internet must appear robust and reliable to clients relying on such content. As more clients come to rely on content from a source, that source can be subjected to high levels of load. There are a number of solutions, collectively called load balancers, which try to solve the load problem through various means. All of these solutions are workarounds for dealing with problems inherent in the medium by which content is served thereby limiting their effectiveness. HTTP, or Hypertext Transport Protocol, is the dominant mechanism behind hosting content on the Internet through websites. The entirety of the Internet has changed drastically over its history, with the invention of new protocols, distribution methods, and technological improvements. However, HTTP has undergone only three versions since its inception in 1991, and all three versions serve content as a text stream that cannot be interrupted to allow for load balancing decisions. We propose a solution that takes existing portions of HTTP, augments them, and includes some new features in order to increase usability and management of serving content over the Internet by allowing redirection of content in-stream. This in-stream redirection introduces a new step into the client-server connection where servers can make decisions while continuing to serve content to the client. Load balancing methods can then use the new version of HTTP to make better decisions when applied to multi-server systems making load balancing more robust, with more control over the client-server interaction.

Heterogeneous wireless networking technologies such as satellite, UMTS, WiMax and WLAN are being used to provide network access for both voice and data services. In big cities, the densely populated areas like town centres, shopping centres and train stations may have coverage of multiple wireless networks. Traditional Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection algorithms are mainly based on the ¿Always Best Connected¿ paradigm whereby the mobile nodes are always directed towards the available network which has the strongest and fastest link. Hence a large number of mobile users may be connected to the more common UMTS while the other networks like WiMax and WLAN would be underutilised, thereby creating an unbalanced load across these different wireless networks. This high variation among the load across different co-located networks may cause congestion on overloaded network leading to high call blocking and call dropping probabilities. This can be alleviated by moving mobile users from heavily loaded networks to least loaded networks. This thesis presents a novel framework for load balancing in heterogeneous wireless networks incorporating the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH). The framework comprises of novel load-aware RAT selection techniques and novel network load balancing mechanism. Three new different load balancing algorithms i.e. baseline, fuzzy and neural-fuzzy algorithms have also been presented in this thesis that are used by the framework for efficient load balancing across the different co-located wireless networks. A simulation model developed in NS2 validates the performance of the proposed load balancing framework. Different attributes like load distribution in all wireless networks, handover latencies, packet drops, throughput at mobile nodes and network utilization have been observed to evaluate the effects of load balancing using different scenarios. The simulation results indicate that with load balancing the performance efficiency improves as the overloaded situation is avoided by load balancing.

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