FPGA Based Vehicle to Vehicle Communication in Spartan 3E

This paper presents economic and reconfigurable RF based wireless communication at 2.4 GHz between two vehicles. It implements digital VLSI using two Spartan 3E FPGAs, where one vehicle receives the information of another vehicle and shares its own information to another vehicle. The information includes vehicle’s speed, location, heading and its operation, such as braking status and turning status. It implements autonomous vehicle technology. In this work, FPGA is used as central signal processing unit which is interfaced with two microcontrollers (ATmega328P). Microcontroller-1 is interfaced with compass module, GPS module, DF Player mini and nRF24L01 module. This microcontroller determines the relative position and the relative heading as seen from one vehicle to another. Microcontroller-2 is used to measure the speed of vehicle digitally. The resulting data from these microcontrollers are transmitted separately and serially through UART interface to FPGA. At FPGA, different signal processing such as speed comparison, turn comparison, distance range measurement and vehicle operation processing, are carried out to generate the voice announcement command, warning signals, event signals, and such outputs are utilized to warn drivers about potential accidents and prevent crashes before event happens.

Study of Pushover Analysis on RC Framed Structure with Underground Structure Considering the Effects of Soil Structure Interaction

This study states that the effects of soil structure interaction on the Reinforced Concrete (RC) framed structures is directly influenced by the soil properties of the site. Here, one preexisting structure is taken for the study. The building is a hospital building with two underground basements. Taking into account the actual soil condition of building site, this study provides idea on the soil structure interaction on the structure The properties of springs are calculated from different standard penetration test (SPT) values, Poisson’s ratio and elasticity of soil along the depth of the soil. Entire soil-foundation-structure system is modelled and analyzed using spring approach. Static analysis, response spectrum analysis and pushover analysis (PA) are done in order to find the variations in natural periods, base shears and deflections of the structures by incorporating soil flexibility as compared to structures with conventional fixed base. Pushover analysis is done to evaluate the performance of the structure when modelled in fixed base and spring base system.

Management of Internet Bandwidth Implementing CoovaChilli and Free Radius

With rapid growth in popularity and use of Internet in academic institutions, the institutions are struggling to keep up with the demand. They need capability to effectively control, monitor and optimize the available bandwidth to ensure good service at optimum cost. This paper has described implementation of Coovachilli and free radius for management of internet bandwidth in academic institutions. During this research, freeware tools such as Freeradius and CoovaChilli have been used to manage Internet bandwidth on a per-user basis based on user credentials. The mechanisms have been used to control bandwidth of Wireless users. Same can be used for wired connections also. When a user tries to connect, the user is redirected to a captive portal under CoovaChilli. There the user provides login and password. Based on the credentials thus provided, CoovaChilli checks identity with the Freeradius. If authorized, the client is allowed access with the bandwidth as mentioned in the profile of the user in WISPr attributes define in Radreply table of Freeradius. When the user is not authorized, CoovaChilli sends an error message. This paper demonstrates that bandwidth can be effectively monitored, managed and optimized by using cost-effective open-source tools in the existing network scenario of the institution.

Development of Performance Grading Map of Nepal Based on Superpave System

The Performance of the bituminous binder plays important role in the overall performance of the pavement system. One of the major cause of pavement failure is the bitumen grade, i.e selection of suitable grade of bitumen. Therefore, performance grading of bituminous binder is inevitable for the specific temperature and climatic zones. This study is focused on the determination of performance grading of bituminous binder for various temperature zones in Nepal. In this study, twenty one years’ daily maximum and minimum secondary temperature data of 70 meteorological stations were collected and were analyzed for temperature zoning. Performance grading of bituminous binder was conducted with the help of Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) and Long-Term Pavement Performance Program (LTPP) prediction models. The concept of Superpave has been adopted for the analysis, which stands for superior performing asphalt pavement. The Superpave mix design includes a new analysis system based on performance characteristics of the pavement layer. The bituminous binder grades for Nepal have been determined on the basis of air temperature thereafter predicting the pavement temperatures. The study has determined seven different performance grade zones based on SHRP and four different performance grade zones based on LTPP model. The study synthesized the Performance Grade (PG) map of the country.

Land Readjustment in Kathmandu Valley

Urban expansion of Kathmandu Valley is taking place at the fast rate challenging urban managers and planners of the city. In-migration has resulted in the unplanned urban growth of the city with the shortage of serviced land for urban development in Kathmandu. So Land Readjustment (LR) technique has been used as urban land development tool by the government. There are twenty two LR projects completed, and some of the projects are ongoing in the valley. The overview of the Land Readjustment technique of Kathmandu Valley has been done to explore the required measures needed to reform the existing legal and Institutional Framework and procedure of LR. Among the implemented LR projects, Nayabazar Land pooling has been selected for the case study as almost all the plots have been developed. Now, it is a dense residential neighborhood. The instruments used for research are literature study, in-depth interviews with different stakeholders of LR projects and landowners. Field visit and questionnaire survey in case study area are conducted regarding the street network and open space of the area. The existing system of LR technique is studied relating it with international experience mainly the case of Germany and Japan to draw positive inferences to explore the wider scope of LR technique for the comprehensive development in urban areas.

Primary School and Urban Residential Neighborhood - A Study of Koteswor, Kathmandu

Primary school is an indispensable part of children’s daily lives and their parents as well. While educational environment within the school premise is important, the location of primary schools in any neighborhood is of equal importance, since it affects the daily journey of the children to school and the neighborhood environment in general. However, there are so far no such mandatory government policies in Nepal that link residential neighborhoods and location of primary schools, and no researches have been carried out in this respect either. This research explores one of the urban residential neighborhoods, Koteswor, of the Kathmandu Valley from the perspective of location of primary school and its service to the locality. The research makes a field study on the distribution pattern and service radius of primary schools, commuting distance and pedestrian safety of children. The study shows that more than three fourth of the children go to more distant schools than to schools within their residential area, and more than half go to other districts. Likewise, walking distance for half of the children exceeds the limit of Ministry of Education’s recommendation for urban areas. Children’s safety on their way to school through vehicular road is also a serious concern of the parents. Thus, while there is enough number of schools in the locality, it raises question on their quality, management and their distribution. Furthermore, only one school run by the Ministry of Education in an area of 40,000 population shows the irresponsibility of the government to meet the free basic education for all stated by the constitution.

Performance Assessment of Crash Barriers used in Road Safety: A Case Study of Malekhu Kurintar Section of the Prithvi Highway

Hill roads in Nepal are comprised of critical geometry and limited roadway clearances. It causes high number of runoff roadway type of accidents with single vehicle. These accidents often carry huge number of fatalities and severe injuries. Installation of crash barriers is the most effective way of preventing such accidents along hill roads. However, the existing practice of construction of crash barriers does not show the satisfactory results. Therefore, this research aimed at the evaluation of typical crash barriers constructed along the valley side of highway. Analysis of the road accident of Malekhu-Kurintar section of Prithvi Highway record shows that this section has relatively higher accident rate and most of the accidents are runoff roadway type. Further, these accidents are mainly caused due to either the absence or the failure of the crash barriers along the valley side of the highway. On the basis of field records, kinetic energy absorbed by the crash barriers and their deflections was investigated by application of computer based analysis tool ABAQUS V6.10. It has given satisfactory results on the deflection of W-beam and plum concrete barriers due to the impact of vehicle moving in various range of speed.

Public Transport Choice Behaviour in Thimi Bhaktapur

The public transport users tend to shift public transport mode in search of a better one. The choice depends on the various attributes of public transport, such as travel time, waiting time, comfort, safety, etc. Since there were competition among different public modes, such as buses, minibuses, microbuses, and even three-wheeler (tempo), the sustainability of the public transport directly depends on the public or users. The users continue to use those public transport which meet their expected level of service. This study focuses on examining attributes of different public transport alternatives available, investigating factors affecting preference of public transport alternatives and developing choice model for public transport alternatives. Multinomial logistic model was developed from the SPSS to find the probability of selecting particular public transport. The public transport choice among the four alternatives, whose destination was same, was found to be influenced by the variables, such as monthly income, age, travel time, walking time, waiting time, fare and gender. The model helps to understand the choice behavior of traveler and can be used for transport planning in future.

Photographic Text-To-Image Synthesis via Multi-Turn Dialogue Using Attentional GAN

The process of generating an image that depicts naturalness is not so easy. To address such problem this paper introduces a novel approach to synthesize a photo-realistic image from the caption. The user can adjust the image highlights turn-by-turn according to the caption. This leads to the integration of natural intelligence. For this, the input passed to dialogue state tracker to extract context feature. Then the generator produces an image. If image is not as per expectations then user gives another dialogue, but the system takes both recent input and previous image to generate a new one. In such a manner, user gets a chance to visualize as per the imagination. We performed extensive experiments on two datasets CUB and COCO to generate a realistic image each turn and obtained the results: Inception Score (IS) of 4.38 ± 0.05, R-precision of 67.96 ± 5.27 % on CUB dataset and IS of 26.12 ± 0.24, R-precision of 91.00 ± 2.31 % on COCO dataset. Further, the work could be enhance to synthesize HQ image, voice integration, and video generation from stories and so on. This research is limited to 256x256 image in each turn.

Rice Plant Disease Detection using Twin Support Vector Machine (TSVM)

Crop disease epidemics can cause severe losses and affect agricultural products and food security especially in south Asian countries and Nepal where rice is enjoyed as a staple throughout the year. To achieve automatic diagnosis of crop disease the proposed system aims to develop a prototype system for detection of the paddy disease. Image recognition of the disease would be conducted based on Image Processing techniques to enhance the quality of the image and Twin Support Vector Machine (TSVM) technique to classify the paddy disease. The methodology involves image acquisition, pre-processing, analysis and classification of the paddy disease. All the paddy sample images will be passed through the RGB calculation before it proceeds to the binary conversion. If the sample is in the range of normal paddy RGB, then it is automatically classify as normal. Then, all the segmented paddy disease sample will be converted into the binary data in data base before proceed through the TSVM for training and testing. The proposed system is targeted to achieve better recognition results.