National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

About: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology is a education organization based out in Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Fuzzy logic & Control theory. The organization has 16288 authors who have published 21577 publications receiving 426294 citations. The organization is also known as: Taiwan Tech & Taiwantech.

Global Asymptotic Model-Free Trajectory-Independent Tracking Control of an Uncertain Marine Vehicle: An Adaptive Universe-Based Fuzzy Control Approach

Abstract: Motivated by the challenging difficulty in tracking an uncertain marine vehicle (MV) with unknown dynamics and disturbances to any unmeasurable/unknown trajectory, which is unresolved, an adaptive universe-based fuzzy control (AUFC) scheme with retractable fuzzy partitioning (RFP) in global universe of discourse (UoD) is created to achieve global asymptotic model-free trajectory-independent tracking. By defining an error surface and intensively exploring the MV structure, tracking error dynamics are sufficiently trimmed via separating external unknowns including trajectory dynamics and disturbances from internal nonlinearities dependent on tracking errors. An innovative retractable fuzzy approximator (RFA) using the RFP is developed to estimate internal nonlinearities and does not require a priori knowledge on the UoD, thereby contributing to a globally adaptive approximation based control approach in conjunction with Lyapunov synthesis. Together with RFA residuals, external unknowns are globally dominated by adaptive universal compensators driven by tracking error surface. Eventually, tracking errors and their derivatives globally asymptotically converge to the origin and all other signals of the closed-loop system are bounded. Simulation studies demonstrate superior performance of the proposed AUFC scheme in terms of both tracking and approximation.

Teachers' scientific epistemological views: The coherence with instruction and students' views***

Abstract: Research about the relationship between teachers' scientific epistemological views (SEVs) and science instruction is often an important issue for many science educators. This study, by collecting research data from four Taiwanese science teachers, their students, and classroom observations, was carried out to examine the coherences between teachers' SEVs and their (1) teaching beliefs, (2) instructional practices, (3) students' SEVs, and (4) students' perceptions toward actual science learning environments. The findings suggested adequate coherences between teachers' SEVs and their teaching beliefs as well as instructional practices. The teachers with relatively positivist-aligned SEVs tended to draw attention to students' science scores in tests and allocate more instructional time on teacher-directed lectures, tutorial problem practices, or in-class examinations, implying a more passive or rote perspective about learning science. In contrast, teachers with constructivist-oriented SEVs tended to focus on student understanding and application of scientific concepts and they adopted more time on student inquiry activities or interactive discussion. These findings are quite consistent with the results about the coherence between teachers' SEVs and students' perceptions toward science learning environments, suggesting that the constructivist-oriented SEVs appeared to foster the creation of more constructivist-oriented science learning environments. Finally, although this study provided some evidence that teachers' SEVs were likely related to their students' SEVs, the teachers' SEVs and those of their students were not obviously coherent. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed91:222–243, 2007