This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
Nowadays product reliability becomes the top concern of the manufacturers and customers always prefer the products with good performances under long period. In order to estimate the lifetime of the product, accelerated life testing (ALT) is introduced because most of the products can last years even decades. Much research has

Nowadays product reliability becomes the top concern of the manufacturers and customers always prefer the products with good performances under long period. In order to estimate the lifetime of the product, accelerated life testing (ALT) is introduced because most of the products can last years even decades. Much research has been done in the ALT area and optimal design for ALT is a major topic. This dissertation consists of three main studies. First, a methodology of finding optimal design for ALT with right censoring and interval censoring have been developed and it employs the proportional hazard (PH) model and generalized linear model (GLM) to simplify the computational process. A sensitivity study is also given to show the effects brought by parameters to the designs. Second, an extended version of I-optimal design for ALT is discussed and then a dual-objective design criterion is defined and showed with several examples. Also in order to evaluate different candidate designs, several graphical tools are developed. Finally, when there are more than one models available, different model checking designs are discussed.
ContributorsYang, Tao (Author) / Pan, Rong (Thesis advisor) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Committee member) / Borror, Connie (Committee member) / Rigdon, Steve (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Nonregular screening designs can be an economical alternative to traditional resolution IV 2^(k-p) fractional factorials. Recently 16-run nonregular designs, referred to as no-confounding designs, were introduced in the literature. These designs have the property that no pair of main effect (ME) and two-factor interaction (2FI) estimates are completely confounded. In

Nonregular screening designs can be an economical alternative to traditional resolution IV 2^(k-p) fractional factorials. Recently 16-run nonregular designs, referred to as no-confounding designs, were introduced in the literature. These designs have the property that no pair of main effect (ME) and two-factor interaction (2FI) estimates are completely confounded. In this dissertation, orthogonal arrays were evaluated with many popular design-ranking criteria in order to identify optimal 20-run and 24-run no-confounding designs. Monte Carlo simulation was used to empirically assess the model fitting effectiveness of the recommended no-confounding designs. The results of the simulation demonstrated that these new designs, particularly the 24-run designs, are successful at detecting active effects over 95% of the time given sufficient model effect sparsity. The final chapter presents a screening design selection methodology, based on decision trees, to aid in the selection of a screening design from a list of published options. The methodology determines which of a candidate set of screening designs has the lowest expected experimental cost.
ContributorsStone, Brian (Author) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Thesis advisor) / Silvestrini, Rachel T. (Committee member) / Fowler, John W (Committee member) / Borror, Connie M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
The development of advanced, anthropomorphic artificial hands aims to provide upper extremity amputees with improved functionality for activities of daily living. However, many state-of-the-art hands have a large number of degrees of freedom that can be challenging to control in an intuitive manner. Automated grip responses could be built into

The development of advanced, anthropomorphic artificial hands aims to provide upper extremity amputees with improved functionality for activities of daily living. However, many state-of-the-art hands have a large number of degrees of freedom that can be challenging to control in an intuitive manner. Automated grip responses could be built into artificial hands in order to enhance grasp stability and reduce the cognitive burden on the user. To this end, three studies were conducted to understand how human hands respond, passively and actively, to unexpected perturbations of a grasped object along and about different axes relative to the hand. The first study investigated the effect of magnitude, direction, and axis of rotation on precision grip responses to unexpected rotational perturbations of a grasped object. A robust "catch-up response" (a rapid, pulse-like increase in grip force rate previously reported only for translational perturbations) was observed whose strength scaled with the axis of rotation. Using two haptic robots, we then investigated the effects of grip surface friction, axis, and direction of perturbation on precision grip responses for unexpected translational and rotational perturbations for three different hand-centric axes. A robust catch-up response was observed for all axes and directions for both translational and rotational perturbations. Grip surface friction had no effect on the stereotypical catch-up response. Finally, we characterized the passive properties of the precision grip-object system via robot-imposed impulse perturbations. The hand-centric axis associated with the greatest translational stiffness was different than that for rotational stiffness. This work expands our understanding of the passive and active features of precision grip, a hallmark of human dexterous manipulation. Biological insights such as these could be used to enhance the functionality of artificial hands and the quality of life for upper extremity amputees.
ContributorsDe Gregorio, Michael (Author) / Santos, Veronica J. (Thesis advisor) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis K. (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Sugar, Thomas (Committee member) / Helms Tillery, Stephen I. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
This research is focused on two separate but related topics. The first uses an electroencephalographic (EEG) brain-computer interface (BCI) to explore the phenomenon of motor learning transfer. The second takes a closer look at the EEG-BCI itself and tests an alternate way of mapping EEG signals into machine commands. We

This research is focused on two separate but related topics. The first uses an electroencephalographic (EEG) brain-computer interface (BCI) to explore the phenomenon of motor learning transfer. The second takes a closer look at the EEG-BCI itself and tests an alternate way of mapping EEG signals into machine commands. We test whether motor learning transfer is more related to use of shared neural structures between imagery and motor execution or to more generalized cognitive factors. Using an EEG-BCI, we train one group of participants to control the movements of a cursor using embodied motor imagery. A second group is trained to control the cursor using abstract motor imagery. A third control group practices moving the cursor using an arm and finger on a touch screen. We hypothesized that if motor learning transfer is related to the use of shared neural structures then the embodied motor imagery group would show more learning transfer than the abstract imaging group. If, on the other hand, motor learning transfer results from more general cognitive processes, then the abstract motor imagery group should also demonstrate motor learning transfer to the manual performance of the same task. Our findings support that motor learning transfer is due to the use of shared neural structures between imaging and motor execution of a task. The abstract group showed no motor learning transfer despite being better at EEG-BCI control than the embodied group. The fact that more participants were able to learn EEG-BCI control using abstract imagery suggests that abstract imagery may be more suitable for EEG-BCIs for some disabilities, while embodied imagery may be more suitable for others. In Part 2, EEG data collected in the above experiment was used to train an artificial neural network (ANN) to map EEG signals to machine commands. We found that our open-source ANN using spectrograms generated from SFFTs is fundamentally different and in some ways superior to Emotiv's proprietary method. Our use of novel combinations of existing technologies along with abstract and embodied imagery facilitates adaptive customization of EEG-BCI control to meet needs of individual users.
Contributorsda Silva, Flavio J. K (Author) / Mcbeath, Michael K (Thesis advisor) / Helms Tillery, Stephen (Committee member) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Sugar, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
This dissertation explores different methodologies for combining two popular design paradigms in the field of computer experiments. Space-filling designs are commonly used in order to ensure that there is good coverage of the design space, but they may not result in good properties when it comes to model fitting. Optimal

This dissertation explores different methodologies for combining two popular design paradigms in the field of computer experiments. Space-filling designs are commonly used in order to ensure that there is good coverage of the design space, but they may not result in good properties when it comes to model fitting. Optimal designs traditionally perform very well in terms of model fitting, particularly when a polynomial is intended, but can result in problematic replication in the case of insignificant factors. By bringing these two design types together, positive properties of each can be retained while mitigating potential weaknesses. Hybrid space-filling designs, generated as Latin hypercubes augmented with I-optimal points, are compared to designs of each contributing component. A second design type called a bridge design is also evaluated, which further integrates the disparate design types. Bridge designs are the result of a Latin hypercube undergoing coordinate exchange to reach constrained D-optimality, ensuring that there is zero replication of factors in any one-dimensional projection. Lastly, bridge designs were augmented with I-optimal points with two goals in mind. Augmentation with candidate points generated assuming the same underlying analysis model serves to reduce the prediction variance without greatly compromising the space-filling property of the design, while augmentation with candidate points generated assuming a different underlying analysis model can greatly reduce the impact of model misspecification during the design phase. Each of these composite designs are compared to pure space-filling and optimal designs. They typically out-perform pure space-filling designs in terms of prediction variance and alphabetic efficiency, while maintaining comparability with pure optimal designs at small sample size. This justifies them as excellent candidates for initial experimentation.
ContributorsKennedy, Kathryn (Author) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Thesis advisor) / Johnson, Rachel T. (Thesis advisor) / Fowler, John W (Committee member) / Borror, Connie M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
During the initial stages of experimentation, there are usually a large number of factors to be investigated. Fractional factorial (2^(k-p)) designs are particularly useful during this initial phase of experimental work. These experiments often referred to as screening experiments help reduce the large number of factors to a smaller set.

During the initial stages of experimentation, there are usually a large number of factors to be investigated. Fractional factorial (2^(k-p)) designs are particularly useful during this initial phase of experimental work. These experiments often referred to as screening experiments help reduce the large number of factors to a smaller set. The 16 run regular fractional factorial designs for six, seven and eight factors are in common usage. These designs allow clear estimation of all main effects when the three-factor and higher order interactions are negligible, but all two-factor interactions are aliased with each other making estimation of these effects problematic without additional runs. Alternatively, certain nonregular designs called no-confounding (NC) designs by Jones and Montgomery (Jones & Montgomery, Alternatives to resolution IV screening designs in 16 runs, 2010) partially confound the main effects with the two-factor interactions but do not completely confound any two-factor interactions with each other. The NC designs are useful for independently estimating main effects and two-factor interactions without additional runs. While several methods have been suggested for the analysis of data from nonregular designs, stepwise regression is familiar to practitioners, available in commercial software, and is widely used in practice. Given that an NC design has been run, the performance of stepwise regression for model selection is unknown. In this dissertation I present a comprehensive simulation study evaluating stepwise regression for analyzing both regular fractional factorial and NC designs. Next, the projection properties of the six, seven and eight factor NC designs are studied. Studying the projection properties of these designs allows the development of analysis methods to analyze these designs. Lastly the designs and projection properties of 9 to 14 factor NC designs onto three and four factors are presented. Certain recommendations are made on analysis methods for these designs as well.
ContributorsShinde, Shilpa (Author) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Thesis advisor) / Borror, Connie (Committee member) / Fowler, John (Committee member) / Jones, Bradley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
A P-value based method is proposed for statistical monitoring of various types of profiles in phase II. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by the average run length criterion under various shifts in the intercept, slope and error standard deviation of the model. In our proposed approach, P-values

A P-value based method is proposed for statistical monitoring of various types of profiles in phase II. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by the average run length criterion under various shifts in the intercept, slope and error standard deviation of the model. In our proposed approach, P-values are computed at each level within a sample. If at least one of the P-values is less than a pre-specified significance level, the chart signals out-of-control. The primary advantage of our approach is that only one control chart is required to monitor several parameters simultaneously: the intercept, slope(s), and the error standard deviation. A comprehensive comparison of the proposed method and the existing KMW-Shewhart method for monitoring linear profiles is conducted. In addition, the effect that the number of observations within a sample has on the performance of the proposed method is investigated. The proposed method was also compared to the T^2 method discussed in Kang and Albin (2000) for multivariate, polynomial, and nonlinear profiles. A simulation study shows that overall the proposed P-value method performs satisfactorily for different profile types.
ContributorsAdibi, Azadeh (Author) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Thesis advisor) / Borror, Connie (Thesis advisor) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Zhang, Muhong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Accelerated life testing (ALT) is the process of subjecting a product to stress conditions (temperatures, voltage, pressure etc.) in excess of its normal operating levels to accelerate failures. Product failure typically results from multiple stresses acting on it simultaneously. Multi-stress factor ALTs are challenging as they increase the number of

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is the process of subjecting a product to stress conditions (temperatures, voltage, pressure etc.) in excess of its normal operating levels to accelerate failures. Product failure typically results from multiple stresses acting on it simultaneously. Multi-stress factor ALTs are challenging as they increase the number of experiments due to the stress factor-level combinations resulting from the increased number of factors. Chapter 2 provides an approach for designing ALT plans with multiple stresses utilizing Latin hypercube designs that reduces the simulation cost without loss of statistical efficiency. A comparison to full grid and large-sample approximation methods illustrates the approach computational cost gain and flexibility in determining optimal stress settings with less assumptions and more intuitive unit allocations.

Implicit in the design criteria of current ALT designs is the assumption that the form of the acceleration model is correct. This is unrealistic assumption in many real-world problems. Chapter 3 provides an approach for ALT optimum design for model discrimination. We utilize the Hellinger distance measure between predictive distributions. The optimal ALT plan at three stress levels was determined and its performance was compared to good compromise plan, best traditional plan and well-known 4:2:1 compromise test plans. In the case of linear versus quadratic ALT models, the proposed method increased the test plan's ability to distinguish among competing models and provided better guidance as to which model is appropriate for the experiment.

Chapter 4 extends the approach of Chapter 3 to ALT sequential model discrimination. An initial experiment is conducted to provide maximum possible information with respect to model discrimination. The follow-on experiment is planned by leveraging the most current information to allow for Bayesian model comparison through posterior model probability ratios. Results showed that performance of plan is adversely impacted by the amount of censoring in the data, in the case of linear vs. quadratic model form at three levels of constant stress, sequential testing can improve model recovery rate by approximately 8% when data is complete, but no apparent advantage in adopting sequential testing was found in the case of right-censored data when censoring is in excess of a certain amount.
ContributorsNasir, Ehab (Author) / Pan, Rong (Thesis advisor) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Kao, Ming-Hung (Committee member) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
In the three phases of the engineering design process (conceptual design, embodiment design and detailed design), traditional reliability information is scarce. However, there are different sources of information that provide reliability inputs while designing a new product. This research considered these sources to be further analyzed: reliability information from similar

In the three phases of the engineering design process (conceptual design, embodiment design and detailed design), traditional reliability information is scarce. However, there are different sources of information that provide reliability inputs while designing a new product. This research considered these sources to be further analyzed: reliability information from similar existing products denominated as parents, elicited experts' opinions, initial testing and the customer voice for creating design requirements. These sources were integrated with three novels approaches to produce reliability insights in the engineering design process, all under the Design for Reliability (DFR) philosophy. Firstly, an enhanced parenting process to assess reliability was presented. Using reliability information from parents it was possible to create a failure structure (parent matrix) to be compared against the new product. Then, expert opinions were elicited to provide the effects of the new design changes (parent factor). Combining those two elements resulted in a reliability assessment in early design process. Extending this approach into the conceptual design phase, a methodology was created to obtain a graphical reliability insight of a new product's concept. The approach can be summarized by three sequential steps: functional analysis, cognitive maps and Bayesian networks. These tools integrated the available information, created a graphical representation of the concept and provided quantitative reliability assessments. Lastly, to optimize resources when product testing is viable (e.g., detailed design) a type of accelerated life testing was recommended: the accelerated degradation tests. The potential for robust design engineering for this type of test was exploited. Then, robust design was achieved by setting the design factors at some levels such that the impact of stress factor variation on the degradation rate can be minimized. Finally, to validate the proposed approaches and methods, different case studies were presented.
ContributorsMejia Sanchez, Luis (Author) / Pan, Rong (Thesis advisor) / Montgomery, Douglas C. (Committee member) / Villalobos, Jesus R (Committee member) / See, Tung-King (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Myoelectric control is lled with potential to signicantly change human-robot interaction.

Humans desire compliant robots to safely interact in dynamic environments

associated with daily activities. As surface electromyography non-invasively measures

limb motion intent and correlates with joint stiness during co-contractions,

it has been identied as a candidate for naturally controlling such robots. However,

state-of-the-art myoelectric

Myoelectric control is lled with potential to signicantly change human-robot interaction.

Humans desire compliant robots to safely interact in dynamic environments

associated with daily activities. As surface electromyography non-invasively measures

limb motion intent and correlates with joint stiness during co-contractions,

it has been identied as a candidate for naturally controlling such robots. However,

state-of-the-art myoelectric interfaces have struggled to achieve both enhanced

functionality and long-term reliability. As demands in myoelectric interfaces trend

toward simultaneous and proportional control of compliant robots, robust processing

of multi-muscle coordinations, or synergies, plays a larger role in the success of the

control scheme. This dissertation presents a framework enhancing the utility of myoelectric

interfaces by exploiting motor skill learning and

exible muscle synergies for

reliable long-term simultaneous and proportional control of multifunctional compliant

robots. The interface is learned as a new motor skill specic to the controller,

providing long-term performance enhancements without requiring any retraining or

recalibration of the system. Moreover, the framework oers control of both motion

and stiness simultaneously for intuitive and compliant human-robot interaction. The

framework is validated through a series of experiments characterizing motor learning

properties and demonstrating control capabilities not seen previously in the literature.

The results validate the approach as a viable option to remove the trade-o

between functionality and reliability that have hindered state-of-the-art myoelectric

interfaces. Thus, this research contributes to the expansion and enhancement of myoelectric

controlled applications beyond commonly perceived anthropomorphic and

\intuitive control" constraints and into more advanced robotic systems designed for

everyday tasks.
ContributorsIson, Mark (Author) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Thesis advisor) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Greger, Bradley (Committee member) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Sugar, Thomas (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015