Analog Isolated Multilevel Quantizer for Voltage Sensing while Maintaining Galvanic Isolation

A low-power, compact device for performing measurements in electrical systems with isolated voltage domains is proposed. Isolated measurements are required in numerous applications. For instance, a measurement of the bus voltage for a system with a high supply voltage and lower isolated local voltage level may be needed for system health monitoring and control. Such a requirement may necessitate the use of isolation amplifiers to provide voltage telemetry for the local system. Isolation amplifiers require dual galvanically isolated supplies and use magnetic, capacitive, or optical barriers between primary and secondary sides. Producing this supplemental voltage requires an extra voltage converter, which consumes power and generates electromagnetic interference which must, in turn, be filtered. Complex designs incorporating feedback are needed to achieve linear response. The proposed Analog Isolated Multilevel Quantizer (AIMQ) addresses these issues by monitoring the primary-side signal and communicating the results to the secondary side using a novel scheme involving Zener diodes, optocouplers, transistors, one-hot coding, and discrete outputs. The result is a low power isolated transducer that can in principle be extended to an arbitrary bit depth.

Use of Bayesian Nonparametric methods for Estimating the Measurements in High Clutter

Robust tracking of a target in a clutter environment is an important and challenging task. In recent years, the nearest neighbor methods and probabilistic data association filters were proposed. However, the performance of these methods diminishes as the number of measurements increases. In this paper, we propose a robust generative approach to effectively model multiple sensor measurements for tracking a moving target in an environment with high clutter. We assume a time-dependent number of measurements that include sensor observations with unknown origin, some of which may only contain clutter with no additional information. We robustly and accurately estimate the trajectory of the moving target in a high clutter environment with an unknown number of clutters by employing Bayesian nonparametric modeling. In particular, we employ a class of joint Bayesian nonparametric models to construct the joint prior distribution of target and clutter measurements such that the conditional distributions follow a Dirichlet process. The marginalized Dirichlet process prior of the target measurements is then used in a Bayesian tracker to estimate the dynamically-varying target state. We show through experiments that the tracking performance and effectiveness of our proposed framework are increased by suppressing high clutter measurements. In addition, we show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods such as nearest neighbor and probability data association filters.