Abstract
Positioning and orientation precision of a multirotor aerial robot can be increased by using additional control loops for each of the driving units. As a result, one can eliminate lack of balance between true thrust forces. A control performance comparison of two proposed thrust controllers, namely robust controller designed with coefficient diagram method (CDM) and proportional, integral and derivative (PID) controller tuned with pole-placement law, is presented in the paper. The research has been conducted with respect to model/plant matching uncertainty and with the use of anti-windup compensators for a simple motor-rotor model approximated by first-order inertia plus delay. From the obtained simulation results one concludes that appropriate choice of AWC compensator improves tracking performance and increases robustness against parametric uncertainty.

Abstract
A brief review in the cavity ring-down technique (CRD) is presented. In this review, there will only be considered the conventional fiber CRD configuration, i.e., there will only be presented researches involving cavities with two couplers with 99:1 ratios, due to the large amount of publications involving this spectroscopy method. The presented survey is divided in different topics related to the measurement of physical parameters, such as strain and temperature, curvature, pressure, refractive index, gas and biochemical sensing.

Abstract
This work demonstrates the viability of using a cavity ring-down (CRD) technique for remote sensing. A conventional CRD configuration is used where an optical circulator is added inside the fiber loop to couple 19 km of optical fiber with a gold mirror at its end with the purpose of remote sensing. As a proof-of-concept, an intensity sensor based on an eight-figure configuration is used at the end of the 19 km of fiber for displacement sensing. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract
As a result of improved living conditions and the progress achieved in areas related to medicine, there is a decrease in the mortality rate but an increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases. Contrary to what happened until a few decades ago, patients with chronic diseases now have a high life expectancy. However, the patients increased life expectancy, often causes great pain and significant adverse effects. In addition to prolonging life, it is essential to increase the quality of life (QoL) of patients. The QoL is now considered an important aspect in clinical practice for patients with chronic illnesses, but the methods to assess QoL, in automatic or semi-automatic manners and their use in clinical decision support are still underexplored and their applications are virtually non-existent. This paper presents an overview of research related to health quality of Life, estimation of quality of life including its continuous estimation, modeling and behavioral recognition and representation of knowledge in this area and decision support systems for clinical decision making and quality of life related applications.

Abstract
Modern distributed real-time embedded applications have high processing requirements associated with strict deadlines. For some applications, such constraints cannot be fulfilled by existing single-core embedded platforms. A solution is to parallelize the execution of the applications, by allowing networked nodes to distribute their workload to remote nodes with spare capacity. In that context, this paper presents a holistic timing analysis for fixedpriority fork-join parallel/distributed tasks. Furthermore, we extend the holistic approach to consider the interaction between parallel threads and messages interchanged through a flexible time triggered switched Ethernet network, and we show how the pessimism on the worst case response time computation of such tasks can be reduced by considering the pipeline effect that occurs in such distributed systems. To evaluate the performance and correctness of the holistic model, this paper includes a numerical evaluation based on a real automotive application. The obtained results show that the proposed method is effective in distributing the load by different nodes, allowing a significant reduction of the worst case response time of the tasks. Moreover, the paper also reports an implementation of the model on a Linux library, called parallel/distributed real-time, as well as the corresponding results obtained on a real testbed. The obtained results are in accordance with the predictions of the holistic timing analysis.

Abstract