High-speed medium-voltage (MV) adjustable speed drives (ASDs) are essential for gearless direct drive systems, offering reduced size and maintenance. High-speed applications include off-shore compressors in oil and gas industry, wind energy generation, and fly-wheel energy storage systems. This paper will cover the implications to cover a higher speed range (120-500Hz), arising from retrofitting existing MV 50/60 Hz cascaded H-bridge (CHB) ASDs. An essential requirement for the ASD is to remain within the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and Harmonic Voltage Factor (HVF) constraints set by standards. Key-aspects affecting CHB performance at high speeds are switching frequency and number of voltage levels. Another key-aspect is the CHB power cell DC-Link operational stress, power loss, and size. A unique comprehensive analysis covering all mentioned aspects is performed to provide a view of the MV high-speed application demands and needed High-Speed CHB design considerations.

A fundamental problem in computer animation is that of realizing purposeful and realistic human movement given a sufficiently-rich set of motion capture clips. We learn data-driven generative models of human movement using autoregressive conditional variational autoencoders, or Motion VAEs. The latent variables of the learned autoencoder define the action space for the movement and thereby govern its evolution over time. Planning or control algorithms can then use this action space to generate desired motions. In particular, we use deep reinforcement learning to learn controllers that achieve goal-directed movements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on multiple tasks. We further evaluate system-design choices and describe the current limitations of Motion VAEs.

This paper presents a new and simple method for capacitor voltages balancing of an n-level diode-clamped multilevel converters using space vector modulation (SVM). The proposed method introduces a generalized approach to calculate dc-link capacitor currents without the use of look-up tables for an n-level diode-clamped converter. This approach balances dc-link capacitor voltages based on minimum energy property. The performance of the proposed method has been studied for a three-level, four-level and five-level diode-clamped converter in MATLAB/Simulink environment.