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Artificial neural network is considered to be one of the effective ways to enable soft robots to achieve high-performance control due to their significant advantages, such as massively parallel processing and distributed storage of information, adaptivity, and fault tolerance. Artificial neural networks are composed of microelectronic components connected together, of which the most basic units are artificial neural synaptic units, such as atomic switches, memristors, and synaptic transistors. This paper first introduces the research status of soft robots and artificial neural synapses, predicts the demand of soft robots for artificial neural synapses, summarizes the difficulties and problems that may be encountered in the application of artificial neural synapses to soft robots, and finally points out the importance and feasibility of artificial neural synapses in the research and development of soft robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eddy current thermography (ECT) is a non-invasive testing method that combines electromagnetic induction and infrared thermography to identify flaws in materials that conduct electricity. However, ECT faces difficulties in accurately locating and classifying defects owing to its low signal-to-noise ratio and complex defect patterns. In this paper, we propose a new method that integrates an improved faster region-convolutional neural network (R-CNN) and an adaptive Canny algorithm to enhance the defect detection performance of ECT. An improved faster R-CNN is a deep neural network that can automatically detect and locate multiple defects in a single ECT image, whereas the adaptive Canny algorithm is an edge detection technique that can identify defect boundaries. The proposed method was tested using a dataset of ECT images with different types of defects. The results demonstrated that our method achieved better accuracy, precision, and speed than existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centrifugal pumps are important equipment in industrial production. At present, vibration signals are often used to diagnose cavitation in centrifugal pumps, but the vibration signals are easy to be disturbed and the fault characteristics are unstable to be detected. In this paper, a single stage centrifugal pump is taken as the study object, and the vibration signals of various parts of the centrifugal pump cavitation state are collected under different flow conditions. The short-time Fourier transform and one-third octave analysis are performed on the filtered signals, and the characteristic frequency of cavitation and the energy near the characteristic frequency with the development of cavitation are obtained. Based on vibration signals, the vibration root mean square (rms) and kurtosis values of different cavitation states are obtained. Flow state, kurtosis, and rms are used as input variables in the double-layer backpropagation neural network model to identify and classify the cavitation states of centrifugal pumps. The results show that the trained neural network model can accurately identify and classify the cavitation state of the centrifugal pump under the conditions of low flow rate, rated flow rate, and large flow rate, and the accuracy is more than 99.5%. This study provides a new technique for diagnosing cavitation in centrifugal pumps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]