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Smartphone detection of Escherichia coli from field water samples is successfully demonstrated using paper microfluidics. A three-channel paper chip is designed and fabricated, with a negative control channel preloaded with bovine serum albumin (BSA)-conjugated beads and two E. coli detection channels preloaded with anti-E. coli-conjugated beads, for low- and high-concentration detection. Field water samples are introduced to the paper chip by dipping or pipetting, and the antigens from E. coli travel through the paper fibers by capillary action while the dust/soil or algae particles are effectively filtered. Antibody-conjugated beads, confined within the paper fibers, immunoagglutinate in the presence of E. coli antigens, while BSA-conjugated beads do not. The extent of immunoagglutination is quantified by evaluating Mie scatter intensity from the digital images taken at an optimized angle and distance using a smartphone. The assay results show excellent agreement with the MacConkey plate results, i.e., the count of viable E. coli. The scatter simulation procedure is introduced to substitute for experimental optimization, such that the proposed method can be easily adapted to the other types of samples. A smartphone application is developed, incorporating the internal gyroscope of a smartphone, to allow the user to position the smartphone at an optimized angle of scatter detection. The detection limit is single-cell-level and the total assay time is 90 s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The work presented in this paper concerns a switching-based control formulation for multi-intersection and multiphase traffic light systems. A macroscopic traffic flow modeling approach is first presented, which is instrumental to the development of a model-based and switching-based optimization method for traffic signal operation, in the framework of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). The main advantage of the switching-based formulation is its capability to determine both “when”’ to switch and “which” mode to switch on without the need to use the cycle-based average flow approximation typical of state-of-the-art formulations. In addition, the framework can handle different cycle times across intersections without the need for synchronization constraints and, moreover, minimum dwell-time constraints can be directly enforced to comply with minimum green/red times in each phase. The simulation experiments on a multi-intersection and multiphase traffic light systems are presented to show the effectiveness of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing power electronics (PE) converter reliability is crucial for ensuring a reliable operation of current and future operating Wind Turbines (WTs). Achieving high reliability of variable speed WT PE systems requires careful consideration of their operation, and particularly their thermal cycling. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating and reconsidering operational strategies of WTs with relation to the thermal loading and lifetime consumption of the converter. The methodology is applied to compare control strategies for the WT generator and evaluate their impact on the converter reliability by observation of the thermal cycles and by calculating the resultant lifetime consumption of those stress cycles. The thermal stress on both the Machine Side Converter (MSC) and the Grid Side Converter (GSC) is examined and compared. It is shown that the least reliable of the three evaluated control strategies is the one that tracks the power curve below rated speed most closely. This paper suggests that dynamic transients associated with the WT control largely influence the IGBT module wear-out and their modelling needs to be prioritized for lifetime studies. These dynamic transients are captured by the improved model whose value is confirmed for the comparisons in the case study of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper solves the problem of designing local adaptive cruise controllers that guarantee collision avoidance of the vehicles in a platoon. Whereas previous studies have solved this problem for specific vehicle models, the present paper shows a general solution for a wider class of linear vehicle models. In particular, the problem of finding a controller that renders a vehicle externally positive to guarantee string stability and collision avoidance is studied in detail. The result is an algorithm that finds a set of closed-loop eigenvalues that correspond to an externally positive feedback loop. The developed methods are applied to an example and the effectiveness is verified in a laboratory experiment with multiple robots driving in a platoon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stereo matching is an important part of establishing stereo vision. Parallax information obtained by stereo matching directly affects the three-dimensional information of an object. End-to-end stereo matching algorithms can directly derive parallax maps from the designed network. However, at the same time, the structure of the network is complex, and a large number of parameters take up much memory. The network increases the device burden, which increases the time required to obtain the parallax map, lowering the efficiency of the network movement. Thus, an improved stereo matching algorithm based on AANet (adaptive aggregation network for efficient stereo matching) is proposed in this paper: AEDNet (adaptive end-to-end depth network for stereo matching). In the feature extraction module, the network simplifies the network structure by limiting the convolution kernel size to obtain the features with low abstraction. In cost aggregation, the intra-scale aggregation module is used to achieve adaptive cost aggregation through deformable convolution, and the inter-scale aggregation module uses the traditional cross-scale aggregation method to compensate for the missing global information to a certain extent. The network is verified the performance on the KITTI dataset. The results show that the algorithm can still complete stereo matching efficiently and accurately and obtain a better disparity map when the network is simplified. These provide preconditions for accurate three-dimensional reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of adaptive steganography, most of the recent research works seek at designing cost functions that are evaluated against steganalysis methods. While those approaches have been successful, they rely on intuitive principles and ad-hoc costs associated with each pixel or Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficient. Beyond the empirical assessments, the insights one can get from such approaches are very limited. On the opposite, this paper presents an original method for steganography in JPEG images that exploits a statistical model of the DCT coefficients. Within the framework of hypothesis testing theory, we use a statistical model of covers to derive the analytical expression of the most powerful detector. The objective of the steganographer is to minimize the statistical performance of this “omniscient detector” which represents a “worst-case” scenario for security. This paper shows how this method allows designing effective steganography, in terms of both security and computational complexity, in the two main use cases: when having only one single JPEG image and when the uncompressed image is available, case also known as Side-Informed (SI). A wide range of numerical comparisons shows that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art especially against the latest and most accurate steganalysis approaches based on Deep Learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefited from the sampling signal from monitoring sensors installed in electro-mechanical actuator (EMA), data-driven methods, such as deep learning models that can mine adaptive features from monitoring signal, have received wide attention in EMA fault diagnosis. A generalized hypothesis accepted by previous efforts on EMA fault diagnosis, is that target domain datasets (i.e., testing monitoring signal) are drawn from the same distribution with source domain datasets (i.e., training monitoring signal). However, except for the different working loads and velocities, various driving signal waveforms also exits in EMA, which further increase the domain discrepancy challenge and decrease the performance of those deep learning models. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning domain adaptation method that introduces joint maximum mean discrepancy (JMMD) into convolutional neural network (CNN), which aims to reduce the domain difference between labeled source domain datasets and unlabeled target domain datasets. In order to simulate domain discrepancy phenomenon, the NASA EMA datasets, sampled from acceleration sensors under variable driving waveforms with different working loads and velocities, are considered in this paper. Experiment results indicate that CNN-JMMD method can reduce the distribution difference and improve the diagnosis accuracy in source and target domains. In comparison with several available methods, extensive experimental evaluations on six domain tasks indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, better performance has been obtained by selecting the proper trade-off factor between CNN and JMMD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online healthcare applications have grown more popular over the years. For instance, telehealth is an online healthcare application that allows patients and doctors to schedule consultations, prescribe medication, share medical documents, and monitor health conditions conveniently. Apart from this, telehealth can also be used to store a patient's personal and medical information. With its rise in usage due to COVID-19, given the amount of sensitive data it stores, security measures are necessary. A simple way of making these applications more secure is through user authentication. One of the most common and often used authentications is face recognition. It is convenient and easy to use. However, face recognition systems are not foolproof. They are prone to malicious attacks like printed photos, paper cutouts, replayed videos, and 3D masks. The goal of face anti-spoofing is to differentiate real users (live) from attackers (spoof). Although effective in terms of performance, existing methods use a significant amount of parameters, making them resource-heavy and unsuitable for handheld devices. Apart from this, they fail to generalize well to new environments like changes in lighting or background. This paper proposes a lightweight face anti-spoofing framework that does not compromise on performance. Our proposed method achieves good performance with the help of an ArcFace Classifier (AC). The AC encourages differentiation between spoof and live samples by making clear boundaries between them. With clear boundaries, classification becomes more accurate. We further demonstrate our model's capabilities by comparing the number of parameters, FLOPS, and performance with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a paradigm that adapts general large-scale pretrained models (PTMs) to speech emotion recognition task. Although PTMs shed new light on artificial general intelligence, they are constructed with general tasks in mind, and thus, their efficacy for specific tasks can be further improved. Additionally, employing PTMs in practical applications can be challenging due to their considerable size. Above limitations spawn another research direction, namely, optimizing large-scale PTMs for specific tasks to generate task-specific PTMs that are both compact and effective. In this paper, we focus on the speech emotion recognition task and propose an improVed emotion-specific pretrained encoder called Vesper. Vesper is pretrained on a speech dataset based on WavLM and takes into account emotional characteristics. To enhance sensitivity to emotional information, Vesper employs an emotion-guided masking strategy to identify the regions that need masking. Subsequently, Vesper employs hierarchical and cross-layer self-supervision to improve its ability to capture acoustic and semantic representations, both of which are crucial for emotion recognition. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP, MELD, and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate that Vesper with 4 layers outperforms WavLM Base with 12 layers, and the performance of Vesper with 12 layers surpasses that of WavLM Large with 24 layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As you may know, the M Barry Carlton Award is bestowed on the authors of the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions of Aerospace and Electronic Systems (T-AES) for a given calendar year. The winners for the 2011 Award were announced in the February issue earlier this year. It is now my privilege to announce that the 2012 M Barry Carlton award winners are Kevin (Jim) Sangston, Fulvio Gini, and Maria (Sabrina) Greco for their paper entitled, "Coherent Radar Target Detection in Heavy-Tailed Compound-Gaussian Clutter." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a high-performance vision-based precision manipulation technique that does not rely on an object, contact, or gripper model, which are challenging and often times impractical to acquire. Instead, we utilize a simple process model that roughly maps object velocities to actuator velocities, and we maintain system efficiency and robustness via advanced vision-based control techniques with disturbance rejection mechanisms. For obtaining simple models, we derive a set of actuator coordination rules for achieving common task space motions. The performance degradation due to modeling inaccuracies is then minimized via the model predictive control framework and a correction matrix method. Our experimental results show that the proposed strategy results in high-performance precision manipulation with minimal modeling effort. Note to Practitioners—Compliant, soft robotic grippers make it easier to grasp objects with various shapes and sizes; these grippers adapt to the shape of the object, which provides robustness to positioning errors and often removes the necessity to precisely plan the contact locations. These advantages make compliant grippers ideal to use in industrial settings as well as in service robotics, where the variety of object shapes and sizes are immense. On the other hand, for the tasks that require precise object manipulation (e.g., for a peg-in-hole problem), these hands are more challenging to control than their rigid counterparts: it is harder to obtain their precise models, and they often do not have enough proprioceptive sensors to calculate the full pose of the system. In this paper, we propose solutions to utilize vision feedback for positioning an object using compliant hands. These solutions do not rely on precise models of the gripper or the full knowledge of the gripper state. We adopt various control techniques to provide precise positioning in steady state as well as to maintain efficiency in the transient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate retinal fluid segmentation on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images plays an important role in diagnosing and treating various eye diseases. The art deep models have shown promising performance on OCT image segmentation given pixel-wise annotated training data. However, the learned model will achieve poor performance on OCT images that are obtained from different devices (domains) due to the domain shift issue. This problem largely limits the real-world application of OCT image segmentation since the types of devices usually are different in each hospital. In this paper, we study the task of cross-domain OCT fluid segmentation, where we are given a labeled dataset of the source device (domain) and an unlabeled dataset of the target device (domain). The goal is to learn a model that can perform well on the target domain. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Structure-guided Cross-Attention Network (SCAN), which leverages the retinal layer structure to facilitate domain alignment. Our SCAN is inspired by the fact that the retinal layer structure is robust to domains and can reflect regions that are important to fluid segmentation. In light of this, we build our SCAN in a multi-task manner by jointly learning the retinal structure prediction and fluid segmentation. To exploit the mutual benefit between layer structure and fluid segmentation, we further introduce a cross-attention module to measure the correlation between the layer-specific feature and the fluid-specific feature encouraging the model to concentrate on highly relative regions during domain alignment. Moreover, an adaptation difficulty map is evaluated based on the retinal structure predictions from different domains, which enforces the model focus on hard regions during structure-aware adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on the three domains of the RETOUCH dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that our approach produces state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain OCT fluid segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph-based clustering plays an important role in the clustering area. Recent studies about graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved impressive success on graph-type data. However, in general clustering tasks, the graph structure of data does not exist such that GNN can not be applied to clustering directly and the strategy to construct a graph is crucial for performance. Therefore, how to extend GNN into general clustering tasks is an attractive problem. In this paper, we propose a graph auto-encoder for general data clustering, AdaGAE, which constructs the graph adaptively according to the generative perspective of graphs. The adaptive process is designed to induce the model to exploit the high-level information behind data and utilize the non-euclidean structure sufficiently. Importantly, we find that the simple update of the graph will result in severe degeneration, which can be concluded as better reconstruction means worse update. We provide rigorous analysis theoretically and empirically. Then we further design a novel mechanism to avoid the collapse. Via extending the generative graph models to general type data, a graph auto-encoder with a novel decoder is devised and the weighted graphs can be also applied to GNN. AdaGAE performs well and stably in different scale and type datasets. Besides, it is insensitive to the initialization of parameters and requires no pretraining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces video domain generalization where most video classification networks degenerate due to the lack of exposure to the target domains of divergent distributions. We observe that the global temporal features are less generalizable, due to the temporal domain shift that videos from other unseen domains may have an unexpected absence or misalignment of the temporal relations. This finding has motivated us to solve video domain generalization by effectively learning the local-relation features of different timescales that are more generalizable, and exploiting them along with the global-relation features to maintain the discriminability. This paper presents the VideoDG framework with two technical contributions. The first is a new deep architecture named the Adversarial Pyramid Network, which improves the generalizability of video features by capturing the local-relation, global-relation, and cross-relation features progressively. On the basis of pyramid features, the second contribution is a new and robust approach of adversarial data augmentation that can bridge different video domains by improving the diversity and quality of augmented data. We construct three video domain generalization benchmarks in which domains are divided according to different datasets, different consequences of actions, or different camera views, respectively. VideoDG consistently outperforms the combinations of previous video classification models and existing domain generalization methods on all benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the lack of distinctiveness to the background, robust monocular 6DOF pose tracking of less-distinct objects remains an important open problem. In this paper, we firstly analyze the object distinctiveness in the tracking process. Then, we propose a novel contour-part model based robust monocular pose tracking method for less-distinct objects. This paper uses the traditional contour feature for pose tracking in a novel strategy called contour part model. First, the contour part model is built by segmenting the projected contour rendered from the 3D model into contour segments of a certain length adaptively according to the Shi-Tomasi cornerness scores. Then, the correspondence is detected in the input image for each contour part by gradient orientation based template matching. Finally, pose tracking is achieved by solving the PnP problem. Experiment results on semi-synthetic and real images show that the proposed method performs better than the existing methods when pose tracking less-distinct objects and shows great robustness toward interference. Additionally, we combine the edge feature and the regional feature in a simple strategy. The overall performance of the fused method is boosted according to the experimental results on the RBOT dataset. The fact shows that the fusion of the edge and regional features has great potential for improving tracking performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is devoted to the problem of erasure coding in distributed storage. We consider a model of storage that assumes that nodes are organized into equally sized groups, called racks, that within each group the nodes can communicate freely without taxing the system bandwidth, and that the only information transmission that counts is the one between the racks. This assumption implies that the nodes within each of the racks can collaborate before providing information to the failed node. The main emphasis of the paper is on code construction for this storage model. We present an explicit family of maximum distance separable (MDS) array codes that support recovery of a single failed node from any number of helper racks using the minimum possible amount of inter-rack communication(such codes are said to provide optimal repair). The codes are constructed over finite fields of size comparable to the code length. We also derive a bound on the number of symbols accessed at helper nodes for the purposes of repair, and construct a code family that approaches this bound, while still maintaining the optimal repair property. Finally, we present a construction of scalar Reed-Solomon codes that support optimal repair for the rack-oriented storage model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new approach to evaluate personalized energy consumption is presented in this paper. The method consists of identifying driver–vehicle dynamics using the probability weighted autoregressive model, which is one of the multi-mode ARX models, and then of reproducing the driver–vehicle behavior in a vehicle-following task. The energy consumption of the vehicle is estimated from the velocity profile calculated by using the driver–vehicle model. In this paper, driving simulator and real-world driving data were recorded to identify the driver–vehicle model in various situations. As a result, real-world energy consumption could be reproduced in a variety of situations with an average error of 1.9% and a standard deviation within 1.5%. Several promising applications of the energy consumption evaluation are introduced in this paper, such as an online energy consumption prediction, a powertrain choice-assistance system for car buyers, and a solution to estimate the macroscopic energy consumption of aggregated vehicles in a traffic flow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To accurately pour drinks into various containers is an essential skill for service robots. However, drink pouring is a dynamic process and difficult to model. Traditional deep imitation learning techniques for implementing autonomous robotic pouring have an inherent black-box effect and require a large amount of demonstration data for model training. To address these issues, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper such that a robot can learn high-level general knowledge and execute low-level actions across multiple drink pouring scenarios. Moreover, with the EHIL method, a logical graph can be constructed for task execution, through which the decision-making process for action generation can be made explainable to users and the causes of failure can be traced out. Based on the logical graph, the framework is manipulable to achieve different targets while the adaptability to unseen scenarios can be achieved in an explainable manner. A series of experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results indicate that EHIL outperforms the traditional behavior cloning method in terms of success rate, adaptability, manipulability, and explainability. Note to Practitioners—Pouring liquids is a common activity in people’s daily lives and all wet-lab industries. Drink pouring dynamic control is difficult to model, while the accurate perception of flow is challenging. To enable the robot to learn under unknown dynamics via observing the human demonstration, deep imitation learning can be used. To address the limitations of traditional deep neural networks, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method enables the robot to learn a sequence of reasonable pouring phases for performing the task rather than simply execute the task via traditional behavior cloning. In this way, explainability and safety can be ensured. Manipulability can be achieved by reconstructing the logical graph. The target of this research is to obtain pouring dynamics via the learning method and realize the precise and quick pouring of drink from the source containers to various targeted containers with reliable performance, adaptability, manipulability, and explainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End-to-end steering estimation is one of the important deep regression tasks. However, driving datasets are always imbalanced on the distribution of the steering value, which makes end-to-end learning models perform bad steering estimation accuracy, especially for the sharp steering value estimation, which finally, leads to an imbalanced training problem. In this paper, the essential reason for the imbalanced training problem for the deep regression task is first revealed as the gradient disharmony. To hedge the gradient disharmony, a general gradient balanced mechanism for the deep regression task is proposed in this paper. Meanwhile, the general gradient balanced mechanism is applied for the steering estimation task. According to the steering distribution, a novel Adaptive Gradient Balanced Mechanism (AGBM) is proposed to hedge the gradient disharmony based on the Laplace distribution with the general gradient balanced mechanism theory. Further, a new loss function embedding with AGBM is proposed to balance the gradient disharmony for the training process. AGBM makes the process of gradient hedging with adaptive style without parameters finetuning. Based on five driving datasets, four experiments are conducted for demonstrations. The experiment results show the AGBM enables the end-to-end models to perform the best accuracy of the steering estimation, including the sharp steering samples. Meanwhile, AGBM is generalized with different end-to-end learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flight delay prediction has recently gained growing popularity due to the significant role it plays in efficient airline and airport operation. Most of the previous prediction works consider the single-airport scenario, which overlooks the time-varying spatial interactions hidden in airport networks. In this paper, the flight delay prediction problem is investigated from a network perspective (i.e., multi-airport scenario). To model the time-evolving and periodic graph-structured information in the airport network, a flight delay prediction approach based on the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) is developed in this paper. More specifically, regarding that GCN cannot take both delay time-series and time-evolving graph structures as inputs, a temporal convolutional block based on the Markov property is employed to mine the time-varying patterns of flight delays through a sequence of graph snapshots. Moreover, considering that unknown occasional air routes under emergency may result in incomplete graph-structured inputs for GCN, an adaptive graph convolutional block is embedded into the proposed method to expose spatial interactions hidden in airport networks. Through extensive experiments, it has been shown that the proposed approach outperforms benchmark methods with a satisfying accuracy improvement at the cost of acceptable execution time. The obtained results reveal that deep learning approach based on graph-structured inputs have great potentials in the flight delay prediction problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a comparative experimental evaluation of one model-free proportional derivative (PD) three degree-of-freedom (DOF) controller and two model-based three-DOF controllers designed to enable low-speed, neutrally buoyant, and fully actuated underwater vehicles to perform trajectory tracking in the X, Y, and heading DOFs. We show the model-free PD controller provides locally asymptotically stable set-point regulation. We show the model-based controllers provide locally asymptotically stable trajectory tracking. The reported controllers were experimentally evaluated on the Johns Hopkins University remotely operated vehicle. We report the model-based controller’s mean absolute position and velocity tracking error is significantly smaller than the model-free PD controller for coupled maneuvers. We report the fixed, model-based controllers performed best using a parameter model including fully parameterized quadratic drag model parameters, and that the choice of parameter model has a significant effect on the performance of the model-based controllers during disparate experimental trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the iterative learning control (ILC) problem for variable trial lengths via compensating output data by using an auxiliary predictive model when the controlled process does not reach the desired trial length. Moreover, this paper aims to propose a general and data-driven ILC method without requiring any explicit mechanistic model information. Specifically, an iterative difference with state transition expression is performed at first over the desired trial length in iteration domain to build an auxiliary predictive model for the iterative input–output dynamics of the linear discrete-time system. Then, an auxiliary predictive compensation-based ILC (APC-ILC) method is presented by defining an expanded output variable in which the predictive output is incorporated to compensate the unavailable output data due to the shorter operation length. The learning gain is iteration-time-varying and is updated using real-time data to adapt to system changes. Furthermore, the proposed learning control law contains additional input information to further improve the control performance. Theoretical analysis and simulations further verify the effectiveness of the proposed APC-ILC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionally, the transition probabilities in the interacting multiple model (IMM) are often fixed based on the prior information. However, this conservative setting may result in inaccurate state estimations. To solve this problem, a Bayesian-based online correction function is proposed in this paper, which can adaptively adjust the transition probabilities. To deal with the response lag and the short-term peak estimation error problem during the respond to model jump, a model jumping threshold is defined, so that the current information of the models can be fully utilized by the IMM algorithm and the correction function of the transition probabilities can be further improved. Subsequently, an adaptive transition probability-based parallel IMM algorithm is proposed in this paper. Finally, three maneuvering target tracking simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, the results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the response speed of the system model jump and the state estimation accuracy. The effectiveness and feasibility of the algorithm are proven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyculture farming, where multiple crop species are grown simultaneously, has potential to reduce pesticide and water usage while improving the utilization of soil nutrients. However, it is much harder to automate polyculture than monoculture. To facilitate research, we present AlphaGardenSim, a fast, first order, open-access polyculture farming simulator with single plant growth and irrigation models tuned using real world measurements. AlphaGardenSim can be used for policy learning as it simulates inter-plant dynamics, including light and water competition between plants in close proximity and approximates growth in a real greenhouse garden at 25, $000\times $ the speed of natural growth. This paper extends earlier work with a new action space that includes planting, which dynamically finds new seed locations that increases resources utilization, and an adaptive sampling technique to reduce the number of actions taken at each timestep without affecting performance. We also evaluate other automation policies using a novel metric that combines plant diversity and canopy coverage. Code and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/AlphaGarden. Note to Practitioners—Monoculture farming is often characterized by heavy agrichemical inputs, such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and increased vulnerability to disease and pestilence. This paper is motivated by the lack of long-term sustainability of industrial agriculture, and its implications for human food security. Although polyculture is a sustainable alternative to monoculture farming, it requires more human labor and is more challenging to automate. In this paper we propose a fast, first order simulator that simulates the growth of plants in a polyculture setting. Simulation experiments suggest that the simulator can be used to learn a planting, watering and pruning plan a robot can follow to produce maximal yield from a diverse set of plants with limited irrigation, however it has not yet been tested on a physical garden. In future research we will develop a fully automated controller that will operate planting, irrigation and pruning tools in a physical garden over multiple plant growth cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a hierarchical learning architecture for safe data-driven control in unknown environments. We consider a constrained nonlinear dynamical system and assume the availability of state-input trajectories solving control tasks in different environments. In addition to task-invariant system state and input constraints, a parameterized environment model generates task-specific state constraints, which are satisfied by the stored trajectories. Our goal is to use these trajectories to find a safe and high-performing policy for a new task in a new, unknown environment. We propose using the stored data to learn generalizable control strategies. At each time step, based on a local forecast of the new task environment, the learned strategy consists of a target region in the state space and input constraints to guide the system evolution to the target region. These target regions are used as terminal sets by a low-level model predictive controller. We show how to i) design the target sets from past data and then ii) incorporate them into a model predictive control scheme with shifting horizon that ensures safety of the closed-loop system when performing the new task. We prove the feasibility of the resulting control policy, and apply the proposed method to robotic path planning, racing, and computer game applications. Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the challenge of designing safe controllers for autonomous systems navigating through new environments. We consider scenarios where trajectory data from control tasks in different environments is available to the control designer. Possible applications include autonomous vehicles racing on new tracks or robotic manipulators performing tasks in the presence of new obstacles. Existing approaches to model-based control design for new environments generally use trajectory libraries, systematically adapting stored trajectories to the constraints of the new environment. This typically requires a priori knowledge of the entire task environment as well as resources to store and maintain the growing library. This paper suggests a new hierarchical control approach, in which stored trajectories are used to learn high-level strategies that can be applied while solving the new task. The strategies are learned offline, and only the parameterized strategy function needs to be stored for online control. Strategies only require knowledge of the nearby task environment, and provide navigation guidelines for the system. In this paper we show how to find such strategies from previous task data and how to integrate them into a low-level controller to safely and efficiently solve the new task. We also show how to adapt the modular framework as needed for a user’s desired application. Simulation experiments in robotic manipulator, autonomous vehicle, and computer game examples suggest that our approach can be used in a wide range of applications. In future research, we will address how to adapt the method for time-varying or stochastic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a model predictive current control (MPCC) method based on current augmenter prediction model (CAPM) appropriate for interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) under high-speed condition. The accuracy of CAPM is improved by considering rotor movement during one control period especially under high-speed condition. Meanwhile, the use of the permanent magnetic flux linkage is eliminated. In order to further improve the robustness of the MPCC method, an adaptive observer based on CAPM is designed to estimate the model error. The proposed adaptive observer also eliminates the use of the permanent magnetic flux linkage, so the whole implementation process of the MPCC method with adaptive observer is independent of the permanent magnetic flux linkage. Moreover, since the adaptive observer with fixed adaptive integral gain cannot achieve satisfactory performance under different operating conditions of the motor, this paper designs a calculation method for the variable adaptive integral gains by considering the current estimation error, the amplitude of current and the angular velocity of the IPMSM. Finally, the proposed method is validated by means of the experimental results on a 20-kW test platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue focus on deep learning for image/video restoration and compression. The huge success of deep-learning–based approaches in computer vision has inspired research in learned solutions to classic image/video processing problems, such as denoising, deblurring, dehazing, deraining, super-resolution (SR), and compression. Hence, learning-based methods have emerged as a promising nonlinear signal-processing framework for image/ video restoration and compression. Recent works have shown that learned models can achieve significant performance gains, especially in terms of perceptual quality measures, over traditional methods. Hence, the state of the art in image restoration and compression is getting redefined. This special issue covers the state of the art in learned image/video restoration and compression to promote further progress in innovative architectures and training methods for effective and efficient networks for image/video restoration and compression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-powered lower exoskeletons have received considerable interests from both academia and industry over the past decades, and encountered increasing applications in human locomotion assistance and strength augmentation. One of the most important aspects in those applications is to achieve robust control of lower exoskeletons, which, in the first place, requires the proactive modeling of human movement trajectories through physical human–robot interaction (pHRI). As a powerful representative tool for motion trajectories, dynamic movement primitives (DMP) have been used to model human movement trajectories. However, canonical DMP only offers a general representation of human movement trajectory and may neglects the interactive term, therefore it cannot be directly applied to lower exoskeletons which need to track human joint trajectories online, because different pilots have different trajectories and even same pilot might change his/her motion during walking. This paper presents a novel coupled cooperative primitive (CCP) strategy, which aims at modeling the motion trajectories online. Besides maintaining canonical motion primitives, we model the interaction term between the pilot and exoskeletons through impedance models, and propose a reinforcement learning method based on policy improvement and path integrals (PI2) to learn the parameters online. Experimental results on both a single degree-of-freedom platform and a HUman-powered Augmentation Lower EXoskeleton (HUALEX) system demonstrate the advantages of our proposed CCP scheme. Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the problem of lower exoskeleton when it interacts with different pilots. In both military and industrial applications of lower exoskeleton for strength augmentation, a most challenge problem is how to deal with the pHRI caused by different pilots. This paper suggests a new learning-based strategy, which modeled the pilot’s motion with movement primitives and update through the pHRI between the pilot and the lower exoskeleton with online reinforcement learning method. In order to employ the proposed CCP into the real-time application, we also combine the CCP with a hierarchical control framework, and applied on a lower exoskeleton system which we built for strength augmentation application (which named as HUALEX). In the experiments of this paper, we validate the proposed CCP on different pilots with HUALEX system, the proposed CCP also achieve a good performance on the online learning and adaptation of the pilot’s gait. In the future, we will extend this algorithm for adapting complex environment in both industrial and military applications, such as in different terrains, stairs, and slopes scenarios, and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-phase grid-connected inverter modeling depends on the equivalent resistance and inductance between the inverter and the grid. However, these parameters are not fixed during the operation of the inverter and vary with the operating conditions. In this paper, a new globally stable adaptive controller is proposed to estimate these values online and update the controller during its operation. A model reference adaptive system (MRAS) based on two fictitious quantities with no physical significance is utilized, namely $M = v \cdot i^*$ and $N = v^* \times i$ , where $v$ and $i$ are the steady-state values of voltage and current in synchronously rotating frame of reference. Detailed stability analysis of the proposed estimation technique has been presented using a Lyapunov energy function-based approach proving the global stability of the technique. Small-signal modeling and analysis of the proposed scheme has also been presented so as to understand the local dynamics of the system. The guidelines to select the parameter of the proposed MRAS system along with updating the controller are elaborated in this paper. Detailed simulation based on MATLAB/Simulink and PLECS, along with experimental studies through a Texas Instruments TMS320F28377S microcontroller, validates the feasibility of the proposed control architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In fog-aided cellular systems, content delivery latency can be minimized by jointly optimizing edge caching and transmission strategies. In order to account for the cache capacity limitations at the edge nodes (ENs), transmission generally involves both fronthaul transfer from a cloud processor with access to the content library to the ENs and wireless delivery from the ENs to the users. In this paper, the resulting problem is studied from an information-theoretic viewpoint by making the following practically relevant assumptions: 1) the ENs have multiple antennas; 2) only uncoded fractional caching is allowed; 3) the fronthaul links are used to send fractions of contents; and 4) the ENs are constrained to use one-shot linear zero-forcing precoding on the wireless channel. Assuming off-line proactive caching and focusing on a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) latency metric, the optimal information-theoretic performance is investigated under both serial and pipelined fronthaul-edge transmission modes. The analysis characterizes the minimum high-SNR latency in terms of normalized delivery time (NDT) for worst case users’ demands. The characterization is exact for a subset of system parameters and is generally optimal within a multiplicative factor of 3/2 for the serial case and 2 for the pipelined case. The results bring insights into the optimal interplay between edge and cloud processing in fog-aided wireless networks as a function of system resources, including the number of antennas at the ENs, the ENs’ cache capacity, and the fronthaul capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a modified strategy using sparse representation to identify the authorship of online handwritten documents. The note-worthy aspect of this paper lies in the introduction of a-priori information for each dictionary atom, that in a way indicates its degree of importance with respect to the dynamic characteristics of the writer. The methodology behind obtaining this information for the dictionary atoms is based on the computation of entropy values over histograms that are generated from the sparse coefficients during the training phase. The prelearned values are incorporated on the traditional schemes of “max” and “mean” pooling of sparse codes, thereby resulting in a modified writer descriptor. Experiments performed with the proposed sparse classification strategy on the handwritten samples of the IAM and IBM-UB1 online handwriting databases demonstrate promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reliable operation of battery management systems depends critically on the accurate estimation of the state of charge (SOC) and characterizing parameters of a battery system. SOC estimation employs models that must be robust against variations in battery cell electrochemical features, aging, and operating conditions. This paper reveals that commonly used SOC estimation schemes are fundamentally flawed in providing the robustness of SOC estimation against model uncertainties. Parameter estimation methodologies and adaptive SOC estimation design are introduced in this paper to enhance SOC estimation accuracy and robustness. By a scrutiny of the impact of parameter variations on SOC estimation accuracy, the SOC–open-circuit-voltage mapping is identified to be the most critical function that must be accurately established. Identification algorithms are introduced, and their convergence properties are established. The integration of the identification algorithms and SOC estimation schemes lead to an adaptive SOC estimation framework that is superior over the existing methods in providing much improved accuracy and robustness. Experimental studies are conducted to validate the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On-road vehicle tracking is crucial for the development of automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. Most existing tracking algorithms assume that the vehicles move independently without considering the interactions between surrounding vehicles. However, in order to keep a safe distance and avoid collisions, the motion behavior of vehicles should be affected by the surrounding vehicles. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel vehicle tracking method that comprehensively considers the motion dependence interactions between vehicles. In this paper, the environment interaction models of lateral and longitudinal are constructed and incorporated into the estimation process that model the interaction behaviors in a 2-D road coordinate system. The problem of motion dependence estimation is handled by an interacting multiple model, which operates different dynamic models in parallel. Furthermore, to adapt the switching between the lateral maneuvering models, a Quasi-Bayesian recursion algorithm with adaptive transition probability is proposed. This adaptive switching strategy improves the accuracy of lateral motion behavior estimation and thus improves the tracking performance. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by simulation, and its performance is quantified by the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound. The simulation results show that the presented algorithm provides higher accuracy and reliability after considering the environment interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, adaptive quantized state estimation fusion is deeply studied. To approach the model mismatching problem induced by random quantization, some quantized Kalman filters have been presented in the previous work, such as the quantized Kalman filter with strong tracking filtering (QKF-STF), the variational Bayesian adaptive quantized Kalman filter (VB-AQKF), and a centralized fusion frame-based complex quantized filter called variational Bayesian adaptive QKF-STF (VB-AQKF-STF). Based on the previous work for the single sensor system, a distributed complex quantized filter is designed in this paper. A novel quantized Kalman filter based on multiple-method fusion scheme (QKF-MMF) is proposed. Similar to the VB-AQKF-STF, the QKF-MMF can also realize joint estimation on the state and the quantization error covariance under the distributed fusion frame. Furthermore, it extends the single sensor results to multisensor tracking systems by using centralized and distributed fusion frames. Two multisensor quantized fusion estimators are proposed for a parallel structure with main-secondary processors in the fusion center. The weighted fusion and embedded integration ways are deeply applied to design the multisensor quantized fusion methods. The proposed work can perfect the quantized estimation algorithms and provide different choices for practical engineering applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the development or deployment of discrete event simulation systems, many sudden changes in requirements emerge. To embrace the changes rapidly and reduce development costs, attaching reusable, and black-boxed components to existing systems has been regarded as one of the most effective approaches because modifications at the code level are generally costly and risky. However, since this approach requires components that are an exact fit, it may not be easy to avoid the modifications at the source code level actually. Moreover, the required components may not exist. Hence, this paper applies black-box extensibility to simulation systems in order to avoid the modifications. This paper proposes adaptive discrete event simulation systems using event control models for extending and modifying semantics through event-based simulation interface. With the proposed work, the simulation events are modulated, deleted, and generated by the event-oriented control functions in the event control model to embrace the changes of requirements. It can substitute for the modifications at the code level and extend the existing behavioral semantics. As a result, the proposed work provides a new alternative step in the development process with reusable components to avoid modifications at the source code level. The new step will lead to rapid adaptations of existing simulation systems. To support the effectiveness of this approach, this paper will describe applicable examples based on our empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we modify the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR) to model interactive unawareness of decision makers (DMs) about the options available to them in the conflict. More specifically, we consider a GMCR with two DMs, where a DM, in some given state, can be unconscious about some of his options, or about the options of his opponent, and therefore, may have only a partial knowledge of the state space. By interactive unawareness, it is meant that a DM can reason about the awareness level of the other DM and about the awareness level of the other DM regarding his or her own awareness level and so on. We generalize standard solution concepts for this model and illustrate its usefulness by means of a hypothetical war conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop robust adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode (NTSM) control methodologies to solve the position and the velocity tracking control problem of the automatic train operation (ATO) system subject to unknown parameters, model uncertainty, and external disturbances. A novel nonlinear nonsingular terminal sliding manifold is proposed by considering that its parameter is unknown, which need to be estimated via a proposed non-negative adaptive law. And a corresponding novel robust adaptive NTSM control strategy, which enables the position tracking error and the velocity tracking error of the ATO system to converge to zero, and eliminates the singularity caused by terminal sliding mode controller, is proposed. Furthermore, unknown parameters of the sliding manifold and the ATO system can be estimated online by the proposed methodology. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a bioinspired reference model based fuzzy adaptive tracking control for active suspension systems. A general bioinspired nonlinear structure, which can present ideal nonlinear quasi-zero stiffness for vibration isolation, is adopted as tracking reference model. Fuzzy logic systems are used to approximate unknown nonlinear terms in nonlinear suspension systems. Particularly, a nonlinear damping is designed to improve damping characteristics of the bioinspired reference model. With beneficial nonlinear stiffness and improved nonlinear damping of the bioinspired reference model, the proposed fuzzy adaptive controller can effectively suppress vibration of suspension systems with less actuator force and much improved ride comfort, thus energy saving performance can be achieved. Finally, a quarter-vehicle active suspension system with considering payload uncertainties, general disturbance, and actuator saturation is provided for evaluating the validity and superiority of the bioinspired nonlinear dynamics based fuzzy adaptive control approach proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we quantify the impact of uncertainty in predicted mobility information on the sensing cost of the mobile sensing problem (i.e. sensing of target areas) in vehicular sensor networks. We focus on vehicular sensor networks in which the communication channel is the bottleneck of the system, and sensing the environment is meant to be provided with a minimum load on the communication channel. First, we formulate an opportunistic scheduler, which does not utilize predicted mobility information in the sensing procedure. Then, we formulate a strategic scheduler, which utilizes predicted mobility information in the sensing procedure. After that, we propose two types of noise models that capture the uncertainty in knowing mobility information. We quantify the impact of uncertainty in knowing mobility information on the sensing cost of the strategic scheduler using an independent coverage model. We find that the strategic scheduler outperforms the noise-free opportunistic scheduler even when the strategic scheduler utilizes noisy mobility information up to a certain threshold of noise. This threshold is determined in the paper, and is referred to as the breaking point of the strategic scheduler. Simulation results of the breaking point closely matches our analysis, which demonstrates the correctness of the used analysis methodology. Finally, we use an estimation model for the mobility information between two points on the road, and we propose an algorithm to keep the scheduling scheme below the breaking point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to calibrate the tri-axis magnetometer errors, an attitude-independent calibration method based on adaptive filtering is proposed. This method can estimate all the error parameters precisely without the need of external equipment to provide stable magnetic field and reference attitude information. In this paper, incremental meta-learning Incremental Delta-Bar-Delta (IDBD) algorithm is applied to adaptive filtering to achieve magnetometer calibration instead of the traditional least squares (LS) algorithm. The results of this calibration method will be compared with the classical calibration method in the earth’s magnetic field as well. The experiments show that the sensor error after calibration by the proposed method is significantly suppressed and reduced by more than 93 % compared with that before calibration and the calibration effect of IDBD algorithm is much better than that of LS algorithm. The proposed method in this paper can not only effectively improves the measurement accuracy of the tri-axis fluxgate sensor, but also is potentially applicable to various kinds of three-axis sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates an adaptive fault-tolerant pseudo-proportional-integral-derivative sliding-mode control (pseudo-PID-SMC) scheme for a high-speed train (HST) subject to actuator faults, asymmetric nonlinear actuator saturation (ANAS), and integral quadratic constraints (IQCs). It is worth mentioning that a pseudo-PID-SMC surface is proposed in this paper and the scheme based on this surface does not require acceleration measurement. An adaptive saturation compensation system that makes no assumption, as in existing works where nonlinear functions are used to describe the unsaturated region of ANAS as known and strictly monotonous, is developed to attenuate the adverse effects of ANAS. For the saturation-free and ANAS cases, two adaptive fault-tolerant pseudo-PID-SMC schemes with no chattering, a simple structure, and inexpensive computation are developed to guarantee the exponential convergence of all signals in the closed-loop systems. Finally, simulation results based on a real train dynamic model are presented to show the proposed schemes’ effectiveness and feasibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the problem of control is investigated for cancer-tumor-immune systems, based on a two-dimension uncertain nonlinear model describing the interaction between immune and cancer cells in a body. First, the control problem is transformed into a state tracking problem. Second, an adaptive control method is proposed to track and stop the growth of cancer and maintain cancer and immune cells at an acceptable level. Different from the existing results in literature, the singularity problem in controller and the inaccuracy in control design have been overcome. From theoretical analysis, it is shown that the resulting closed-loop system is asymptotically stable and the tracking errors converge to the origin. Finally, simulation results illustrate not only the competitive relationship between immune system and tumor, but also the immune system has strong immunity to low level tumor volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most researchers focus on designing accurate crowd counting models with heavy parameters and computations but ignore the resource burden during the model deployment. A real-world scenario demands an efficient counting model with low-latency and high-performance. Knowledge distillation provides an elegant way to transfer knowledge from a complicated teacher model to a compact student model while maintaining accuracy. However, the student model receives the wrong guidance with the supervision of the teacher model due to the inaccurate information understood by the teacher in some cases. In this paper, we propose a dual-knowledge distillation (DKD) framework, which aims to reduce the side effects of the teacher model and transfer hierarchical knowledge to obtain a more efficient counting model. First, the student model is initialized with global information transferred by the teacher model via adaptive perspectives. Then, the self-knowledge distillation forces the student model to learn the knowledge by itself, based on intermediate feature maps and target map. Specifically, the optimal transport distance is utilized to measure the difference of feature maps between the teacher and the student to perform the distribution alignment of the counting area. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, demonstrating the superiority of DKD. When there are only approximately 6% of the parameters and computations from the original models, the student model achieves a faster and more accurate counting performance as the teacher model even surpasses it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolving fuzzy systems (EFSs) are now well developed and widely used, thanks to their ability to self-adapt both their structures and parameters online. Since the concept was first introduced two decades ago, many different types of EFSs have been successfully implemented. However, there are only very few works considering the stability of the EFSs, and these studies were limited to certain types of membership functions with specifically predefined parameters, which largely increases the complexity of the learning process. At the same time, stability analysis is of paramount importance for control applications and provides the theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the learning algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the stability proof of a class of EFSs based on data clouds, which are grounded at the AnYa type fuzzy systems and the recently introduced empirical data analytics (EDA) methodological framework. By employing data clouds, the class of EFSs of AnYa type considered in this paper avoids the traditional way of defining membership functions for each input variable in an explicit manner and its learning process is entirely data driven. The stability of the considered EFS of AnYa type is proven through the Lyapunov theory, and the proof of stability shows that the average identification error converges to a small neighborhood of zero. Although, the stability proof presented in this paper is specially elaborated for the considered EFS, it is also applicable to general EFSs. The proposed method is illustrated with Box–Jenkins gas furnace problem, one nonlinear system identification problem, Mackey–Glass time series prediction problem, eight real-world benchmark regression problems as well as a high-frequency trading prediction problem. Compared with other EFSs, the numerical examples show that the considered EFS in this paper provides guaranteed stability as well as a better approximation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a sampled data-based modeling approach for complex network systems. A compression method, known as characteristic modeling, is used to construct microscopic models from macroscopic observations. Based on this model, a novel control method is also developed to achieve network synchronization. The proposed approach can reduce both the complexity of microscopic dynamics and overall networks. Its application to pinning control design validates the effectiveness of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this two-paper series describes the incorporation of demand response (DR) and energy storage systems (ESSs) in the joint distribution and generation expansion planning for isolated systems. The role of DR and ESS has recently attracted an increasing interest in power systems. However, previous models have not been completely adapted in order to treat DR and ESS on an equal footing. The model presented includes DR and ESS in the planning of insular distribution systems. Hence, this paper presents a novel model to decide the joint expansion planning of distributed generation and the distribution network considering the impact of ESS and price-dependent DR programs. The problem is formulated as a stochastic-programming-based model driven by the maximization of the net social benefit. The associated deterministic equivalent is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program suitable for commercially available software. The outcomes of the model are the location and size of new generation and storage units and the distribution assets to be installed, reinforced or replaced. In the second companion paper, an insular case study (La Graciosa, Canary Islands, Spain) is provided illustrating the effects of DR and ESS on social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Effective transient power grid simulators are needed during design processes because a designed power grid needs to be numerously analyzed. This paper builds an efficient and reliable incremental power grid transient simulator, which we name it InTraSim, by integrating macro modeling techniques, sparse recovery mechanisms, an innovated pseudo-node value estimation method, and an initiated adaptive error control scheme. InTraSim is able to deal with not only element-value alterations of designs but also topology modifications of designs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]