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Single‐unit (SU) recording in nonhuman primates (NHPs) is indispensible in the quest of how the brain works, yet electrodes currently used for the NHP brain are limited in signal longevity, stability, and spatial coverage. Using new structural materials, microfabrication, and penetration techniques, we develop a mechanically robust ultraflexible, 1 µm thin electrode array (MERF) that enables pial penetration and high‐density, large‐scale, and chronic recording of neurons along both vertical and horizontal cortical axes in the nonhuman primate brain. Recording from three monkeys yields 2,913 SUs from 1,065 functional recording channels (up to 240 days), with some SUs tracked for up to 2 months. Recording from the primary visual cortex (V1) reveals that neurons with similar orientation preferences for visual stimuli exhibited higher spike correlation. Furthermore, simultaneously recorded neurons in different cortical layers of the primary motor cortex (M1) show preferential firing for hand movements of different directions. Finally, it is shown that a linear decoder trained with neuronal spiking activity across M1 layers during monkey's hand movements can be used to achieve on‐line control of cursor movement. Thus, the MERF electrode array offers a new tool for basic neuroscience studies and brain–machine interface (BMI) applications in the primate brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous polarimetric radars can measure the polarization scattering matrix (PSM) of moving targets within one pulse. The key point is the orthogonal waveform design to reduce the interference caused by the simultaneous transmission and reception. Meanwhile, to ensure the measurement accuracy of moving targets, the Doppler tolerance of the transmitted waveforms is also important. In this article, first, a matched filter (MF) at the receiver is considered and a unified framework with a newly proposed objective function to design Doppler resilient sequences under several constraints is described. The proposed objective function contains the widely used peak sidelobe level (PSL) and the integrated sidelobe level (ISL) as special cases. Meanwhile, a series of constraint conditions, including the unimodular constraint, the uncertainty modulus constraint, and the PAR constraint, is considered. Thereafter, a mismatched filter is considered for further improving the correlation properties and a similar framework for designing the optimal receiving filter at the expense of a controllable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss is proposed. Numerical results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed methods. The designed sequence pair is also implemented on a fully polarimetric system to measure the PSM of a canonical target in the anechoic chamber, and the effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by using the simultaneous polarimetric radar. It is predicted that the framework has the potential to be applied for other multichannel systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency interference (RFI) has become a growing concern for weather radar, distorting radar variable estimation. By simultaneously or alternately transmitting the horizontal and vertical polarized waves, polarimetric weather radar can be referred to as SHV radar or AHV radar. The SHV radar can mimic the AHV radar by discarding either H- or V-channel measurements, which leads to an alternating scheme. In this research, the real RFI measurements from an operational C-band SHV radar are used to characterize the RFI temporal, spectral, and polarimetric features. Then, the RFI is simulated to quantify the performance of the object-orientated spectral polarimetric (OBSPol) filter in RFI mitigation. The OBSPol filter has been previously proposed by the authors to mitigate the narrowband clutter (both stationary and moving) and noise. This work extends the application of the filter to remove the RFI for SHV radar. Specifically, by taking advantage of the low copolar correlation of the RFI signal measured in AHV radar, the RFI mitigation method is designed, and its effectiveness is proven by qualitative and quantitative analyses. In particular, in the case of RFI overlapped to weather echoes in the time domain, the RFI can be mitigated, also when the duty cycle of the RFI is high. However, this work does not provide a full evaluation of the RFI mitigation performance on all radar data outputs but a proof of concept to show the effectiveness of the proposed filter for RFI mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High cross-polarization isolation (CPI) is crucial to the accurate polarization measurement using polarimetric phased array radar (PPAR). In this article, we propose an adaptive direction-dependent polarization state configuration (AD2PSC) method to improve the polarization isolation. Compared with the conventional fixed polarization state of radiated wave whether it is linear, circular, or elliptical polarization state, our AD2PSC approach configures the polarization state on basis of beam steering. To achieve the adaptive configuration of magnitude and phase of the dual-polarization antenna, an improved steepest descent algorithm is put forward. To facilitate the uniform representation for the polarization measurement application of PPAR, the universal expressions of intrinsic and measured backscatter matrices are derived for arbitrary polarization state. The dual-polarization dipole array is used to assess the priority of our proposed method. Compared with the conventional approaches, our approach could obtain higher CPI while being available for a larger scanning range. The configured CPI meets the specific polarization requirement for PPAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new control method for modular multilevel converter (MMC), which is based on a modification of the conventional nearest level control (NLC) scheme implemented by a model predictive control (MPC) technique. Applying the proposed method, the simplicity of the NLC is maintained while the current control ability in terms of both phase current and circulating current is enhanced by the MPC technique. A proper rounding function is used for each arm of the MMC instead of the conventional nearest integer function. The rounding function is determined by evaluating a cost function within the frame of MPC. To validate the proposed technique, a three-phase MMC prototype is employed. The conventional NLC-based control approach of MMC is also evaluated for comparative purposes. Results show that the proposed method exhibits excellent current-regulating ability. Compared with the conventional control scheme, the overall performance is improved without significantly increasing the computational burden or adding relevant complexity to the control system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weather radar is well recognized as an effective sensor for obtaining the microphysical and dynamical properties of precipitation at high spatial and temporal resolution. Radar calibration is one of the most important prerequisites for achieving accurate observations. In this article, a portable, cost-effective and repeatable radar calibration technique, namely, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided radar calibration, is proposed. A UAV serves as the stable aerial platform carrying a metal sphere, flying over the radar illumination areas to complete the calibration process. The flying routine of the UAV can be pre-programmed, and thus, the antenna pattern regarding different elevation and azimuth angles can be retrieved. To obtain the position of the sphere, the real-time single-frequency precise point positioning-type global navigation satellite system solution is developed. In addition, the radar constant is calculated in the range-Doppler domain, and only the data where the metal sphere separates from clutter and other objects are selected. The S-band polarimetric Doppler transportable atmospheric radar (TARA) is used in the calibration campaign. The experiments demonstrate the following results: 1) antenna pointing calibration can be completed and 2) antenna pattern can be retrieved and weather radar constant can be accurately calculated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at removing stationary and moving clutter while retaining precipitation for dual-polarization weather radar, a new clutter suppression method, named the object-orientated spectral polarimetric (OBSpol) filter, is put forward in this paper. Based on the spectral polarimetric feature and the range-Doppler continuity of precipitation, the OBSpol filter generates a filtering mask implemented on the raw range-Doppler spectrogram to mitigate the clutter and noise. The procedures are as follows. After the spectral polarimetric filtering and the mathematical morphology method, one binary mask where “1” indicates the precipitation is obtained. Then, the contiguous bins of the same value “1” in the range-Doppler domain are grouped in areas termed as objects. Whether the produced objects are precipitation or not will be further judged based on appropriate weather radar observable. Thus, combining all the filtered separate objects, a filtering mask can be obtained. In this paper, data collected by the polarimetric Doppler IRCTR drizzle radar are used to demonstrate and assess the performance of the proposed technique in the case of ground clutter, narrowband moving clutter, and noise. Two precipitation cases are examined: 1) moderate precipitation with large scale and 2) light precipitation with severe clutter contamination. In the range-Doppler spectrogram, both stationary and narrowband moving clutters are mitigated, while maintaining nonoverlapping precipitation signal. This helps to solve the problem when clutter and precipitation overlap in the time domain. In addition, the OBSpol filter is proven to be effective with different Doppler velocity resolutions. This technique can be applied in real-time due to its low computation complexity. Moreover, the spectral polarimetric filtering can be designed using the measurements of dual-polarization radar systems which do not have cross-polar measurements. Hence, the proposed clutter mitigation technique can be implemented for operational dual-polarization weather radar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel algorithm is put forward to separate radar target and moving clutter based on a combination of the low-rank matrix optimization (LRMO) and the decision tree. Similar to the moving object detection in the field of automated video analysis, the proposed separation method, which is carried out in the range-Doppler domain, makes use of different motion variations of radar target and clutter in the spectrogram sequence. The technique is very general, but the focus of this paper is on narrowband moving clutter suppression in a weather radar. The first step in implementing this method is the generation of a range-Doppler spectrogram sequence. Then, the LRMO is applied to the obtained sequence to divide target and moving clutter into foreground and background. From the foreground sequence which is obtained by solving the LRMO, foreground frequency and spectral width are combined in a decision tree to obtain a filtering mask to mitigate the narrowband moving clutter and noise. Data collected by a polarimetric Doppler weather radar known as the IRCTR Drizzle Radar are used to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, its effectiveness in removing narrowband moving clutter is quantitatively assessed through comparisons with another clutter mitigation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new clutter suppression method, named the moving double spectral linear depolarization ratio (MDsLDR) filter, is put forward to mitigate narrow-band clutter in weather radars. The narrow-band clutter observed in the Doppler domain includes: 1) stationary clutter such as ground clutter and 2) nonstationary clutter such as artifacts caused by the radar system itself or external sources. These artifacts are difficult to remove, because they are not confined to specific azimuth and range bins. Based on the difference of the spectral-polarization feature and the spectral continuity of precipitation and clutter, the MDsLDR filter can remove ground clutter, artifacts, and noise. The performance of the newly proposed filter is assessed by data collected by the Doppler-polarimetric IRCTR Drizzle Radar. Three precipitation cases are considered in this paper: moderate/light precipitation, convective precipitation with hook-echo signature, and light precipitation with severe artifact contamination. Furthermore, the implementation of the MDsDLR filter requires relatively low computation complexity, so that the MDsLDR filter can be operated in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• A novel passive knee exoskeleton with inclusivity in uncertainties • Propose a method for analysis human-exoskeleton with uncertainties • Propose an indicator to quantify the exoskeletons' motion transmission smoothness • Smoothness indicator consider only configuration variables It is suggested that exoskeletons may present challenges in terms of wearability due to unexpected human-machine interaction forces, usually caused by wearing uncertainties such as wearing slips, geometric differences in individual knees, and variable-axis knee movements. Additionally, the forces caused by drastic changes in velocity during exoskeleton locomotion may also be a contributing factor. To address these issues, this paper introduces a new passive knee exoskeleton and its human-machine wearing parallel (HMWP) research prototype to compensate and accommodate these uncertainties. Subsequently, a response interval analysis method based on Chebyshev functions is proposed to investigate the effect of uncertainties on the HMWP system's kinematic performance. In order to enhance the motion transmission smoothness, a new kinematic performance evaluation indicator is proposed, which considers solely the exoskeleton-configuration parameters. The response interval analysis method and new indicator are applied together in kinematic dimensional synthesis, resulting in significant improvements in the exoskeleton's kinematic performance. Furthermore, a parameter sensitivity analysis is conducted to facilitate more effective improvements to the exoskeleton's comfort. This research can also be used to improve the wearability of other wearable devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary How primates perceive objects along with their detailed features remains a mystery. This ability to make fine visual discriminations depends upon a high-acuity analysis of spatial frequency (SF) along the visual hierarchy from V1 to inferotemporal cortex. By studying the transformation of SF across macaque parafoveal V1, V2, and V4, we discovered SF-selective functional domains in V4 encoding higher SFs up to 12 cycles/°. These intermittent higher-SF-selective domains, surrounded by domains encoding lower SFs, violate the inverse relationship between SF preference and retinal eccentricity. The neural activities of higher- and lower-SF domains correspond to local and global features, respectively, of the same stimuli. Neural response latencies in high-SF domains are around 10 ms later than in low-SF domains, consistent with the coarse-to-fine nature of perception. Thus, our finding of preserved resolution from V1 into V4, separated both spatially and temporally, may serve as a connecting link for detailed object representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar micro-Doppler (m-D) signature, which reflects the micromotion dynamic and structural characteristics of radar target with micromotion, has received increasing attention. Most of the existing m-D signature-extraction methods operate in the time domain or the time-frequency domain. Different from these methods, in this paper, an m-D period estimation approach that operates in the ambiguity domain is proposed. Although the ambiguity function (AF) has been widely used in the field of radar signal processing, its application for m-D signal is introduced for the first time. It is proved that the AF of m-D signal exhibits periodicity along the lag axis and has the best concentration when the lag equals to multiples of the m-D period. Based on this, three AF concentration statistics are employed to capture the periodicity and to provide the m-D estimate. The most important property of the AF concentration statistics is that they are (or approximately) invariant to polynomial translations with terms not larger than second order even if the signal is Doppler ambiguous. Numeric simulation and real radar experiments are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primates need to detect and recognize camouflaged animals in natural environments. Camouflage-breaking movements are often the only visual cue available to accomplish this. Specifically, sudden movements are often detected before full recognition of the camouflaged animal is made, suggesting that initial processing of motion precedes the recognition of motion-defined contours or shapes. What are the neuronal mechanisms underlying this initial processing of camouflaged motion in the primate visual brain? We investigated this question using intrinsic-signal optical imaging of macaque V1, V2 and V4, along with computer simulations of the neural population responses. We found that camouflaged motion at low speed was processed as a direction signal by both direction- and orientation-selective neurons, whereas at high-speed camouflaged motion was encoded as a motion-streak signal primarily by orientation-selective neurons. No population responses were found to be invariant to the camouflage contours. These results suggest that the initial processing of camouflaged motion at low and high speeds is encoded as direction and motion-streak signals in primate early visual cortices. These processes are consistent with a spatio-temporal filter mechanism that provides for fast processing of motion signals, prior to full recognition of camouflage-breaking animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual scenes can be readily decomposed into a variety of oriented components, the processing of which is vital for object segregation and recognition. In primate V1 and V2, most neurons have small spatio-temporal receptive fields responding selectively to oriented luminance contours (first order), while only a subgroup of neurons signal non-luminance defined contours (second order). So how is the orientation of second-order contours represented at the population level in macaque V1 and V2? Here we compared the population responses in macaque V1 and V2 to two types of second-order contour stimuli generated either by modulation of contrast or phase reversal with those to first-order contour stimuli. Using intrinsic signal optical imaging, we found that the orientation of second-order contour stimuli was represented invariantly in the orientation columns of both macaque V1 and V2. A physiologically constrained spatio-temporal energy model of V1 and V2 neuronal populations could reproduce all the recorded population responses. These findings suggest that, at the population level, the primate early visual system processes the orientation of second-order contours initially through a linear spatio-temporal filter mechanism. Our results of population responses to different second-order contour stimuli support the idea that the orientation maps in primate V1 and V2 can be described as a spatial-temporal energy map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modular converters such as the multilevel cascaded H-bridge (CHB) are an attractive option for multiple applications mainly because of inherent modularity and fault-tolerant operation. This article is focused on the CHB converter operating with unbalanced conditions (different dc voltages and/or modulation indexes). Under these circumstances, applying the conventional control and modulation strategies, the output voltage harmonic spectrum is degraded. In this article, a generalized variable-angle phase-shifted pulsewidth modulation (PS-PWM) technique for CHB converters with a large number of power modules (> 3) is presented. The method considers all possible cells’ combinations to form groups and assigns the role of each cell in the group. This cell role defines the identifier of the cell in the variable-angle PS-PWM technique. In the steady state, in each group of cells, the harmonic distortion of the CHB output voltage located at twice the carrier frequency ƒc is eliminated, while the distortion at 4ƒc is also diminished. Experimental results show how the proposed technique achieves superior harmonic performance without introducing any significant disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of color is an internal label for the inferred spectral reflectance of visible surfaces. To study how spectral representation is transformed through modular subsystems of successive cortical areas, we undertook simultaneous optical imaging of intrinsic signals in macaque V1, V2, and V4, supplemented by higher-resolution electrophysiology and two-photon imaging in awake macaques. We find a progressive evolution in the scale and precision of chromotopic maps, expressed by a uniform blob-like architecture of hue responses within each area. Two-photon imaging reveals enhanced hue-specific cell clustering in V2 compared with V1. A phenomenon of endspectral (red and blue) responses that is clear in V1, recedes in V2, and is virtually absent in V4. The increase in mid- and extra-spectral hue representations through V2 and V4 reflects the nature of hierarchical processing as higher areas read out locations in chromatic space from progressive integration of signals relayed by V1. • Color-response blobs comprise a uniform architecture across V1, V2, and V4 • Blobs evolve progressively in spatial scale and separation of hue representation • Two-photon imaging shows greater hue-specific cell clustering in V2 than in V1 • Chromotopic organization achieves greater spectral uniformity from V1 to V2 to V4 How does our visual brain generate perceptual color space? Liu et al. find that within a uniform blob-like architecture of hue responses, chromotopic maps develop progressively in scale and precision along the visual hierarchy of macaque V1, V2, and V4. Such hierarchical refinement improves spectral uniformity, better reflecting color perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]