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This paper aims to estimate contact location from sparse and high-dimensional soft tactile array sensor data using the tactile image. The authors used three feature extraction methods: handcrafted features, convolutional features and autoencoder features. Subsequently, these features were mapped to contact locations through a contact location regression network. Finally, the network performance was evaluated using spherical fittings of three different radii to further determine the optimal feature extraction method.

This paper aims to estimate contact location from sparse and high-dimensional soft tactile array sensor data using the tactile image.

This research indicates that data collected by probes can be used for contact localization. Introducing a batch normalization layer after the feature extraction stage significantly enhances the model’s generalization performance. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, the authors conclude that convolutional methods can more accurately estimate contact locations.

The paper provides both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the performance of three contact localization methods across different datasets. To address the challenge of obtaining accurate contact locations in quantitative analysis, an indirect measurement metric is proposed.

This study aims to characterize the mechanical properties of sintered nano-silver under various sintering processes by nano-indentation tests.

Through microstructure observations and characterization, the influences of sintering process on the microstructure evolutions of sintered nano-silver were presented. And, the indentation load, indentation displacement curves of sintered silver under various sintering processes were measured by using nano-indentation test. Based on the nano-indentation test, a reverse analysis of the finite element calculation was used to determine the yielding stress and hardening exponent.

The porosity decreases with the increase of the sintering temperature, while the average particle size of sintered nano-silver increases with the increase of sintering temperature and sintering time. In addition, the porosity reduced from 34.88%, 30.52%, to 25.04% if the ramp rate was decreased from 25°C/min, 15°C/min, to 5°C/min, respectively. The particle size appears more frequently within 1 µm and 2 µm under the lower ramp rate. With reverse analysis, the strain hardening exponent gradually heightened with the increase of temperature, while the yielding stress value decreased significantly with the increase of temperature. When the sintering time increased, the strain hardening exponent increased slightly.

The mechanical properties of sintered nano-silver under different sintering processes are clearly understood.

This paper could provide a novel perspective on understanding the sintering process effects on the mechanical properties of sintered nano-silver.

This study aims to achieve superior localization and mapping performance in point cloud degradation scenarios through the effective removal of dynamic obstacles. With the continuous development of various technologies for autonomous vehicles, the LIDAR-based Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system is becoming increasingly important. However, in SLAM systems, effectively addressing the challenges of point cloud degradation scenarios is essential for accurate localization and mapping, with dynamic obstacle removal being a key component.

This paper proposes a method that combines adaptive feature extraction and loop closure detection algorithms to address this challenge. In the SLAM system, the ground point cloud and non-ground point cloud are separated to reduce the impact of noise. And based on the cylindrical projection image of the point cloud, the intensity features are adaptively extracted, the degradation direction is determined by the degradation factor and the intensity features are matched with the map to correct the degraded pose. Moreover, through the difference in raster distribution of the point clouds before and after two frames in the loop process, the dynamic point clouds are identified and removed, and the map is updated.

Experimental results show that the method has good performance. The absolute displacement accuracy of the laser odometer is improved by 27.1%, the relative displacement accuracy is improved by 33.5% and the relative angle accuracy is improved by 23.8% after using the adaptive intensity feature extraction method. The position error is reduced by 30% after removing the dynamic target.

Compared with LiDAR odometry and mapping algorithm, the method has greater robustness and accuracy in mapping and localization.

Surveys in Europe show that immigration is more of a challenge than an opportunity for a significant number of people. However, little attention is given to attitudes toward immigration in the Middle East. This paper examines the effects of personal values and religiosity on the anti-immigration attitudes of citizens in the Middle East and North African countries.

Utilizing data from the World Values Survey, we analyze how personal values and religiosity affect anti-immigration attitudes in nine Middle Eastern countries. The data covers individual-level data of 9 MENA countries from the WVS Round 7 (2017–2022). Factor analysis is applied as a data reduction method. Afterward, an OLS regression analysis is conducted on the pooled data.

Anti-immigration attitudes increase with age, education, and religiosity. Personal values such as national pride, support for nationals, and belongingness to one’s country significantly affect anti-immigration attitudes. Furthermore, the importance of religion as a measure of religiosity was found to be positively associated with anti-immigration attitudes.

This paper contributes to underexplored literature by investigating how individual-level determinants, such as demographic indicators, personal values, and religious factors, shape anti-immigration attitudes in the MENA context, distinct from European dynamics.

The objective of this paper is to further the understanding of netnography as a research method for supply chain academics. Netnography is a method for gathering and gaining insight from industry-specific online communities. We prescribe that viewing netnography through the lens of the supply chain will permit researchers to explore, discover, understand, describe or report concepts or phenomena that have previously been studied via survey research or quantitative modeling.

To introduce netnography to supply chain research, we propose a framework to guide how netnography can be adopted and used. Definitions and directions are provided, highlighting some of the practices within netnographic research.

Netnography provides the researcher with another avenue to pursue answers to research questions, either alone or in conjunction with the dominant methods of survey research and quantitative modeling. It provides another tool in the researchers’ toolbox to engage practitioners in the field.

The development of netnography as a research method is associated with Robert Kozinets. He developed the method to study online communities in consumer behavior. We justify why this method can be applied to supply chain research, how to collect data and provide research examples of its use. This technique has room to grow as a supply chain research method.

Most previous studies predicting review helpfulness ignored the significance of deep features embedded in review text and instead relied on hand-crafted features. Hand-crafted and deep features have the advantages of high interpretability and predictive accuracy. This study aims to propose a novel review helpfulness prediction model that uses deep learning (DL) techniques to consider the complementarity between hand-crafted and deep features.

First, an advanced convolutional neural network was applied to extract deep features from unstructured review text. Second, this study used previous studies to extract hand-crafted features that impact the helpfulness of reviews and enhance their interpretability. Third, this study incorporated deep and hand-crafted features into a review helpfulness prediction model and evaluated its performance using the Yelp.com data set. To measure the performance of the proposed model, this study used 2,417,796 restaurant reviews.

Extensive experiments confirmed that the proposed methodology performs better than traditional machine learning methods. Moreover, this study confirms through an empirical analysis that combining hand-crafted and deep features demonstrates better prediction performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to apply DL techniques and use structured and unstructured data to predict review helpfulness in the restaurant context. In addition, an advanced feature-fusion method was adopted to better use the extracted feature information and identify the complementarity between features.

大多数先前预测评论有用性的研究忽视了嵌入在评论文本中的深层特征的重要性, 而主要依赖手工制作的特征。手工制作和深层特征具有高解释性和预测准确性的优势。本研究提出了一种新颖的评论有用性预测模型, 利用深度学习技术来考虑手工制作特征和深层特征之间的互补性。

首先, 采用先进的卷积神经网络从非结构化的评论文本中提取深层特征。其次, 本研究利用先前研究中提取的手工制作特征, 这些特征影响了评论的有用性并增强了其解释性。第三, 本研究将深层特征和手工制作特征结合到一个评论有用性预测模型中, 并使用Yelp.com数据集对其性能进行评估。为了衡量所提出模型的性能, 本研究使用了2,417,796条餐厅评论。

广泛的实验验证了所提出的方法优于传统的机器学习方法。此外, 通过实证分析, 本研究证实了结合手工制作和深层特征可以展现出更好的预测性能。

据我们所知, 这是首个在餐厅评论预测中应用深度学习技术, 并结合了结构化和非结构化数据来预测评论有用性的研究之一。此外, 本研究采用了先进的特征融合方法, 更好地利用了提取的特征信息, 并识别了特征之间的互补性。

Bearings play a critical role in the reliable operation of induction machines, and their failure can lead to significant operational challenges and downtime. Detecting and diagnosing these defects is imperative to ensure the longevity of induction machines and preventing costly downtime. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel approach for diagnosis of bearing faults in induction machine.

To identify the different fault states of the bearing with accurately and efficiently in this paper, the original bearing vibration signal is first decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using variational mode decomposition (VMD). The IMFs that contain more noise information are selected using the Pearson correlation coefficient. Subsequently, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used to filter the noisy IMFs. Second, the composite multiscale weighted permutation entropy (CMWPE) of each component is calculated to form the features vector. Finally, the features vector is reduced using the locality-sensitive discriminant analysis algorithm, to be fed into the support vector machine model for training and classification.

The obtained results showed the ability of the VMD_DWT algorithm to reduce the noise of raw vibration signals. It also demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively extract different fault features from vibration signals.

This study suggested a new VMD_DWT method to reduce the noise of the bearing vibration signal. The proposed approach for bearing fault diagnosis of induction machine based on VMD-DWT and CMWPE is highly effective. Its effectiveness has been verified using experimental data.

Time of flight (ToF) imaging is a promising emerging technology for the purposes of crop identification. This paper aim to presents localization system for identifying and localizing asparagus in the field based on point clouds from ToF imaging. Since the semantics are not included in the point cloud, it contains the geometric information of other objects such as stones and weeds other than asparagus spears. An approach is required for extracting the spear information so that a robotic system can be used for harvesting.

A real-time convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method is used for filtering the point cloud generated by a ToF camera, allowing subsequent processing methods to operate over smaller and more information-dense data sets, resulting in reduced processing time. The segmented point cloud can then be split into clusters of points representing each individual spear. Geometric filters are developed to eliminate the non-asparagus points in each cluster so that each spear can be modelled and localized. The spear information can then be used for harvesting decisions.

The localization system is integrated into a robotic harvesting prototype system. Several field trials have been conducted with satisfactory performance. The identification of a spear from the point cloud is the key to successful localization. Segmentation and clustering points into individual spears are two major failures for future improvements.

Most crop localizations in agricultural robotic applications using ToF imaging technology are implemented in a very controlled environment, such as a greenhouse. The target crop and the robotic system are stationary during the localization process. The novel proposed method for asparagus localization has been tested in outdoor farms and integrated with a robotic harvesting platform. Asparagus detection and localization are achieved in real time on a continuously moving robotic platform in a cluttered and unstructured environment.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new velocity prediction navigation algorithm to develop a conflict-free path for robots in dynamic crowded environments. The algorithm BP-prediction and reciprocal velocity obstacle (PRVO) combines the BP neural network for velocity PRVO to accomplish dynamic collision avoidance.

This presented method exhibits innovation by anticipating ahead velocities using BP neural networks to reconstruct the velocity obstacle region; determining the optimized velocity corresponding to the robot’s scalable radius range from the error generated by the non-holonomic robot tracking the desired trajectory; and considering acceleration constraints, determining the set of multi-step reachable velocities of non-holonomic robot in the space of velocity variations.

The method is validated using three commonly used metrics of collision rate, travel time and average distance in a comparison between simulation experiments including multiple differential drive robots and physical experiments using the Turtkebot3 robot. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other RVO extension methods on the three metrics.

In this paper, the authors propose navigation algorithms capable of adaptively selecting the optimal speed for a multi-robot system to avoid robot collisions during dynamic crowded interactions.

The circular economy (CE) promotes the recovery of value from waste while also working towards achieving long-term environmentally sustainable goals. The goal of this research is to explore the challenges, opportunities, future scope and green practices that small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) face as they move from the linear economy to the CE.

Based on a structured questionnaire, a survey was conducted with representatives from 163 SMEs in India. The data were analysed using co-variance based structural equation modelling technique.

This research identifies various challenges, including consumer acceptability, worries about awareness, recyclability issues, financial constraints and the absence of a defined management plan for SMEs in adopting the CE. Further, strong management will, innovation, technical up-gradation, training of employees, employee motivation and appropriate guidelines are recognized as essential possibilities for CE implementation.

While there has been some work on CE, no studies have directly compared these efforts with the goal of shifting from a linear economy to a CE. Given the transient nature of many archives, it is critical that the efforts put into them and the opinions of those who work in them be recorded so that communities can benefit from a shared linear economy in making decisions about their own history.