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The purpose of this paper is to consider the leader-following formation control problem for nonholonomic vehicles based on a novel biologically inspired neurodynamics approach.

The interactions among the networked multi-vehicle system is modeled by an undirected graph. First, a distributed estimation law is proposed for each follower vehicle to estimate the state including the position, orientation and linear velocity of the leader. Then, a distributed formation tracking control law is designed based on the estimated state of the leader, where a bio-inspired neural dynamic is introduced to solve the impractical velocity jumps problem. Explicit stability and convergence analyses are presented using Lyapunov tools.

The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control law are demonstrated by numerical simulations and physical vehicle experiments. Consequently, the proposed protocol can successfully achieve the desired formation under connected topologies while tracking the trajectory generated by the leader.

This paper proposes a neurodynamics-based leader–follower formation tracking algorithm for multiple nonholonomic vehicles.

This paper aims to investigate the distributed formation control problem for a multi-quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle system without linear velocity feedbacks.

A nonlinear controller is proposed based on the orthogonal group SE(3) to obviate singularities and ambiguities of the traditional parameterized attitude representations. A cascade structure is applied in the distributed controller design. The inner loop is responsible for attitude control, and the outer loop is responsible for translational dynamics. To ensure a linear-velocity-free characteristic, some auxiliary variables are introduced to construct virtual signals in distributed controller design. The stability analysis of the proposed distributed control method by the Lyapunov function is provided as well.

A group of four quadrotors with constant reference linear velocity and a group of six quadrotors with varying reference linear velocity are adopted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

This is a new innovation for multi-robot formation control method to improve assembly automation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an improved compressive sensing algorithm for solder joint imagery compressing and recovery. The improved algorithm can improve the performance in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of solder joint imagery recovery.

Unlike the traditional method, at first, the image was transformed into a sparse signal by discrete cosine transform; then the solder joint image was divided into blocks, and each image block was transformed into a one-dimensional data vector. At last, a block compressive sampling matching pursuit was proposed, and the proposed algorithm with different block sizes was used in recovering the solder joint imagery.

The experiments showed that the proposed algorithm could achieve the best results on PSNR when compared to other methods such as the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm, greedy basis pursuit algorithm, subspace pursuit algorithm and compressive sampling matching pursuit algorithm. When the block size was 16 × 16, the proposed algorithm could obtain better results than when the block size was 8 × 8 and 4 × 4.

The paper provides a methodology for solder joint imagery compressing and recovery, and the proposed algorithm can also be used in other image compressing and recovery applications.

According to the compressed sensing (CS) theory, a sparse or compressible signal can be represented by a fewer number of bases than those required by the Nyquist theorem. The findings provide fundamental guidelines to improve performance in image compressing and recovery based on compressive sensing.

This paper aims to develop a new real‐time effective method for solving the inverse kinematics (IK) problem, especially for those manipulators with high‐dimensional nonlinear kinematic equations.

The paper transforms the IKs problem into a minimization problem. Then, a novel meta‐heuristic algorithm, called the electromagnetism‐like method (EM), is used to solve this equivalent problem. Moreover, in order to further improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of EM, a hybrid method which combines EM with the Davidon‐Fletcher‐Powell (DFP) method is proposed.

The results showed that EM is a powerful yet easy algorithm for solving the IKs problem of robot manipulators. Its complexity is independent on the characteristics of the kinematic equations involving dimensionality and the degree of nonlinearity. Moreover, EM can be used as an accompanying algorithm for DFP method to get better precision at a lower iteration number.

The method developed in this paper is a generalized approach that is efficient enough to obtain IK solutions independent of robot geometry and the number of degrees of freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to present the radial basis function (RBF) networks‐based adaptive robust control for an omni‐directional wheeled mobile manipulator in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances.

First, a dynamic model is obtained based on the practical omni‐directional wheeled mobile manipulator system. Second, the RBF neural network is used to identify the unstructured system dynamics directly due to its ability to approximate a nonlinear continuous function to arbitrary accuracy. Using the learning ability of neural networks, RBFNARC can co‐ordinately control the omni‐directional mobile platform and the mounted manipulator with different dynamics efficiently. The implementation of the control algorithm is dependent on the sliding mode control.

Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, the stability of the whole control system, the boundedness of the neural networks weight estimation errors, and the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the tracking error are all strictly guaranteed.

In this paper, an adaptive robust control scheme using neural networks combined with sliding mode control is proposed for crawler‐type mobile manipulators in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. RBF neural networks approximate the system dynamics directly and overcome the structured uncertainty by learning. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, the stability of the whole control system, the boundedness of the neural networks weight estimation errors, and the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the tracking error are all strictly guaranteed.

When using a machine vision inspection system for rail surface defect detection, many complex factors such as illumination changes, reflection inequality, shadows, stains and rust might inevitably deform the scanned rail surface image. This paper aims to reduce the influence of these factors, a pipeline of image processing algorithms for robust defect detection is developed.

First, a new inverse Perona-Malik (P-M) diffusion model is presented for image enhancement, which takes the reciprocal of gradient as feature to adjust the diffusion coefficients, and a distinct nearest-neighbor difference scheme is introduced to select proper defect boundaries during discretized implementation. As a result, the defect regions are sufficiently smoothened, whereas the faultless background remains unchanged. Then, by subtracting the diffused image from the original image, the defect features will be highlighted in the difference image. Subsequently, an adaptive threshold binarization, followed by an attribute opening like filter, can easily eliminate the noisy interferences and find out the desired defects.

Using data from our developed inspection apparatus, the experiments show that the proposed method can attain a detection and measurement precisions as high as 93.6 and 85.9 per cent, respectively, while the recovery accuracy remains 93 per cent. Additionally, the proposed method is computationally efficient and can perform robustly even under complex environments.

A pipeline of algorithms for rail surface detection is proposed. Particularly, an inverse P-M diffusion model with a distinct discretization scheme is introduced to enhance the defect boundaries and suppress noises. The performance of the proposed method has been verified with real images from our own developed system.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the advances in grey system theory research and various application achievements in science and engineering. At the same time, it commemorates the 40th anniversary of the birth of grey system theory and the 10th anniversary of Grey Systems–Theory and Application.

Firstly, the innovations of theoretical research in grey system theory were summarized and some of the widely recognized new results are briefly described. By searching and combing the research results of grey system theory in China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI) database and Web of Science by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), this paper shows the rapid development trend of grey system theory in the past 40 years, and the successful applications of grey system theory in the fields of social sciences, natural sciences and engineering technologies.

More than 227 thousands literature were found by input 10 phrases such as grey system, grey number and sequence operator etc. in CNKI database. After entering the new century, the number of grey system papers included in CNKI database is increasing rapidly. Since 2008, more than 10 thousands papers have been included per year and more than 15 thousands papers have been included per year since 2014. Grey system method and model are widely used in physics, chemistry, biology and other fields of natural science, as well as transportation, electric power, machinery and other fields of engineering technology, and a large number of valuable results have been achieved.

It can be seen that the grey system theory plays an important role in promoting China’s scientific and technological progress, innovation and development and high-level talent training from tens of thousands of literatures marked with important national science and technology projects and a large number of grey system literatures published by China’s double first-class universities and double first-class discipline construction universities.

Both innovations of theoretical research and practical application play important role in the growth of new theory. The innovations of theoretical research provide methods and tools for practical application, which is conducive to improve application efficiency and broaden application fields. A large number of practical applications needs have become the source of theoretical innovation and the solid background for the birth of theoretical innovation achievements.

This paper aims to focus on solving the path optimization problem by modifying the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) technique as it suffers from the selection of the optimal number of nodes and deploy in free space for reliable trajectory planning.

Traditional PRM is modified by developing a decision-making strategy for the selection of optimal nodes w.r.t. the complexity of the environment and deploying the optimal number of nodes outside the closed segment. Subsequently, the generated trajectory is made smoother by implementing the modified Bezier curve technique, which selects an optimal number of control points near the sharp turns for the reliable convergence of the trajectory that reduces the sum of the robot’s turning angles.

The proposed technique is compared with state-of-the-art techniques that show the reduction of computational load by 12.46%, the number of sharp turns by 100%, the number of collisions by 100% and increase the velocity parameter by 19.91%.

The proposed adaptive technique provides a better solution for autonomous navigation of unmanned ground vehicles, transportation, warehouse applications, etc.

The two main purposes of this paper are: first, the development of a new optimization algorithm called GHSACO by incorporating the global-best harmony search (GHS) which is a stochastic optimization algorithm recently developed, with the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Second, design of a new indirect adaptive recurrent fuzzy-neural controller (IARFNNC) for uncertain nonlinear systems using the developed optimization method (GHSACO) and the concept of the supervisory controller.

The novel optimization method introduces a novel improvization process, which is different from that of the GHS in the following aspects: a modified harmony memory representation and conception. The use of a global random switching mechanism to monitor the choice between the ACO and GHS. An additional memory consideration selection rule using the ACO random proportional transition rule with a pheromone trail update mechanism. The developed optimization method is applied for parametric optimization of all recurrent fuzzy neural networks adaptive controller parameters. In addition, in order to guarantee that the system states are confined to the safe region, a supervisory controller is incorporated into the IARFNNC global structure.

First, to analyze the performance of GHSACO method and shows its effectiveness, some benchmark functions with different dimensions are used. Simulation results demonstrate that it can find significantly better solutions when compared with the Harmony Search (HS), GHS, improved HS (IHS) and conventional ACO algorithm. In addition, simulation results obtained using an example of nonlinear system shows clearly the feasibility and the applicability of the proposed control method and the superiority of the GHSACO method compared to the HS, its variants, particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithms applied to the same problem.

The proposed new GHS algorithm is more efficient than the original HS method and its most known variants IHS and GHS. The proposed control method is applicable to any uncertain nonlinear system belongs in the class of systems treated in this paper.

To eliminate the angle deviation of magnetic encoder, this paper aims to propose a compensation method based on permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) sensorless control. The paper also describes the experiments performed to verify the validity of this proposed method.

The proposed method uses PMSM sensorless control method to get high precision virtual angle value, and then get the deviation value between virtual position and magnetic angle which is used as compensation table. Oversampling linear interpolation tabulation method has been proposed to eliminate the noise signals. Finally, a magnetic encoder with precision (repeatability) 0.09° and unidirectional motion precision 0.03 is realized. The control system with an encoder running at 14,000 and 0.01 r/min showing high motion resolution is also realized.

Higher value of current in PMSM leads to a magnetic encoder with higher precision. When using oversampling linear interpolation to tabulate the compensation table, it is understood that more oversampling does not lead to a better result. Finally, validated by experiments, using eight intervals to calculate the mean value of angle deviation leads to the best result.

The angle deviation compensation method proposed in this paper has a great practical implication and a good commercial application. The method proposed in this paper could be effectively used to self-correct the magnetic encoder using arctangent method and also correct any rotary encoder sensor.

This paper originally proposes an adaptive correction method for a rotary encoder based on PMSM sensorless control. To eliminate the noise signals in an angle compensation table, over-sampling linear interpolation tabulation method has been proposed which also guarantees the precision of the compensation table.