Virtual Model Reduction-based Control Strategy of Planar Three-link Underactuated Manipulator with Middle Passive Joint

This paper presents a position control strategy for a planar active-passive-active (APA) underactuated manipulator with second-order nonholonomic characteristics. According to the structural characteristics of the planar APA system, we divide the system into two parts: a planar virtual Pendubot (PVP) and a planar virtual Acrobot (PVA). For the PVP, we mainly fulfill the target angle of the first link, which is calculated through the geometry method, and make the system stable. In this stage, via keeping the states of the third link being zero, the system is reduced to the PVP. Meanwhile, we design an open-loop control law based on the nilpotent approximation (NA) model of the PVP to make the second link stable and the first link stabilize at its target angle. Then, the planar APA system is reduced to a PVA with all links’ angular velocities being zero. For the PVA, we mainly realize the other two links’ target angles obtained via the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Thus, the control objective of the planar APA system is achieved. Finally, above control strategy is verified by simulation results.

     

Chaos-PSO-based Motion Planning and Accurate Tracking for Position-posture Control of a Planar Underactuated Manipulator with Disturbance

Unlike a fully-actuated manipulator, the position-posture control of a planar underactuated manipulator (PUM) is more difficult, but the research on it is significant due to the wide practical applications. The existing control methods consider no external disturbance and are involved in the staged control idea, bringing the problems of nonsmooth control torque and time-consuming. A novel one-stage control approach is proposed in this paper for the position-posture control of a three-link PUM with the first free joint under the external disturbance. By analyzing the coupling relationship between its active joints and free joint, the position-posture control is transformed into the trajectory tracking control. Unlike the general trajectory planning, the trajectories of the active joints are planned to include several parameters. Meanwhile, the parameters are solved using a chaos particle swarm optimization algorithm to guarantee that all joint angles can reach to their desired angles. Then, to obtain the high trajectory tracking accuracy at every moment under the external disturbance, the nonlinear disturbance observer is constructed and a nonlinear fast terminal sliding mode tracking controller is designed. Finally, the feasibility and superiority of this strategy are verified via two simulations.

     

Power Smoothing of a Variable-speed Wind Turbine Generator

This paper presents a power-smoothing scheme of a variable-speed wind turbine generator (VSWTG) that employs separate control gains for the over-frequency section (OFS) and under-frequency section (UFS). In the proposed scheme, an additional proportional control loop based on the system frequency deviation operating in conjunction with maximum power point tracking operation is used. In the OFS, to improve the energy-storing capability, the scheme suggests the gain of the frequency deviation control loop, which is set to be monotonously decreasing with the rotor speed while being significantly larger than that in the UFS. In the UFS, to improve the energy-releasing capability while preventing over-deceleration, the gain of the frequency deviation control loop is set to be a linear function of the rotor speed. The simulation results under continuously varying wind speeds with different wind patterns and wind speeds clearly demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly mitigates the output power fluctuations of a VSWTG. The proposed scheme keeps the frequency within a narrow range, thereby reducing the required primary frequency control reserve for regulating the frequency under normal operations.

     

Protein interaction networks: centrality,modularity, dynamics,and applications

In the post-genomic era, proteomics has achieved significant theoretical and practical advances with the development of high-throughput technologies. Especially the rapid accumulation of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) provides a foundation for constructing protein interaction networks (PINs), which can furnish a new perspective for understanding cellular organizations, processes, and functions at network level. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on three main characteristics of PINs: centrality, modularity, and dynamics. 1) Different centrality measures, which are used to calculate the importance of proteins, are summarized based on the structural characteristics of PINs or on the basis of its integrated biological information; 2) Different modularity definitions and various clustering algorithms for predicting protein complexes or identifying functional modules are introduced; 3) The dynamics of proteins, PPIs and sub-networks are discussed, respectively. Finally, the main applications of PINs in the complex diseases are reviewed, and the challenges and future research directions are also discussed.     

细节决定成败：推荐系统实验反思与讨论

近些年来,随着互联网的迅速发展,用户在各种在线平台上接收到海量的信息,信息爆炸成为一个关键性问题。在此背景下,推荐系统逐步渗透到人们工作生活的各个场景,已成为不可或缺的一环。它不仅可以帮助用户快速获得想要的信息和服务,还可以提高资源利用效率,从而给企业带来更多效益。因此,个性化推荐算法不仅获得了工业界广泛的关注,也是科研领域的研究热点之一。在个性化推荐的研究中,受限于平台与效率等因素,研究者大多无法将算法部署到在线系统上进行评价,因此离线评价成为推荐领域研究的主要方式。然而个性化推荐涉及到的场景复杂,可获得的数据信息多种多样,用户行为多为隐式反馈且存在许多噪声,这使得推荐系统离线评价的实验设定复杂多变,存在大量易被忽视却十分重要的细节。比如在训练采样负例时,既可以仅从用户没有交互过的商品中采样,也可以将验证测试集的商品视作未知交互加入采样池。同样,从训练到测试在很多其他环节也涉及这样的实现细节（如数据集处理、已知负样本的使用、Top-N排序候选集范围等）。这些实验细节通常不会在学术论文中被显式提及,却潜在影响了模型效果的对比,还决定着实验的科学性,甚至会导致相反或错误的分析结论。本文从数据集处理、模型训练、验证与测试、效果评价等多个角度,系统地讨论与反思了推荐系统实验中的细节设定。对于每个环节,我们枚举了若干常见设定,并在真实数据集上验证了其中某些设定的实际影响。实验结果表明一些细节确实会导致关于模型优劣的不同结论。最终我们形成了关于推荐系统实验细节的指导性总结,包括可选、建议、必须的三类设定,希望帮助推荐算法研究者规避实现细节上的陷阱,更科学合理地设计实验。     

考虑接触行为的U型渠道冻胀数值模拟

U型衬砌渠道具有良好的整体性和冻胀适应性,但在冬季仍极易因土体冻胀而导致破坏。考虑渠基冻土与衬砌接触面冻结的非线性特性和冻土、混凝土材料的塑性特征,建立能分析渠道基土与衬砌间挤压、脱开及滑移等接触力学行为的渠道冻胀破坏热力耦合数值模型。以宝鸡峡灌区塬下北干渠为原型渠道,按照模型是否考虑接触分别进行冻胀数值模拟,并对模拟结果进行对比分析。结果表明:考虑接触的模型模拟结果与原型实测值更相符,更能合理地解释U型渠道冻胀在渠底与阴坡衔接处冻胀量最小;考虑接触的混凝土塑性应变最大值是不考虑接触时的3.76倍;考虑接触的法向冻胀力和切向冻结力更均匀,最大值均减少1.5~3.0倍,应力集中现象减弱,更能反映混凝土衬砌板与渠基土之间的滑移变形与破坏准则的相互作用。研究结果为U型衬砌渠道冻胀破坏规律提供了分析方法。     

Effect of deposition time on microstructures and growth behavior of ZrC coatings prepared by low pressure chemical vapor deposition with the Br<Subscript>2</Subscript>-Zr-C<Subscript>3</Subscript>H<Subscript>6</Subscript>-H<Subscript>2</Subscript>-Ar System

ZrC coatings were deposited on graphite substrates by low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) with the Br₂-Zr-C₃H₆-H₂-Ar system. The effects of deposition time on the microstructures and growth behavior of ZrC coatings were investigated. ZrC coating grew in an island-layer mode. The formation of coating was dominated by the nucleation of ZrC in the initial 20 minutes, and the rapid nucleation generated a fine-grained structure of ZrC coating. When the deposition time was over 30 min, the growth of coating was dominated by that of crystals, giving a column-arranged structure. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy showed that the molar ratio of carbon to zirconium was near 1:1 in ZrC coating, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy showed that ZrC was the main phase in coatings, accompanied by about 2.5mol% ZrO₂ minor phase.     

Research on phaseless near-field antenna measurement

A method of phaseless near-field measurement is studied which can reconstruct the far-field characteristics of the antenna by analyzing the near-field amplitude-only data. The method includes a dual-plane scanning strategy which lets the linear polarization probe collect the amplitude-only data on the two scanning planes respectively. The phase of each sampling points at one of the scanning planes can be retrieved using the iterative fourier transform algorithm. Then the far-field properties of the antenna are obtained by applying the near-field/far-field transformation technique. Theoretical research and simulations show that the phaseless near-field measurement strategy can reconstruct the far-field pattern effectively and that a better choice of the initial iterate phase can help to improve the convergence rate and the convergence precision of the method.     

Variable sorting based on fault tree structure adjustment for multi-valued decision diagrams

The dynamic fault tree does not have the ability of fault calculation when analyzing the reliability of the system, so it needs to be modeled and analyzed by means of multi-valued decision diagrams and so on. The dynamic fault tree is translated into a multi-valued decision diagram according to the ordering of variables of basic events which affects the size of the generated multi-valued decision diagram and the cost of traversal to get cut sequences. An adjustment method of the dynamic fault tree structure is proposed based on the importance degree of repeated events, dynamic gates and the locations of events of the dynamic fault tree. By taking the fact that the basic events at the same level are equally important into account, an improved dynamic variable ordering method and ordering generation algorithm for the multi-valued decision diagram are presented in this paper. The result analysis of an example shows that the improved dynamic variable ordering method can reduce the size of the multi-valued decision diagram and space and time complexity of the reliability calculation compared to the similar methods.     

Method Based on Time Randomization to Resist Fault Sensitivity Analysis

A fault sensitivity analysis (FSA)-resistance model based on time randomization is proposed. The randomization unit is composed of two parts, namely the configurable register array (R-A) and the decoder (chiefly random number generator, RNG). In this way, registers chosen can be either valid or invalid depending on the configuration information generated by the decoder. Thus, the fault sensitivity information can be confusing. Meanwhile, based on this model, a defensive scheme is designed to resist both fault sensitivity analysis (FSA) and differential power analysis (DPA). This scheme is verified with our experiments.