Modeling and Control of Hybrid-driven Gliding Motion for an Underwater Gliding Snake-like Robot

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - An underwater gliding snake-like robot (UGSR) combines the advantages of an underwater glider (UG) and an underwater snake-like robot...     

Reaction mechanism and microstructure evolution of reaction sintered <Emphasis Type="Italic">h</Emphasis>-BN

Hexagonal boron nitride ceramic (h-BN) based on the nitridation of B powders was obtained by reaction sintering method. The effects of sintering temperature on the mechanical properties and microstructure of the resultant products were investigated and the reaction mechanism was discussed. Results showed that the reaction between B and N₂ occurred vigorously at temperatures ranging from 1 000 °C to 1 300 °C, which resulted in the generation of t-BN. When the temperature exceeded 1 450 °C, transformation from t-BN to h-BN began to occur. As the sintering temperature increased, the spherical particles of t-BN gradually transformed into fine sheet particles of h-BN. These particles subsequently displayed a compact arrangement to achieve a more uniform microstructure, thereby increasing the strength.     

Modal Identification of Linear Time-varying Systems Using Continuous Wavelet Transform

A wavelet based identification method for linear time-varying systems is presented,and the ridge and skeleton of the continuous wavelet transform of free response is used to extract time-varying parameters. The stiffness and damping coefficients of single-degree-of—freedom systems,frequencies and damping ratios of multi-degree-of-freedom systems are estimated without any prior information of systems. The proposed method is applied to linear time-varying systems with both abrupt and smooth variation parameters. Gaussian white noise is added to the response to test the anti-noise performance of the algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of accurately tracking the variation of the systems.     

Robust image hashing using non-uniform sampling in discrete Fourier domain

This paper proposes a robust image hashing method in discrete Fourier domain that can be applied in such fields as image authentication and retrieval. In the pre-processing stage, image resizing and total variation based filtering are first used to regularize the input image. Then the secondary image is obtained by the rotation projection, and the robust frequency feature is extracted from the secondary image after discrete Fourier transform. More sampling points are chosen from the low- and middle-frequency component to represent the salient content of the image effectively, which is achieved by the non-uniform sampling. Finally, the intermediate sampling feature vectors are scrambled and quantized to produce the resulting binary hash securely. The security of the method depends entirely on the secret key. Experiments are conducted to show that the present method has satisfactory robustness against perceptual content-preserving manipulations and has also very low probability for collision of the hashes of distinct images.     

A scalable kernel-based semisupervised metric learning algorithm with out-of-sample generalization ability

In recent years, metric learning in the semisupervised setting has aroused a lot of research interest. One type of semisupervised metric learning utilizes supervisory information in the form of pairwise similarity or dissimilarity constraints. However, most methods proposed so far are either limited to linear metric learning or unable to scale well with the data set size. In this letter, we propose a nonlinear metric learning method based on the kernel approach. By applying low-rank approximation to the kernel matrix, our method can handle significantly larger data sets. Moreover, our low-rank approximation scheme can naturally lead to out-of-sample generalization. Experiments performed on both artificial and real-world data show very promising results.     

An ant direction hybrid differential evolution heuristic for the large-scale passive harmonic filters planning problem

This article presents a heuristic which combines the orthogonal array experiment technique and an ant direction hybrid differential evolution algorithm (ADHDEOA) for planning of a large-scale passive harmonic filters problem. The addressed problem has a multi-bus and under abundant harmonic current sources in the system. In this study, an orthogonal array is first conducted to obtain the initial solution. Next, an ant direction hybrid differential evolution (ADHDE) is applied to search for a near optimum solution. The objective is to minimize the cost of the filter, the total demand distortion of harmonic currents and the total harmonic distortion of voltages at each bus simultaneously. In order to determine a set of weights of each term in the objective function, the simplest and most efficient form of triangular membership functions has been considered. The designed heuristic ADHDEOA is applied to a practical harmonic problem in a steel plant, and three design schemes are compared to demonstrate the performance of the ADHDEOA.     

The development of a sub-population genetic algorithm II (SPGA II) for multi-objective combinatorial problems

Previous research has shown that sub-population genetic algorithm is effective in solving the multi-objective combinatorial problems. Based on these pioneering efforts, this paper extends the SPGA algorithm with a global Pareto archive technique and a two-stage approach to solve the multi-objective problems. In the first stage, the areas next to the two single objectives are searched and solutions explored around these two extreme areas are reserved in the global archive for later evolutions. Then, in the second stage, larger searching areas except the middle area are further extended to explore the solution space in finding the near-optimal frontiers. Through extensive experimental results, SPGA II does outperform SPGA, NSGA II, and SPEA 2 in the parallel scheduling problems and knapsack problems; it shows that the approach improves the sub-population genetic algorithm significantly. It may be of interests for researchers in solving multi-objective combinatorial problems.