A Galerkin finite element scheme for time–space fractional diffusion equation

In this paper, a Galerkin finite element scheme to approximate the time–space fractional diffusion equation is studied. Firstly, the fractional diffusion equation is transformed into a fractional Volterra integro-differential equation. And a second-order fractional trapezoidal formula is used to approach the time fractional integral. Then a Galerkin finite element method is introduced in space direction, where the semi-discretization scheme and fully discrete scheme are given separately. The stability analysis of semi-discretization scheme is discussed in detail. Furthermore, convergence analysis of semi-discretization scheme and fully discrete scheme are given in details. Finally, two numerical examples are displayed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Robust cooperative output tracking of networked high-order power integrators systems

This paper focuses on a robust cooperative output tracking problem of networked power integrator systems. The dynamics of each system is considered as a nonlinear high-order power integrator whose linearised model is uncontrollable around its origin. It is proven via Lyapunov Theory that under some mild assumptions and graph structural properties, all agents’ outputs in the network can be synchronised to a desired trajectory with a bounded error in the presence of external disturbances as well as model uncertainties. Moreover, the tracking performance can be tuned by appropriately choosing parameters within the controller. The proposed controller for each agent is in the essence constructed via backstepping technique consisting of three components: the state feedback of its own, the outputs of its neighbours and the information of the desired trajectory if connected, and thus in a distributed manner.     

Adaptive neural control for an uncertain robotic manipulator with joint space constraints

In this paper, adaptive neural tracking control is proposed for a robotic manipulator with uncertainties in both manipulator dynamics and joint actuator dynamics. The manipulator joints are subject to inequality constraints, i.e., the joint angles are required to remain in some compact sets. Integral barrier Lyapunov functionals (iBLFs) are employed to address the joint space constraints directly without performing an additional mapping to the error space. Neural networks (NNs) are utilised to compensate for the unknown robot dynamics and external force. Adapting parameters are developed to estimate the unknown bounds on NN approximations. By the Lyapunov synthesis, the proposed control can guarantee the semi-global uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system, and the practical tracking of joint reference trajectory is achieved without the violation of predefined joint space constraints. Simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.     

Analysis and design of delta operator systems with nested actuator saturation

In this paper, the problem of estimating the domain of attraction is considered for delta operator systems subject to nested actuator saturation. A set invariance condition is established for the delta operator system with nested actuator saturation in terms of auxiliary feedback matrices. Based on the set invariance condition, an optimisation approach is proposed to estimate the domain of attraction for the delta operator system. Thereby, the partial results of nested actuator saturation for both continuous-time systems and discrete-time systems are extended to delta operator system framework. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design techniques.     

Robust admissibility and admissibilisation of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems

This paper is concerned with the characterisation of robust admissibility and admissibilisation for uncertain discrete-time singular system with interval time-varying delay. Considering the norm-bounded uncertainty and the interval time-varying delay, a new comparison model is introduced to transform the original singular system into two connected subsystems. After this transformation, a singular system without uncertainty and delay can be handled by the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method. By virtue of the scaled small gain theorem, an admissibility condition of the original singular system is proposed in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Moreover, the problem of robust admissibilisation of uncertain discrete singular time-varying system is also studied by iterative linear matrix inequality algorithm with initial condition optimisation. Several numerical examples are used to illustrate that the results are less conservative than existing ones.     

H∞ filtering for piecewise homogeneous Markovian jump nonlinear systems

This paper concerns the problem of H_∞ filtering for piecewise homogeneous Markovian jump nonlinear systems. Different from the existing studies in the literatures, the existence of variations in transition rates for Markovian jump nonlinear systems is considered. The purpose of the paper is to design mode-dependent and mode-independent filters, such that the dynamics of the filtering errors are stochastic integral input-to-state stable with H_∞ performance index. Using the linear matrix inequality method and the Lyapunov functional method, sufficient conditions for the solution to the H_∞ filtering problem are derived. Finally, three examples are proposed to illustrate the effectiveness of the given theoretical results.     

Fault diagnosis of nonlinear and large-scale processes using novel modified kernel Fisher discriminant analysis approach

It is pretty significant for fault diagnosis timely and accurately to improve the dependability of industrial processes. In this study, fault diagnosis of nonlinear and large-scale processes by variable-weighted kernel Fisher discriminant analysis (KFDA) based on improved biogeography-based optimisation (IBBO) is proposed, referred to as IBBO-KFDA, where IBBO is used to determine the parameters of variable-weighted KFDA, and variable-weighted KFDA is used to solve the multi-classification overlapping problem. The main contributions of this work are four-fold to further improve the performance of KFDA for fault diagnosis. First, a nonlinear fault diagnosis approach with variable-weighted KFDA is developed for maximising separation between the overlapping fault samples. Second, kernel parameters and features selection of variable-weighted KFDA are simultaneously optimised using IBBO. Finally, a single fitness function that combines erroneous diagnosis rate with feature cost is created, a novel mixed kernel function is introduced to improve the classification capability in the feature space and diagnosis accuracy of the IBBO-KFDA, and serves as the target function in the optimisation problem. Moreover, an IBBO approach is developed to obtain the better quality of solution and faster convergence speed. On the one hand, the proposed IBBO-KFDA method is first used on Tennessee Eastman process benchmark data sets to validate the feasibility and efficiency. On the other hand, IBBO-KFDA is applied to diagnose faults of automation gauge control system. Simulation results demonstrate that IBBO-KFDA can obtain better kernel parameters and feature vectors with a lower computing cost, higher diagnosis accuracy and a better real-time capacity.     

Superpixel-based active contour model for unsupervised change detection from satellite images

This study proposes a superpixel-based active contour model (SACM) for unsupervised change detection from satellite images. The accuracy of change detection produced by the traditional active contour model suffers from the trade-off parameter. The SACM is designed to address this limitation through the incorporation of the spatial and statistical information of superpixels. The proposed method mainly consists of three steps. First, the difference image is created with change vector analysis method from two temporal satellite images. Second, statistical region merging method is applied on the difference image to produce a superpixel map. Finally, SACM is designed based on the superpixel map to detect changes from the difference image. The SACM incorporates spatial and statistical information and retains the accurate shapes and outlines of superpixels. Experiments were conducted on two data sets, namely Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus and SPOT 5, to validate the proposed method. Experimental results show that SACM reduces the effects of the trade-off parameter. The proposed method also increases the robustness of the traditional active contour model for input parameters and improves its effectiveness. In summary, SACM often outperforms some existing methods and provides an effective unsupervised change detection method.     

A non-negative low-rank representation for hyperspectral band selection

Hyperspectral images are widely used in real applications due to their rich spectral information. However, the large volume brings a lot of inconvenience, such as storage and transmission. Hyperspectral band selection is an important technique to cope with this issue by selecting a few spectral bands to replace the original image. This article proposes a novel band selection algorithm that first estimates the redundancy through analysing relationships among spectral bands. After that, spectral bands are ranked according to their relative importance. Subsequently, in order to remove redundant spectral bands and preserve the original information, a maximal linearly independent subset is constructed as the optimal band combination. Contributions of this article are listed as follows: (1) A new strategy for band selection is proposed to preserve the original information mostly; (2) A non-negative low-rank representation algorithm is developed to discover intrinsic relationships among spectral bands; (3) A smart strategy is put forward to adaptively determine the optimal combination of spectral bands. To verify the effectiveness, experiments have been conducted on both hyperspectral unmixing and classification. For unmixing, the proposed algorithm decreases the average root mean square errors (RMSEs) by 0.05, 0.03, and 0.05 for the Urban, Cuprite, and Indian Pines data sets, respectively. With regard to classification, our algorithm achieves the overall accuracies of 77.07% and 89.19% for the Indian Pines and Pavia University data sets, respectively. These results are close to the performance with original images. Thus, comparative experiments not only illustrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, but also prove the validity of band selection on hyperspectral image processing.     

Parallel Marching Blocks: A Practical Isosurfacing Algorithm for Large Data on Many‐Core Architectures

Interactive isosurface visualisation has been made possible by mapping algorithms to GPU architectures. However, current state‐of‐the‐art isosurfacing algorithms usually consume large amounts of GPU memory owing to the additional acceleration structures they require. As a result, the continued limitations on available GPU memory mean that they are unable to deal with the larger datasets that are now increasingly becoming prevalent. This paper proposes a new parallel isosurface‐extraction algorithm that exploits the blocked organisation of the parallel threads found in modern many‐core platforms to achieve fast isosurface extraction and reduce the associated memory requirements. This is achieved by optimising thread co‐operation within thread‐blocks and reducing redundant computation; ultimately, an indexed triangular mesh can be produced. Experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm is much faster (up to 10×) than state‐of‐the‐art GPU algorithms and has a much smaller memory footprint, enabling it to handle much larger datasets (up to 64×) on the same GPU.