Adaptive robust posture control of a parallel manipulator driven by pneumatic muscles

Rather severe parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities exist in the dynamic modeling of a parallel manipulator driven by pneumatic muscles. Those uncertainties not only come from the time-varying friction forces and the static force modeling errors of pneumatic muscles but also from the inherent complex nonlinearities and unknown disturbances of the parallel manipulator. In this paper, a discontinuous projection-based adaptive robust control strategy is adopted to compensate for both the parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities of a three-pneumatic-muscles-driven parallel manipulator to achieve precise posture trajectory tracking control. The resulting controller effectively handles the effects of various parameter variations and the hard-to-model nonlinearities such as the friction forces of the pneumatic muscles. Simulation and experimental results are obtained to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive robust controller.     

增材制造技术在电机中的应用综述

增材制造技术(即3D打印)因具有高设计自由度、高材料利用率、高成形效率和精度等优势,逐渐成为高效轻质高功率密度电机设计与制造的研究热点。该文旨在对3D打印电机的性能及其应用作系统性综述。首先,对3D打印电机的发展脉络进行简要概括。其次,分别对3D打印铁心、磁钢、绕组,以及散热和机械支撑结构的研究现状进行总结,并与传统工艺加工的样件进行性能对比。随后,介绍了适用于增材制造的结构设计方法——拓扑优化。最后,根据目前的研究情况归纳了3D打印电机未来的发展趋势和面临的挑战。     

一种抗背景干扰的多尺度人群计数算法

人群计数技术以估计人群图片或视频中的人数为目标,可以有效预防人群踩踏事故的发生,广泛应用于安防预警、城市规划及大型集会管理等领域。然而,由于人群尺度变化、背景干扰、人群分布不均、遮挡和透视效应等因素的影响,单幅图片的人群计数仍是一项非常具有挑战性的任务。针对人群计数中多尺度变化和背景干扰问题,提出一种抗背景干扰的多尺度人群计数算法。以VGG16网络结构为基础,引入特征金字塔构建多尺度特征融合骨干网络解决人群多尺度变化问题,设计Double-Head-CC结构对融合后的特征图进行前景背景分割和密度图预测以抑制背景干扰。基于密度图的局部相关性和多任务学习,定义多重损失函数和多任务联合损失函数进行网络优化。在ShanghaiTech、UCF-QNRF和JHU-CROWD++数据集上进行训练和评测,实验结果表明,该算法能够很好地预测人群密度分布和人群数量,具有较高的准确性,且鲁棒性强、泛化性能良好。     

The influence of design aesthetics in usability testing: Effects on user performance and perceived usability

This article examined the effects of product aesthetics on several outcome variables in usability tests. Employing a computer simulation of a mobile phone, 60 adolescents (14-17 yrs) were asked to complete a number of typical tasks of mobile phone users. Two functionally identical mobile phones were manipulated with regard to their visual appearance (highly appealing vs not appealing) to determine the influence of appearance on perceived usability, performance measures and perceived attractiveness. The results showed that participants using the highly appealing phone rated their appliance as being more usable than participants operating the unappealing model. Furthermore, the visual appearance of the phone had a positive effect on performance, leading to reduced task completion times for the attractive model. The study discusses the implications for the use of adolescents in ergonomic research.     

Synchronization of complex dynamical networks under recoverable attacks

In this paper, the synchronization of complex dynamical networks (CDNs) under ‘successful’ but recoverable attacks is studied by utilizing the framework of switching systems. ‘Successful’ attacks refer to a class of attacks that break a network into a group of isolated clusters. Recoverable attacks refer to a class of attacks that the network can recover from after a period of time. To facilitate the investigation of the synchronization of a CDN under ‘successful’ but recoverable attacks, the attack frequency and the average recovering time are introduced. By using a piecewise Lyapunov function, the upper bounds of the attack frequency and the average recovering time are obtained to ensure that the whole network can achieve global synchronization under attacks.     

State feedback design for input-saturating quadratic systems

This paper proposes a method to design stabilizing state feedback control laws for nonlinear quadratic systems subject to input saturation. Based on a quadratic Lyapunov function, a modified sector condition and a particular representation for the quadratic terms, synthesis conditions in a “quasi”-LMI form are stated in a regional (local) context. An LMI-based optimization problem is then derived for computing the state feedback gains maximizing the estimate of the stability region of the closed-loop system.     

A convex optimization approach to filtering in jump linear systems with state dependent transitions

We introduce a new methodology to construct a Gaussian mixture approximation to the true filter density in hybrid Markovian switching systems. We relax the assumption that the mode transition process is a Markov chain and allow it to depend on the actual and unobservable state of the system. The main feature of the method is that the Gaussian densities used in the approximation are selected as the solution of a convex programming problem which trades off sparsity of the solution with goodness of fit. A meaningful example shows that the proposed method can outperform the widely used interacting multiple model (IMM) filter and GPB2 in terms of accuracy at the expenses of an increase in computational time.     

Arbitrary decay rate for two connected strings with joint anti-damping by boundary output feedback

In this paper, we are concerned with the boundary stabilization of two connected strings with middle joint anti-damping for which all eigenvalues of the (control) free system are located on the right complex plane. We first design an explicit state feedback controller to achieve exponential stability for the closed-loop system. Consequently, we design the output feedback by using infinite-dimensional observer. The backstepping approach is adopted in investigation. It is shown that by using one boundary stabilizer only, the output feedback can make the closed-loop system exponentially stable with arbitrary decay rate.     

Stability analysis for multi-agent systems using the incidence matrix: Quantized communication and formation control

The spectral properties of the incidence matrix of the communication graph are exploited to provide solutions to two multi-agent control problems. In particular, we consider the problem of state agreement with quantized communication and the problem of distance-based formation control. In both cases, stabilizing control laws are provided when the communication graph is a tree. It is shown how the relation between tree graphs and the null space of the corresponding incidence matrix encode fundamental properties for these two multi-agent control problems.     

Fault tolerant control for singular systems with actuator saturation and nonlinear perturbation

In this paper, the problem of robust fault tolerant control for a class of singular systems subject to both time-varying state-dependent nonlinear perturbation and actuator saturation is investigated. A sufficient condition for the existence of a fixed-gain controller is first proposed which guarantees the regularity, impulse-free and stability of the closed-loop system under all possible faults. An optimization problem with LMI constraints is formulated to determine the largest contractively invariant ellipsoid. An adaptive fault tolerant controller is then developed to compensate for the failure effects on the system by estimating the fault and updating the design parameter matrices online. Both of these two controllers are in the form of a saturation avoidance feedback with the advantage of relatively small actuator capacities compared with the high gain counterpart. An example is included to illustrate the proposed procedures and their effectiveness.