A journal of IEEE and CAA , publishes high-quality papers in English on original theoretical/experimental research and development in all areas of automation

## Early Access

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, Available online
Abstract:
In smart industrial systems, in many cases, a fault can be captured as an event to represent the distinct nature of subsequent changes. Event-based fault diagnosis techniques are capable model-based methods for diagnosing faults from a sequence of observable events executed by the system under diagnosis. Most event-based diagnosis techniques rely on perfect observations of observable events. However, in practice, it is common to miss an observable event due to a problem in sensor-readings or communication/transmission channels. This paper develops a fault diagnosis tool, referred to as diagnoser, which can robustly detect, locate, and isolate occurred faults. The developed diagnoser is resilient against missed observations. A missed observation is detected from its successive sequence of events. Upon detecting a missed observation, the developed diagnoser automatically resets and then, asynchronously resumes the diagnosis process. This is achieved solely based on post-reset/activation observations and without interrupting the performance of the system under diagnosis. New concepts of asynchronous detectability and asynchronous diagnosability are introduced. It is shown that if asynchronous detectability and asynchronous diagnosability hold, the proposed diagnoser is capable of diagnosing occurred faults under imperfect observations. The proposed technique is applied to diagnose faults in a manufacturing process. Illustrative examples are provided to explain the details of the proposed algorithm. The result paves the way towards fostering resilient Cyber-Physical systems in Industry 4.0 context.
, Available online
Abstract:
Cyber attacks pose severe threats on synchronization of multi-agent systems. Deception attack, as a typical type of cyber attack, can bypass the surveillance of the attack detection mechanism silently, resulting in a heavy loss. Therefore, the problem of mean-square bounded synchronization in multi-agent systems subject to deception attacks is investigated in this paper. The control signals can be replaced with false data from controller-to-actuator channels or the controller. The success of the attack is measured through a stochastic variable. A distributed impulsive controller using a pinning strategy is redesigned, which ensures that mean-square bounded synchronization is achieved in the presence of deception attacks. Some sufficient conditions are derived, in which upper bounds of the synchronization error are given. Finally, two numerical simulations with symmetric and asymmetric network topologies are given to illustrate the theoretical results.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003177
Abstract:
An increasing number of enterprises have adopted cloud computing to manage their important business applications in distributed green cloud (DGC) systems for low response time and high cost-effectiveness in recent years. Task scheduling and resource allocation in DGCs have gained more attention in both academia and industry as they are costly to manage because of high energy consumption. Many factors in DGCs, e.g., prices of power grid, and the amount of green energy express strong spatial variations. The dramatic increase of arriving tasks brings a big challenge to minimize the energy cost of a DGC provider in a market where above factors all possess spatial variations. This work adopts a G/G/1 queuing system to analyze the performance of servers in DGCs. Based on it, a single-objective constrained optimization problem is formulated and solved by a proposed simulated-annealing-based bees algorithm (SBA) to find SBA can minimize the energy cost of a DGC provider by optimally allocating tasks of heterogeneous applications among multiple DGCs, and specifying the running speed of each server and the number of powered-on servers in each GC while strictly meeting response time limits of tasks of all applications. Realistic data-based experimental results prove that SBA achieves lower energy cost than several benchmark scheduling methods do.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003213
Abstract:
This paper concentrates on asymmetric barrier Lyapunov functions (ABLFs) based on finite-time adaptive neural network (NN) control methods for a class of nonlinear strict feedback systems with time-varying full state constraints. During the process of backstepping recursion, the approximation properties of NNs are exploited to address the problem of unknown internal dynamics. The ABLFs are constructed to make sure that the time-varying asymmetrical full state constraints are always satisfied. According to the Lyapunov stability and finite-time stability theory, it is proven that all the signals in the closed-loop systems are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) and the system output is driven to track the desired signal as quickly as possible near the origin. In the meantime, in the scope of finite-time, all states are guaranteed to stay in the pre-given range. Finally, a simulation example is proposed to verify the feasibility of the developed finite time control algorithm.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911627
Abstract:
The stabilization problem of distributed proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers for general first-order multi-agent systems with time delay is investigated in the paper. The closed-loop multi-input multi-output (MIMO) framework in frequency domain is firstly introduced for the multi-agent system. Based on the matrix theory, the whole system is decoupled into several subsystems with respect to the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix. Considering that the eigenvalues may be complex numbers, the consensus problem of the multi-agent system is transformed into the stabilizing problem of all the subsystems with complex coefficients. For each subsystem with complex coefficients, the range of admissible proportional gains \begin{document}${k_{\rm{P}}}$\end{document} is analytically determined. Then, the stabilizing region in the space of integral gain (\begin{document}${k_{\rm{I}}}$\end{document}) and derivative gain (\begin{document}${k_{\rm{D}}}$\end{document}) for a given \begin{document}${k_{\rm{P}}}$\end{document} value is also obtained in an analytical form. The entire stabilizing set can be determined by sweeping \begin{document}${k_{\rm{P}}}$\end{document} in the allowable range. The proposed method is conducted for general first-order multi-agent systems under arbitrary topology including undirected and directed graph topology. Besides, the results in the paper provide the basis for the design of distributed PID controllers satisfying different performance criteria. The simulation examples are presented to check the validity of the proposed control strategy
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003018
Abstract:
Due to the critical defects of techniques in fully autonomous vehicles, man-machine cooperative driving is still of great significance in today’s transportation system. Unlike the previous shared control structure, this paper introduces a double loop structure which is applied to indirect shared steering control between driver and automation. In contrast to the tandem indirect shared control, the parallel indirect shared control put the authority allocation system of steering angle into the framework to allocate the corresponding weighting coefficients reasonably and output the final desired steering angle according to the current deviation of vehicle and the accuracy of steering angles. Besides, the active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is also added in the frame in order to track the desired steering angle fleetly and accurately as well as restrain the internal and external disturbances effectively which including the steering friction torque, wind speed and ground interference etc. Eventually, we validated the advantages of double loop framework through three sets of double lane change and slalom experiments, respectively. Exactly as we expected, the simulation results show that the double loop structure can effectively reduce the lateral displacement error caused by the driver or the controller, significantly improve the tracking precision and keep great performance in trajectory tracking characteristics when driving errors occur in one of driver and controller.
, Available online
Abstract:
In view of the environment competencies, selecting the optimal green supplier is one of the crucial issues for enterprises, and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies can more easily solve this green supplier selection (GSS) problem. In addition, prioritized aggregation (PA) operator can focus on the prioritization relationship over the criteria, Choquet integral (CI) operator can fully take account of the importance of criteria and the interactions among them, and Bonferroni mean (BM) operator can capture the interrelationships of criteria. However, most existing researches cannot simultaneously consider the interactions, interrelationships and prioritizations over the criteria, which are involved in the GSS process. Moreover, the interval type-2 fuzzy set (IT2FS) is a more effective tool to represent the fuzziness. Therefore, based on the advantages of PA, CI, BM and IT2FS, in this paper, the interval type-2 fuzzy prioritized Choquet normalized weighted BM operators with λ fuzzy measure and generalized prioritized measure are proposed, and some properties are discussed. Then, a novel MCDM approach for GSS based upon the presented operators is developed, and detailed decision steps are given. Finally, the applicability and practicability of the proposed methodology are demonstrated by its application in the shared-bike GSS and by comparisons with other methods. The advantages of the proposed method are that it can consider interactions, interrelationships and prioritizations over the criteria simultaneously.
, Available online
Abstract:
Group Role Assignment (GRA) is originally a complex problem in Role-Based Collaboration (RBC). The solution to GRA provides modelling techniques for more complex problems. GRA with Constraints (GRA+) is categorized as a class of complex assignment problems. At present, there are few generally efficient solutions to this category of problems. Each special problem case requires a specific solution. Group Multi-Role Assignment (GMRA) and GRA with Conflicting Agents on Roles (GRACAR) are two problem cases in GRA+. The contributions of this paper include: 1) The formalization of a new problem of GRA+, called Group Multi-role Assignment with Conflicting roles and agents (GMAC), which is an extension to the combination of GMRA and GRACAR; 2) A practical solution based on an optimization platform; 3) A sufficient condition, used in planning, for solving GMAC problems; and 4) A clear presentation of the benefits in avoiding conflicts when dealing with GMAC. The proposed methods are verified by experiments, simulations, proofs and analysis.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003291
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Timely investigating post-disaster situations in order to locate victims and secure hazardous sources is critical, but also very challenging and risky. Despite first responders putting their lives at risk in saving others, some human-physical limits cause delays in response time that results many in deaths and property damages. In this paper, we proposed and implemented a framework designed to create a collaborative effort between heterogeneous unmanned vehicles and first-responders to make search and rescue operations safer and faster. The framework consists of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), cloud-based remote control station (RCS). A light-weight message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) based communication is adopted for facilitating collaboration between autonomous systems. To effectively work under unfavorable disaster conditions, antenna tracker is developed as a tool to extend network coverage to distant areas and mobile charging points for the UAVs are incorporated in the framework. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay and analyzed using architectural analysis and design language (AADL). Experimental measurements and simulation results show that the adopted communication protocol performs more efficiently than other conventional communication protocols and the implemented UAV control mechanisms are functioning properly. Several scenarios are provided and implemented to validate the overall effectiveness of the proposed framework and to demonstrate the possible use cases.
, Available online
Abstract:
In this paper, a data-based scheme is proposed to solve the optimal tracking problem of autonomous nonlinear switching systems. The system state is forced to track the reference signal by minimizing the performance function. First, the problem is transformed to solve the corresponding Bellman optimality equation in terms of the Q-function (also named as action value function). Then, an iterative algorithm based on adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is developed to find the optimal solution which is totally based on sampled data. The linear-in-parameter (LIP) neural network is taken as the value function approximator. Considering the presence of approximation error at each iteration step, the generated approximated value function sequence is proved to be boundedness around the exact optimal solution under some verifiable assumptions. Moreover, the effect that the learning process will be terminated after a finite number of iterations is investigated in this paper. A sufficient condition for asymptotically stability of the tracking error is derived. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated with three simulation examples.
, Available online
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop a novel global-attention-based neural network (GANN) for vision language intelligence, specifically, image captioning (language description of a given image). As many previous works, an encoder-decoder framework is adopted in our proposed model, in which the encoder is responsible for encoding the region proposal features and extracting global caption feature based on a specially designed module of predicting the caption objects, and the decoder generates captions by taking the obtained global caption feature along with the encoded visual features as inputs for each attention head of the decoder layer. The global caption feature is introduced for the purpose of exploring the latent contributions of extracted region proposals for image captioning, and further helping the decoder better focus on the most relevant proposals so as to extract more accurate visual features in each time step of caption generation. Our GANN architecture is implemented by incorporating the global caption feature into the attention weight calculation phase in the word predication process in each head of the decoder layer. In our experiments, we qualitatively analyzed the proposed model, and quantitatively evaluated several state-of-the-art schemes with GANN on the MS-COCO dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed global attention mechanism for image captioning.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911555
Abstract:
For the complex batch process with characteristics of unequal batch data length, a novel data-driven batch process monitoring method is proposed based on mixed data features analysis and multi-way kernel entropy component analysis (MDFA-MKECA) in this paper. Combining the mechanistic knowledge, different mixed data features of each batch including statistical and thermodynamics entropy features, are extracted to finish data pre-processing. After that, MKECA is applied to reduce data dimensionality and finally establish a monitoring model. The proposed method is applied to a reheating furnace industry process, and the experimental results demonstrate that the MDFA-MKECA method can reduce the calculated amount and effectively provide on-line monitoring of the batch process.
, Available online
Abstract:
Reliability engineering implemented early in the development process has a significant impact on improving software quality. It can assist in the design of architecture and guide later testing, which is beyond the scope of traditional reliability analysis methods. Structural reliability models work for this, but most of them remain tested in only simulation case studies due to lack of actual data. Here we use software metrics for reliability modeling which are collected from source codes of post versions. Through the proposed strategy, redundant metric elements are filtered out and the rest are aggregated to represent the module reliability. We further propose a framework to automatically apply the module value and calculate overall reliability by introducing formal methods. The experimental results from an actual project show that reliability analysis at the design and development stage can be close to the validity of analysis at the test stage through reasonable application of metric data. The study also demonstrates that the proposed methods have good applicability.
, Available online
Abstract:
In computer vision fields, 3D object recognition is one of the most important tasks for many real-world applications. Three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their advantages in 3D object recognition. In this paper, we propose to use the principal curvature directions of 3D objects (using a CAD model) to represent the geometric features as inputs for the 3D CNN. Our framework, namely CurveNet, learns perceptually relevant salient features and predicts object class labels. Curvature directions incorporate complex surface information of a 3D object, which helps our framework to produce more precise and discriminative features for object recognition. Multitask learning is inspired by sharing features between two related tasks, where we consider pose classification as an auxiliary task to enable our CurveNet to better generalize object label classification. Experimental results show that our proposed framework using curvature vectors performs better than voxels as an input for 3D object classification. We further improved the performance of CurveNet by combining two networks with both curvature direction and voxels of a 3D object as the inputs. A Cross-Stitch module was adopted to learn effective shared features across multiple representations. We evaluated our methods using three publicly available datasets and achieved competitive performance in the 3D object recognition task.
, Available online
Abstract:
The purpose of the next Internet of Things (IoT) is that of making available myriad of services to people by high sensing intelligent devices capable of reasoning and real time acting. The convergence of IoT and Multi-Agent Systems provides the opportunity to benefit from the social attitude of agents in order to perform Machine-to-Machine cooperation among smart entities. However, the selection of reliable partners for cooperation represents a hard task in a mobile and federated context, especially because the trustworthiness of devices is largely unreferenced. The issues discussed above can be synthesized by recalling the well known concept of social resilience in IoT systems, i.e. the capability of an IoT network to resist to possible attacks by malicious agent that potentially could infect large areas of the network, spamming unreliable information and/or assuming unfair behaviors. In this sense, social resilience is devoted to face malicious activities of software agents in their social interactions, and do not deal with the correct working of the sensors and other information devices. In this setting, the use of a reputation model can be a practicable and effective solution to form local communities of agents on the basis of their social capabilities. In this paper, we propose a framework for agents operating in an IoT environment, called ResIoT, where the formation of communities for collaborative purposes is performed on the basis of agent reputation. In order to validate our approach, we performed an experimental campaign by means of a simulated framework, which allowed us to verify that, by our approach, devices have not any economic convenience to performs misleading behaviors. Moreover, further experimental results have shown that our approach is able detect the nature of the active agents in the systems (i.e., honest and malicious), with an accuracy of not less than 11% compared to the best competitor tested and highlighting a high resilience with respect to some malicious activities.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003192
Abstract:
This paper investigates the secure synchronization control problem for a class of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with unknown system matrices and intermittent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. For the attack free case, an optimal control law consisting of a feedback control and a compensated feedforward control is proposed to achieve the synchronization, and the feedback control gain matrix is learned by iteratively solving an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE). For considering the attack cases, it is difficult to perform the stability analysis of the synchronization errors by using the existing Lyapunov function method due to the presence of unknown system matrices. In order to overcome this difficulty, a matrix polynomial replacement method is given and it is shown that, the proposed optimal control law can still guarantee the asymptotical convergence of synchronization errors if two inequality conditions related with the DoS attacks hold. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
, Available online
Abstract:
With the continuous improvement of automation, industrial robots have become an indispensable part of automated production lines. They widely used in a number of industrial production activities, such as spraying, welding, handling, etc., and have a great role in these sectors. Recently, the robotic technology is developing towards high precision, high intelligence. Robot calibration technology has a great significance to improve the accuracy of robot. However, it has much work to be done in the identification of robot parameters. The parameter identification work of existing serial and parallel robots is introduced. On the one hand, it summarizes the methods for parameter calibration and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, the application of parameter identification is introduced. This overview has a great reference value for robot manufacturers to choose proper identification method, points further research areas for researchers. Finally, this paper analyzes the existing problems in robot calibration, which may be worth researching in the future.
, Available online
Abstract:
In this paper, denial of service (DoS) attack management for destroying the collaborative estimation in sensor networks and minimizing attack energy from the attacker perspective is studied. In the communication channels between sensors and a remote estimator, the attacker chooses some channels to randomly jam DoS attacks to make their packets randomly dropped. A stochastic power allocation approach composed of three steps is proposed. Firstly, the minimum number of channels and the channel set to be attacked are given. Secondly, a necessary condition and a sufficient condition on the packet loss probabilities of the channels in the attack set are provided for general and special systems, respectively. Finally, by converting the original coupling nonlinear programming problem to a linear programming problem, a method of searching attack probabilities and power to minimize the attack energy is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation examples.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003087
Abstract:
This paper is concerned with the problem of finite-time control for a class of discrete-time networked systems. The measurement output and control input signals are quantized before being transmitted in communication network. The quantization density of the network is assumed to be variable depending on the throughputs of network for the sake of congestion avoidance. The variation of the quantization density modes satisfies persistent dwell-time (PDT) switching which is more general than dwell-time switching in networked channels. By using a quantization-error-dependent Lyapunov function approach, sufficient conditions are given to ensure that the quantized systems are finite-time stable and finite-time bounded with a prescribed \begin{document}${\cal H}_{\infty }$\end{document} performance, upon which a set of controllers depending on the mode of quantization density are designed. In order to show the effectiveness of the designed \begin{document}${\cal H}_{\infty }$\end{document} controller, we apply the developed theoretical results to a numerical example.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911645
Abstract:
Prediction intervals (PIs) for industrial time series can provide useful guidance for workers. Given that the failure of industrial sensors may cause the missing point in inputs, the existing kernel dynamic Bayesian networks (KDBN), serving as an effective method for PIs construction, suffer from high computational load using the stochastic algorithm for inference. This study proposes a variational inference method for the KDBN for the purpose of fast inference, which avoids the time-consuming stochastic sampling. The proposed algorithm contains two stages. The first stage involves the inference of the missing inputs by using a local linearization based variational inference, and based on the computed posterior distributions over the missing inputs the second stage sees a Gaussian approximation for probability over the nodes in future time slices. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a synthetic dataset and a practical dataset of generation flow of blast furnace gas (BFG) are employed with different ratios of missing inputs. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can provide reliable PIs for the generation flow of BFG and it exhibits shorter computing time than the stochastic based one.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003006
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In many traditional non-rigid structure from motion (NRSFM) approaches, the estimation results of part feature points may significantly deviate from their true values because only the overall estimation error is considered in their models. Aimed at solving this issue, a local deviation-constrained-based column-space-fitting approach is proposed in this paper to alleviate estimation deviation. In our work, an effective model is first constructed with two terms: the overall estimation error, which is computed by a linear subspace representation, and a constraint term, which is based on the variance of the reconstruction error for each frame. Furthermore, an augmented Lagrange multipliers (ALM) iterative algorithm is presented to optimize the proposed model. Moreover, a convergence analysis is performed with three steps for the optimization process. As both the overall estimation error and the local deviation are utilized, the proposed method can achieve a good estimation performance and a relatively uniform estimation error distribution for different feature points. Experimental results on several widely used synthetic sequences and real sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm.
, Available online
Abstract:
The movement of pedestrians involves temporal continuity, spatial interactivity, and random diversity. As a result, pedestrian trajectory prediction is rather challenging. Most existing trajectory prediction methods tend to focus on just one aspect of these challenges, ignoring the temporal information of the trajectory and making too many assumptions. In this paper, we propose a recurrent attention and interaction (RAI) model to predict pedestrian trajectories. The RAI model consists of a temporal attention module, spatial pooling module, and randomness modeling module. The temporal attention module is proposed to assign different weights to the input sequence of a target, and reduce the speed deviation of different pedestrians. The spatial pooling module is proposed to model not only the social information of neighbors in historical frames, but also the intention of neighbors in the current time. The randomness modeling module is proposed to model the uncertainty and diversity of trajectories by introducing random noise. We conduct extensive experiments on several public datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms many that are state-of-the-art.
, Available online
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Timed weighted marked graphs are a subclass of timed Petri nets that have wide applications in the control and performance analysis of flexible manufacturing systems. Due to the existence of multiplicities (i.e., weights) on edges, the performance analysis and resource optimization of such graphs represent a challenging problem. In this paper, we develop an approach to transform a timed weighted marked graph whose initial marking is not given, into an equivalent parametric timed marked graph where the edges have unitary weights. In order to explore an optimal resource allocation policy for a system, an analytical method is developed for the resource optimization of timed weighted marked graphs by studying an equivalent net. Finally, we apply the proposed method to a flexible manufacturing system and compare the results with a previous heuristic approach. Simulation analysis shows that the developed approach is superior to the heuristic approach.
, Available online
Abstract:
Pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) are compliant and suitable for robotic devices that have been shown to be effective in assisting patients with neurologic injuries, such as strokes, spinal cord injuries, etc., to accomplish rehabilitation tasks. However, because PMAs have nonlinearities, hysteresis, and uncertainties, etc., complex mechanisms are rarely involved in the study of PMA-driven robotic systems. In this paper, we use nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) and an extension of the echo state network called an echo state Gaussian process (ESGP) to design a tracking controller for a PMA-driven lower limb exoskeleton. The dynamics of the system include the PMA actuation and mechanism of the leg orthoses; thus, the system is represented by two nonlinear uncertain subsystems. To facilitate the design of the controller, joint angles of leg orthoses are forecasted based on the universal approximation ability of the ESGP. A gradient descent algorithm is employed to solve the optimization problem and generate the control signal. The stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed when the ESGP is capable of approximating system dynamics. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the approximation ability of the ESGP and achieve gait pattern training with four healthy subjects.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003090
Abstract:
In this paper we present a CNN based approach for a real time 3D-hand pose estimation from the depth sequence. Prior discriminative approaches have achieved remarkable success but are facing two main challenges: Firstly, the methods are fully supervised hence require large numbers of annotated training data to extract the dynamic information from a hand representation. Secondly, unreliable hand detectors based on strong assumptions or a weak detector which often fail in several situations like complex environment and multiple hands. In contrast to these methods, this paper presents an approach that can be considered as semi-supervised by performing predictive coding of image sequences of hand poses in order to capture latent features underlying a given image without supervision. The hand is modelled using a novel latent tree dependency model (LDTM) which transforms internal joint location to an explicit representation. Then the modeled hand topology is integrated with the pose estimator using data dependent method to jointly learn latent variables of the posterior pose appearance and the pose configuration respectively. Finally, an unsupervised error term which is a part of the recurrent architecture ensures smooth estimations of the final pose. Experiments on three challenging public datasets, ICVL, MSRA, and NYU demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed method which is comparable or better than state-of-the-art approaches.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003009
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This paper discusses a novel rational approximation algorithm of arbitrary-order fractances, which has high order-stability characteristic and wider approximation frequency bandwidth. The fractor has been exploited extensively in various scientific domains. The well-known shortcoming of the existing fractance approximation circuits, such as the oscillation phenomena, is still in great need of special research attention. Motivated by this need, a novel algorithm with high order-stability characteristic and wider approximation frequency bandwidth is introduced. In order to better understand the iterating process, the approximation principle of this algorithm is investigated at first. Next, features of the iterating function and frequency-domain characteristics of the impedance function calculated by this algorithm are researched, respectively. Furthermore, approximation performance comparisons have been made between the corresponding circuit and other types of fractance approximation circuits. Finally, a fractance approximation circuit with the impedance function of negative 2/3-order is designed. The high order-stability characteristic and wider approximation frequency bandwidth are fundamental important advantages, which make our proposed algorithm competitive in practical applications.
, Available online
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Motivated by the converse Lyapunov technique for investigating converse results of semistable switched systems in control theory, this paper utilizes a constructive induction method to identify a cost function for performance gauge of an average, multi-cue multi-choice (MCMC), cognitive decision making model over a switching time interval. It shows that such a constructive cost function can be evaluated through an abstract energy called Lyapunov function at initial conditions. Hence, the performance gauge problem for the average MCMC model becomes the issue of finding such a Lyapunov function, leading to a possible way for designing corresponding computational algorithms via iterative methods such as adaptive dynamic programming. In order to reach this goal, a series of technical results are presented for the construction of such a Lyapunov function and its mathematical properties are discussed in details. Finally, a major result of guaranteeing the existence of such a Lyapunov function is rigorously proved.
, Available online
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This paper investigates two noncooperative-game strategies which may be used to represent a human driver’s steering control behavior in response to vehicle automated steering intervention. The first strategy, namely the Nash strategy is derived based on the assumption that a Nash equilibrium is reached in a noncooperative game of vehicle path-following control involving a driver and a vehicle automated steering controller. The second one, namely the Stackelberg strategy is derived based on the assumption that a Stackelberg equilibrium is reached in a similar context. A simulation study is performed to study the differences between the two proposed noncooperative- game strategies. An experiment using a fixed-base driving simulator is carried out to measure six test drivers’ steering behavior in response to vehicle automated steering intervention. The Nash strategy is then fitted to measured driver steering wheel angles following a model identification procedure. Control weight parameters involved in the Nash strategy are identified. It is found that the proposed Nash strategy with the identified control weights is capable of representing the trend of measured driver steering behavior and vehicle lateral responses. It is also found that the proposed Nash strategy is superior to the classic driver steering control strategy which has widely been used for modeling driver steering control over the past. A discussion on improving automated steering control using the gained knowledge of driver noncooperative-game steering control behavior was made.
, Available online
Abstract:
In today’s modern electric Vehicles, enhancing the Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical (CPS) system’s performance is necessary for the safe maneuverability of the vehicle. As a typical CPS system, the braking system is crucial for the vehicle design and safe control. However, precise state estimation of the brake pressure is desired to perform safe driving with a high degree of autonomy. In this paper, a sensorless state estimation technique of the vehicle’s brake pressure is developed using a deep-learning approach. A Deep Neural Network (DNN) is structured and trained using special deep-learning training techniques, such as, dropout and rectified units. These techniques are utilized to obtain more accurate model for brake pressure state estimation applications. The proposed model is trained using real experimental training data which were collected via conducting real vehicle testing. The vehicle was attached to a chassis dynamometer while the brake pressure data were collected under random driving cycles. Based on these experimental data, the DNN is trained and the performance of the proposed state estimation approach is validated accordingly. The results demonstrate high-accuracy brake pressure state estimation with RMSE of 0.048 MPa.
, Available online
Abstract:
The localized faults of rolling bearings can be diagnosed by its vibration impulsive signals. However, it is always a challenge to extract the impulsive feature under background noise and nonstationary conditions. This paper investigates impulsive signals detection of a single-point defect rolling bearing and presents a novel data-driven detection approach based on dictionary learning. To overcome the effects harmonic and noise components, we propose an autoregressive-minimum entropy deconvolution model to separate harmonic and deconvolve the effect of the transmission path. To address the shortcomings of conventional sparse representation under the changeable operation environment, we propose an approach that combines K-clustering with singular value decomposition (K-SVD) and Split-Bregman to extract impulsive components precisely. Via experiments on synthetic signals and real run-to-failure signals, the excellent performance for different impulsive signals detection verifies the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach. Meanwhile, a comparison with the state-of-the-art methods is illustrated, which shows that the proposed approach can provide more accurate detected impulsive signals.
, Available online
Abstract:
This paper investigates the problem of controlling half-vehicle semi-active suspension system involving a Magnetorheological (MR) damper. This features a hysteretic behavior that is presently captured through the nonlinear Bouc-Wen model. The control objective is to regulate well the heave and the pitch motions of the chassis despite the road irregularities. The difficulty of the control problem lies in the nonlinearity of the system model, the uncertainty of some of its parameters, and the inaccessibility to measurements of the hysteresis internal state variables. Using Lyapunov control design tools, we design two observers to get online estimates of the hysteresis internal states and a stabilizing adaptive state-feedback regulator. The whole adaptive controller is formally shown to meet the desired control objectives. This theoretical result is confirmed by several simulations demonstrating the supremacy of the latter compared to the skyhook control and passive suspension.
, Available online
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This paper proposes a novel sampled-data asynchronous fuzzy output feedback control approach for active suspension systems in restricted frequency domain. In order to better investigate uncertain suspension dynamics, the sampled-data Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy half-car active suspension (HCAS) system is considered, which is further modelled as a continuous system with an input delay. Firstly, considering that the fuzzy system and the fuzzy controller cannot share the identical premises due to the existence of input delay, a reconstructed method is employed to synchronize the time scales of membership functions between the fuzzy controller and the fuzzy system. Secondly, since external disturbances often belong to a restricted frequency range, a finite frequency control criterion is presented for control synthesis to reduce conservatism. Thirdly, given a full information of state variables is hardly available in practical suspension systems, a two-stage method is proposed to calculate the static output feedback control gains. Moreover, an iterative algorithm is proposed to compute the optimum solution. Finally, numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003189
Abstract:
Multi-agent systems are usually equipped with open communication infrastructures to improve interactions efficiency, reliability and sustainability. Although technologically cost-effective, this makes them vulnerable to cyber-attacks with potentially catastrophic consequences. To this end, we present a novel control architecture capable to deal with the distributed constrained regulation problem in the presence of time-delay attacks on the agents’ communication infrastructure. The basic idea consists of orchestrating the interconnected cyber-physical system as a leader-follower configuration so that adequate control actions are computed to isolate the attacked unit before it compromises the system operations. Simulations on a multi-area power system confirm that the proposed control scheme can reconfigure the leader-follower structure in response to denial of-service (DoS) attacks.
, Available online
Abstract:
Filtering is a recursive estimation of hidden states of a dynamic system from noisy measurements. Such problems appear in several branches of science and technology, ranging from target tracking to biomedical monitoring. A commonly practiced approach of filtering with nonlinear systems is Gaussian filtering. The early Gaussian filters used a derivative-based implementation, and suffered from several drawbacks, such as the smoothness requirements of system models and poor stability. A derivative-free numerical approximation-based Gaussian filter, named the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), was introduced in the nineties, which offered several advantages over the derivative-based Gaussian filters. Since the proposition of UKF, derivative-free Gaussian filtering has been a highly active research area. This paper reviews significant developments made under Gaussian filtering since the proposition of UKF. The review is particularly focused on three categories of developments: i) advancing the numerical approximation methods; ii) modifying the conventional Gaussian approach to further improve the filtering performance; and iii) constrained filtering to address the problem of discrete-time formulation of process dynamics. This review highlights the computational aspect of recent developments in all three categories. The performance of various filters are analyzed by simulating them with real-life target tracking problems.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911636
Abstract:
The Möller algorithm is a self-stabilizing minor component analysis algorithm. This research document involves the study of the convergence and dynamic characteristics of the Möller algorithm using the deterministic discrete time (DDT) methodology. Unlike other analysis methodologies, the DDT methodology is capable of serving the distinct time characteristic and having no constraint conditions. Through analyzing the dynamic characteristics of the weight vector, several convergence conditions are drawn, which are beneficial for its application. The performing computer simulations and real applications demonstrate the correctness of the analysis’s conclusions.
, Available online
Abstract:
The paper proposes a novel approach for formation-containment control based on a dynamic event-triggering mechanism for multi-agent systems. The leader-leader and follower-follower communications are reduced by utilizing the distributed dynamic event-triggered framework. We consider two separate sets of design parameters: one set comprising control and dynamic event-triggering parameters for the leaders and a second set similar to the first one with different values for the followers. The proposed algorithm includes two novel stages of co-design optimization to simultaneously compute the two sets of parameters. The design optimizations are convex and use the weighted sum approach to enable a structured trade-off between the formation-containment convergence rate and associated communications. Simulations based on non-holonomic mobile robot multi-agent systems quantify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
, Available online
Abstract:
This paper proposes a static-output-feedback based robust fuzzy wheelbase preview control algorithm for uncertain active suspensions with time delay and finite frequency constraint. Firstly, a Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy augmented model is established to formulate the half-car active suspension system with consideration of time delay, sprung mass variation and wheelbase preview information. Secondly, in view of the resonation between human’s organs and vertical vibrations in the frequency range of 4-8 Hz, a finite frequency control criterion in terms of H norm is developed to improve ride comfort. Meanwhile, other mechanical constraints are also considered and satisfied via generalized H2 norm. Thirdly, in order to maintain the feasibility of the controller despite of some state variables are not online-measured, a two stage approach is adopted to derive a static output feedback controller. Finally, numerical simulation results illustrate the excellent performance of the proposed controller.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003180
Abstract:
In order to improve detection system robustness and reliability, multi-sensor fusion is used in modern air combat. In this paper, a data fusion method based on reinforcement learning is developed for multi-sensors. Initially, the cubic B-spline interpolation is used to solve time alignment problems of multi-source data. Then, the reinforcement learning based data fusion (RLBDF) method is proposed to obtain the fusion results. With the case that the priori knowledge of target is obtained, the fusion accuracy reinforcement is realized by the error between fused value and actual value. Furthermore, the Fisher information is instead used as the reward if the priori knowledge is unable to be obtained. Simulations results verify that the developed method is feasible and effective for the multi-sensor data fusion in air combat.
, Available online
Abstract:
Deadlock resolution strategies based on siphon control are widely investigated. Their computational efficiency largely depends on siphon computation. Mixed-integer programming (MIP) can be utilized for the computation of an emptiable siphon in a Petri net (PN). Based on it, deadlock resolution strategies can be designed without requiring complete siphon enumeration that has exponential complexity. Due to this reason, various MIP methods are proposed for various subclasses of PNs. This work proposes an innovative MIP method to compute an emptiable minimal siphon (EMS) for a subclass of PNs named S4PR. In particular, many particular structural characteristics of EMS in S4PR are formalized as constraints, which greatly reduces the solution space. Experimental results show that the proposed MIP method has higher computational efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed method allows one to determine the liveness of an ordinary S4PR.
, Available online
Abstract:
Necessary and sufficient conditions for the exact controllability and exact observability of a descriptor infinite dimensional system are obtained in the sense of distributional solution. These general results are used to examine the exact controllability and exact observability of the Dzektser equation in the theory of seepage and the exact controllability of wave equation.
, Available online
Abstract:
For a large-scale palmprint identification system, it is necessary to speed up the identification process to reduce the response time and also to have a high rate of identification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel hashing-based technique called orientation field code hashing for fast palmprint identification. By investigating hashing-based algorithms, we first propose a double-orientation encoding method to eliminate the instability of orientation codes and make the orientation codes more reasonable. Secondly, we propose a window-based feature measurement for rapid searching of the target. We explore the influence of parameters related to hashing-based palmprint identification. We have carried out a number of experiments on the Hong Kong PolyU large-scale database and the CASIA palmprint database plus a synthetic database. The results show that on the Hong Kong PolyU large-scale database, the proposed method is about 1.5 times faster than the state-of-the-art ones, while achieves the comparable identification accuracy. On the CASIA database plus the synthetic database, the proposed method also achieves a better performance on identification speed.
, Available online
Abstract:
This paper focuses on a new finite-time convergence disturbance rejection control scheme design for a flexible Timoshenko manipulator subject to extraneous disturbances. To suppress the shear deformation and elastic oscillation, position the manipulator in a desired angle, and ensure the finitetime convergence of disturbances, we develop three disturbance observers (DOs) and boundary controllers. Under the derived DOs-based control schemes, the controlled system is guaranteed to be uniformly bounded stable and disturbance estimation errors converge to zero in a finite time. In the end, numerical simulations are established by finite difference methods to demonstrate the effectiveness of the devised scheme by selecting appropriate parameters.
, Available online
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to assess the operational efficiency of a public bus transportation via a case study from a company in a large city of China by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and Shannon’s entropy. This company operates 37 main routes on the backbone roads. Thus, it plays a significant role in public transportation in the city. According to bus industry norms, an efficiency evaluation index system is constructed from the perspective of both company operation and passenger demands. For passenger satisfaction, passenger waiting time and passenger-crowding degree are considered, and they are undesirable indicators. To describe such indicators, a super-efficient DEA model is constructed. With this model, by using actual data, efficiency is evaluated for each bus route. Results show that the DEA model with Shannon’s entropy being combined achieves more reasonable results. Also, sensitivity analysis is presented. Therefore, the results are meaningful for the company to improve its operations and management.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003201
Abstract:
With the increasing presence of robots in our daily life, there is a strong need and demand for the strategies to acquire a high quality interaction between robots and users by enabling robots to understand users' mood, intention, and other aspects. During human-human interaction, personality traits have an important influence on human behavior, decision, mood, and many others. Therefore, we propose an efficient computational framework to endow the robot with the capability of understanding the user's personality traits based on the user's nonverbal communication cues represented by three visual features including the head motion, gaze, and body motion energy, and three vocal features including voice pitch, voice energy, and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). We used the Pepper robot in this study as a communication robot to interact with each participant by asking questions, and meanwhile, the robot extracts the nonverbal features from each participant's habitual behavior using its on-board sensors. On the other hand, each participant's personality traits are evaluated with a questionnaire. We then train the ridge regression and linear support vector machine (SVM) classifiers using the nonverbal features and personality trait labels from a questionnaire and evaluate the performance of the classifiers. We have verified the validity of the proposed models that showed promising binary classification performance on recognizing each of the Big Five personality traits of the participants based on individual differences in nonverbal communication cues.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003207
Abstract:
In this paper, a deadlock prevention policy for robotic manufacturing cells with uncontrollable and unobservable events is proposed based on a Petri net formalism. First, a Petri net for the deadlock control of such systems is defined. Its admissible markings and first-met inadmissible markings (FIMs) are introduced. Next, place invariants are designed in an integer linear program (ILP) to survive all admissible markings and prohibit all FIMs, keeping the underlying system from reaching deadlocks, livelocks, bad markings, and the markings that may evolve into them via firings of uncontrollable transitions. The ILP also ensures that the obtained deadlock-free supervisor does not observe any unobservable transition. In addition, the supervisor is guaranteed to be admissible and structurally minimal in terms of both control places and added arcs. The condition under which the supervisor is maximally permissive in behavior is also given. Finally, experimental results and comparisons are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003198
Abstract:
Configuration evaluation is a key technology to be considered in the design of multiple aircrafts formation (MAF) configurations with high dynamic properties in engineering applications. This paper deduces the relationship between relative velocity, dynamic safety distance and dynamic adjacent distance of formation members, then divides the formation states into collision-state and matching-state. Meanwhile, probability models are constructed based on the binary normal distribution of relative distance and relative velocity. Moreover, configuration evaluation strategies are studied by quantitatively analyzing the denseness and the basic capabilities according to the MAF collision-state probability and the MAF matching-state probability, respectively. The scale of MAF is grouped into 5 levels, and previous lattice-type structures are extended into four degrees by taking the relative velocities into account to instruct the configuration design under complex task conditions. Finally, hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation and outfield flight test results are presented to verify the feasibility of these evaluation strategies.
, Available online
Abstract:
A fully distributed microgrid system model is presented in this paper. In the user side, two types of load and plug-in electric vehicles are considered to schedule energy for more benefits. The charging and discharging states of the electric vehicles are represented by the zero-one variables with more flexibility. To solve the nonconvex optimization problem of the users, a novel neurodynamic algorithm which combines the neural network algorithm with the differential evolution algorithm is designed and its convergence speed is faster. A distributed algorithm with a new approach to deal with the equality constraints is used to solve the convex optimization problem of the generators which can protect their privacy. Simulation results and comparative experiments show that the model and algorithms are effective.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003111
Abstract:
One of challenging issues on stability analysis of time-delay systems is how to obtain a stability criterion from a matrix-valued polynomial on a time-varying delay. The first contribution of this paper is to establish a necessary and sufficient condition on a matrix-valued polynomial inequality over a certain closed interval. The degree of such a matrix-valued polynomial can be an arbitrary finite positive integer. The second contribution of this paper is to introduce a novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, which includes a cubic polynomial on a time-varying delay, in stability analysis of time-delay systems. Based on the novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and the necessary and sufficient condition on matrix-valued polynomial inequalities, two stability criteria are derived for two cases of the time-varying delay. A well-studied numerical example is given to show that the proposed stability criteria are of less conservativeness than some existing ones.
, Available online
Abstract:
An optimal control strategy of winner-take-all (WTA) model is proposed for target tracking and cooperative competition of multi-UAVs. In this model, firstly, based on the artificial potential field method, the artificial potential field function is improved and the fuzzy control decision is designed to realize the trajectory tracking of dynamic targets. Secondly, according to the finite-time convergence high-order differentiator, a double closed-loop UAV speed tracking controller is designed to realize the speed control and tracking of the target tracking trajectory. Numerical simulation results show that the designed speed tracking controller has the advantages of fast tracking, high precision, strong stability and avoiding chattering. Finally, a cooperative competition scheme of multiple UAVs based on WTA is designed to find the minimum control energy from multiple UAVs and realize the optimal control strategy. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation results show that the model has the fast convergence, high control accuracy, strong stability and good robustness.
, Available online
Abstract:
Embedded systems have numerous applications in everyday life. Petri-net-based Representation for embedded systems (PRES+) is an important methodology for the modeling and analysis of these embedded systems. For a large complex embedded system, the state space explosion is a difficult problem for PRES+ to model and analyze. The Petri net synthesis method allows one to bypass the state space explosion issue. To solve this problem, as well as model and analyze large complex systems, two synthesis methods for PRES+ are presented in this paper. First, the property preservation of the synthesis shared transition set method is investigated. The property preservation of the synthesis shared transition subnet set method is then studied. An abstraction-synthesis-refinement representation method is proposed. Through this representation method, the synthesis shared transition set approach is used to investigate the property preservation of the synthesis shared transition subnet set operation. Under certain conditions, several important properties of these synthetic nets are preserved, namely reachability, timing, functionality, and liveness. An embedded control system model is used as an example to illustrate the effectiveness of these synthesis methods for PRES+.
, Available online
Abstract:
This paper investigates the distributed model predictive control (MPC) problem of linear systems whose network topologies are changeable by the way of inserting new subsystems, disconnecting existing subsystems, or merely modifying the couplings between different subsystems. To equip live systems with the quick response ability when modifying network topology, while keeping a satisfactory dynamic performance, a novel reconfiguration control scheme based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is presented. In this scheme, the local controllers directly influenced by the structure realignment are redesigned in the reconfiguration control. Meanwhile, by employing the powerful ADMM algorithm, the iterative formulas for solving the reconfigured optimization problem are obtained, which significantly accelerate the computation speed and ensure a timely output of the reconfigured optimal control response. Ultimately, the presented reconfiguration scheme is applied to the level control of a benchmark four-tank plant to illustrate its effectiveness and main characteristics.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911801
Abstract:
Random vector functional link networks (RVFL) is a class of single hidden layer neural networks based on a learner paradigm by which some parameters are randomly selected and contains more information due to the direct links between inputs and outputs. In this paper, combining the advantages of RVFL and the ideas of online sequential extreme learning machine (OS-ELM) and initial-training-free online extreme learning machine (ITF-OELM), a novel online learning algorithm which is named as initial-training-free online random vector functional link (ITF-ORVFL) is investigated for training RVFL. Because the idea of ITF-ORVFL comes from OS-ELM and ITF-OELM, the link vector of RVFL can be analytically determined based on sequentially arriving data by ITF-ORVFL with a high learning speed. Besides a novel variable is added to the update formulae of ITF-ORVFL, and the stability for nonlinear systems based on this learning algorithm is guaranteed. The experiment results indicate that the proposed ITF-ORVFL is effective in estimating nonparametric uncertainty.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911729
Abstract:
In this paper, a kind of lateral stability control strategy is put forward about the four wheel independent drive electric vehicle. The design of control system adopts hierarchical structure. Unlike the previous control strategy, this paper introduces a method which is the combination of sliding mode control and optimal allocation algorithm. According to the driver's operation commands (steering angle and speed), the steady state responses of the sideslip angle and yaw rate are obtained. Based on this, the reference model is built. Upper controller adopts the sliding mode control principle to obtain the desired yawing moment demand. Lower controller is designed to satisfy the desired yawing moment demand by optimal allocation of the tire longitudinal forces. Firstly, the optimization goal is built to minimize the actuator cost. Secondly, the weighted least-square method is used to design the tire longitudinal forces optimization distribution strategy under the constraint conditions of actuator and the friction oval. Beyond that, when the optimal allocation algorithm is not applied, a method of axial load ratio distribution is adopted. Finally, CarSim associated with Simulink simulation experiments are designed under the conditions of different velocities and different pavements. The simulation results show that the control strategy designed in this paper has a good following effect comparing with the reference model and the sideslip angle \begin{document}$\beta$\end{document} is controlled within a small rang at the same time. Beyond that, based on the optimal distribution mode, the electromagnetic torque phase of each wheel can follow the trend of the vertical force of the tire, which shows the effectiveness of the optimal distribution algorithm.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911549
Abstract:
To balance the contradiction between higher flexibility and heavier load bearing capacity, we present a novel deformable manipulator which is composed of active rigid joints and deformable links. The deformable link is composed of passive spherical joints with preload forces between socket-ball surfaces. To estimate the load bearing capacity of a deformable link, we present a static force-based model of spherical joint with preload force and analyze the static force propagation in the deformable link. This yields an important result that the load bearing capacity of a spherical joint only depends on its radius, preload force, and static friction coefficient. We further develop a parameter estimation method to estimate the product of preload force and static friction coefficient. The experimental results validate our model. 80.4% of percentage errors on the maximum payload mass prediction are below 15%.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911531
Abstract:
This paper investigates the sliding mode control problem for a class of discrete-time nonlinear networked Markovian jump systems in the presence of probabilistic Denial-of-Service attacks. The communication network via which the data is propagated is unsafe and the malicious adversary can attack the system during state feedback. By considering random Denial-of-Service attacks, a new sliding mode variable is designed, which takes into account the distribution information of the probabilistic attacks. Then, by resorting to Lyapunov theory and stochastic analysis methods, sufficient conditions are established for the existence of the desired sliding mode controller, guaranteeing both reachability of the designed sliding surface and stability of the resulting sliding motion. Finally, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed sliding mode control algorithm.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911720
Abstract:
In a passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) system, the recovery of collided tag signals on a physical layer can enhance identification efficiency. However, frequency drift is very common in UHF RFID systems, and will have an influence on the recovery on the physical layer. To address the problem of recovery with the frequency drift, this paper adopts a radial basis function (RBF) network to separate the collision signals, and decode the signals via FM0 to recovery collided RFID tags. Numerical results show that the method in this paper has better performance of symbol error rate (SER) and separation efficiency compared to conventional methods when frequency drift occurs.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911534
Abstract:
Hand gesture recognition is a popular topic in computer vision and makes human-computer interaction more flexible and convenient. The representation of hand gestures is critical for recognition. In this paper, we propose a new method to measure the similarity between hand gestures and exploit it for hand gesture recognition. The depth maps of hand gestures captured via the Kinect sensors are used in our method, where the 3D hand shapes can be segmented from the cluttered backgrounds. To extract the pattern of salient 3D shape features, we propose a new descriptor–3D Shape Context, for 3D hand gesture representation. The 3D Shape Context information of each 3D point is obtained in multiple scales because both local shape context and global shape distribution are necessary for recognition. The description of all the 3D points constructs the hand gesture representation, and hand gesture recognition is explored via dynamic time warping algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark datasets. The experimental results verify that the proposed method is robust to noise, articulated variations, and rigid transformations. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the comparisons of accuracy and efficiency.
, Available online  , doi: 10.1109/JAS.2019.1911648
Abstract:
The passwords for unlocking the mobile devices are relatively simple, easier to be stolen, which causes serious potential security problems. An important research direction of identity authentication is to establish user behavior models to authenticate users. In this paper, a mobile terminal APP browsing behavioral authentication system architecture which synthesizes multiple factors is designed. This architecture is suitable for users using the mobile terminal APP in the daily life. The architecture includes data acquisition, data processing, feature extraction, and sub model training. We can use this architecture for continuous authentication when the user uses APP at the mobile terminal.
, Available online
Abstract:
Shared control schemes allow a human driver to work with an automated driving agent in driver-vehicle systems while retaining the driver’s abilities to control. The human driver, as an essential agent in the driver-vehicle shared control systems, should be precisely modeled regarding their cognitive processes, control strategies, and decision-making processes. The interactive strategy design between drivers and automated driving agents brings an excellent challenge for human-centric driver assistance systems due to the inherent characteristics of humans. Many open-ended questions arise, such as what proper role of human drivers should act in a shared control scheme? How to make an intelligent decision capable of balancing the benefits of agents in shared control systems? Due to the advent of these attentions and questions, it is desirable to present a survey on the decision making between human drivers and highly automated vehicles, to understand their architectures, human driver modeling, and interaction strategies under the driver-vehicle shared schemes. Finally, we give a further discussion on the key future challenges and opportunities. They are likely to shape new potential research directions.

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

• JCR Impact Factor 2019: 5.129
Rank：Top 17% (11/63), Category of Automation & Control Systems
Quantile: The 1st (SCI Q1)
CiteScore 2019 : 8.3
Rank： Top 9% (Category of Computer Science: Information System) , Top 11% (Category of Control and Systems Engineering), Top 12% (Category of Artificial Intelligence)
Quantile: The 1st (Q1)