An overview of non-noble metal electrocatalysts and their associated air cathodes for Mg-air batteries

Abstract Although metal-air batteries (MABs) including Mg-air batteries possess high theoretical energy densities and are promising in energy storage systems, the poor performances and high cost of corresponding electrocatalysts and air cathodes significantly limit practical application. Based on this, the present review gives a summary of the recent progress in the development of cost effective non-noble metal electrocatalysts and their associated air cathodes for MABs, with a particular focus on Mg-air batteries including the aspects of corresponding catalyst synthesis and characterization, catalyzed oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) mechanism, air cathode fabrication and performance validation. The paper also provides an analysis on the issues that challenge the development of advanced electrocatalysts and the associated air cathodes for Mg-air batteries, as well as a discussion of potential research directions that may help resolve these issues and facilitate the practical application of Mg-air batteries

Diff-Transfer: Model-based Robotic Manipulation Skill Transfer via Differentiable Physics Simulation

The capability to transfer mastered skills to accomplish a range of similar yet novel tasks is crucial for intelligent robots. In this work, we introduce $\textit{Diff-Transfer}$, a novel framework leveraging differentiable physics simulation to efficiently transfer robotic skills. Specifically, $\textit{Diff-Transfer}$ discovers a feasible path within the task space that brings the source task to the target task. At each pair of adjacent points along this task path, which is two sub-tasks, $\textit{Diff-Transfer}$ adapts known actions from one sub-task to tackle the other sub-task successfully. The adaptation is guided by the gradient information from differentiable physics simulations. We propose a novel path-planning method to generate sub-tasks, leveraging $Q$-learning with a task-level state and reward. We implement our framework in simulation experiments and execute four challenging transfer tasks on robotic manipulation, demonstrating the efficacy of $\textit{Diff-Transfer}$ through comprehensive experiments. Supplementary and Videos are on the website https://sites.google.com/view/difftransfe

An overview of non-noble metal electrocatalysts and their associated air cathodes for Mg-air batteries

Although metal-air batteries (MABs) including Mg-air batteries possess high theoretical energy densities and are promising in energy storage systems, the poor performances and high cost of corresponding electrocatalysts and air cathodes significantly limit practical application. Based on this, the present review gives a summary of the recent progress in the development of cost effective non-noble metal electrocatalysts and their associated air cathodes for MABs, with a particular focus on Mg-air batteries including the aspects of corresponding catalyst synthesis and characterization, catalyzed oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) mechanism, air cathode fabrication and performance validation. The paper also provides an analysis on the issues that challenge the development of advanced electrocatalysts and the associated air cathodes for Mg-air batteries, as well as a discussion of potential research directions that may help resolve these issues and facilitate the practical application of Mg-air batteries