PAC: A Novel Self-Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Controller for Micro Aerial Vehicles

There exists an increasing demand for a flexible and computationally efficient controller for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) due to a high degree of environmental perturbations. In this work, an evolving neuro-fuzzy controller, namely Parsimonious Controller (PAC) is proposed. It features fewer network parameters than conventional approaches due to the absence of rule premise parameters. PAC is built upon a recently developed evolving neuro-fuzzy system known as parsimonious learning machine (PALM) and adopts new rule growing and pruning modules derived from the approximation of bias and variance. These rule adaptation methods have no reliance on user-defined thresholds, thereby increasing the PAC's autonomy for real-time deployment. PAC adapts the consequent parameters with the sliding mode control (SMC) theory in the single-pass fashion. The boundedness and convergence of the closed-loop control system's tracking error and the controller's consequent parameters are confirmed by utilizing the LaSalle-Yoshizawa theorem. Lastly, the controller's efficacy is evaluated by observing various trajectory tracking performance from a bio-inspired flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (BI-FWMAV) and a rotary wing micro aerial vehicle called hexacopter. Furthermore, it is compared to three distinctive controllers. Our PAC outperforms the linear PID controller and feed-forward neural network (FFNN) based nonlinear adaptive controller. Compared to its predecessor, G-controller, the tracking accuracy is comparable, but the PAC incurs significantly fewer parameters to attain similar or better performance than the G-controller.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in Information Science Journal 201

Data-driven Soft Sensors in the Process Industry

In the last two decades Soft Sensors established themselves as a valuable alternative to the traditional means for the acquisition of critical process variables, process monitoring and other tasks which are related to process control. This paper discusses characteristics of the process industry data which are critical for the development of data-driven Soft Sensors. These characteristics are common to a large number of process industry fields, like the chemical industry, bioprocess industry, steel industry, etc. The focus of this work is put on the data-driven Soft Sensors because of their growing popularity, already demonstrated usefulness and huge, though yet not completely realised, potential. A comprehensive selection of case studies covering the three most important Soft Sensor application fields, a general introduction to the most popular Soft Sensor modelling techniques as well as a discussion of some open issues in the Soft Sensor development and maintenance and their possible solutions are the main contributions of this work

Evolving Ensemble Fuzzy Classifier

The concept of ensemble learning offers a promising avenue in learning from data streams under complex environments because it addresses the bias and variance dilemma better than its single model counterpart and features a reconfigurable structure, which is well suited to the given context. While various extensions of ensemble learning for mining non-stationary data streams can be found in the literature, most of them are crafted under a static base classifier and revisits preceding samples in the sliding window for a retraining step. This feature causes computationally prohibitive complexity and is not flexible enough to cope with rapidly changing environments. Their complexities are often demanding because it involves a large collection of offline classifiers due to the absence of structural complexities reduction mechanisms and lack of an online feature selection mechanism. A novel evolving ensemble classifier, namely Parsimonious Ensemble pENsemble, is proposed in this paper. pENsemble differs from existing architectures in the fact that it is built upon an evolving classifier from data streams, termed Parsimonious Classifier pClass. pENsemble is equipped by an ensemble pruning mechanism, which estimates a localized generalization error of a base classifier. A dynamic online feature selection scenario is integrated into the pENsemble. This method allows for dynamic selection and deselection of input features on the fly. pENsemble adopts a dynamic ensemble structure to output a final classification decision where it features a novel drift detection scenario to grow the ensemble structure. The efficacy of the pENsemble has been numerically demonstrated through rigorous numerical studies with dynamic and evolving data streams where it delivers the most encouraging performance in attaining a tradeoff between accuracy and complexity.Comment: this paper has been published by IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System

Multi-time-horizon Solar Forecasting Using Recurrent Neural Network

The non-stationarity characteristic of the solar power renders traditional point forecasting methods to be less useful due to large prediction errors. This results in increased uncertainties in the grid operation, thereby negatively affecting the reliability and increased cost of operation. This research paper proposes a unified architecture for multi-time-horizon predictions for short and long-term solar forecasting using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The paper describes an end-to-end pipeline to implement the architecture along with the methods to test and validate the performance of the prediction model. The results demonstrate that the proposed method based on the unified architecture is effective for multi-horizon solar forecasting and achieves a lower root-mean-squared prediction error compared to the previous best-performing methods which use one model for each time-horizon. The proposed method enables multi-horizon forecasts with real-time inputs, which have a high potential for practical applications in the evolving smart grid.Comment: Accepted at: IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE 2018), 7 pages, 5 figures, code available: sakshi-mishra.github.i

Modeling Financial Time Series with Artificial Neural Networks

Financial time series convey the decisions and actions of a population of human actors over time. Econometric and regressive models have been developed in the past decades for analyzing these time series. More recently, biologically inspired artificial neural network models have been shown to overcome some of the main challenges of traditional techniques by better exploiting the non-linear, non-stationary, and oscillatory nature of noisy, chaotic human interactions. This review paper explores the options, benefits, and weaknesses of the various forms of artificial neural networks as compared with regression techniques in the field of financial time series analysis.CELEST, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center (SBE-0354378); SyNAPSE program of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (HR001109-03-0001