Advances in Robotics, Automation and Control

The book presents an excellent overview of the recent developments in the different areas of Robotics, Automation and Control. Through its 24 chapters, this book presents topics related to control and robot design; it also introduces new mathematical tools and techniques devoted to improve the system modeling and control. An important point is the use of rational agents and heuristic techniques to cope with the computational complexity required for controlling complex systems. Through this book, we also find navigation and vision algorithms, automatic handwritten comprehension and speech recognition systems that will be included in the next generation of productive systems developed by man

Roadmap on Superoscillations

Superoscillations are band-limited functions with the counterintuitive property that they can vary arbitrarily faster than their fastest Fourier component, over arbitrarily long intervals. Modern studies originated in quantum theory, but there were anticipations in radar and optics. The mathematical understanding—still being explored—recognises that functions are extremely small where they superoscillate; this has implications for information theory. Applications to optical vortices, sub-wavelength microscopy and related areas of nanoscience are now moving from the theoretical and the demonstrative to the practical. This Roadmap surveys all these areas, providing background, current research, and anticipating future developments

Roadmap on superoscillations

Superoscillations are band-limited functions with the counterintuitive property that they can vary arbitrarily faster than their fastest Fourier component, over arbitrarily long intervals. Modern studies originated in quantum theory, but there were anticipations in radar and optics. The mathematical understanding—still being explored—recognises that functions are extremely small where they superoscillate; this has implications for information theory. Applications to optical vortices, sub-wavelength microscopy and related areas of nanoscience are now moving from the theoretical and the demonstrative to the practical. This Roadmap surveys all these areas, providing background, current research, and anticipating future developments

Information Theory in Molecular Evolution: From Models to Structures and Dynamics

This Special Issue collects novel contributions from scientists in the interdisciplinary field of biomolecular evolution. Works listed here use information theoretical concepts as a core but are tightly integrated with the study of molecular processes. Applications include the analysis of phylogenetic signals to elucidate biomolecular structure and function, the study and quantification of structural dynamics and allostery, as well as models of molecular interaction specificity inspired by evolutionary cues

Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications

This book focuses on new sensing technologies, measurement techniques, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Specifically, the book briefly describes the potential of smart sensors in the aforementioned applications, collecting 24 articles selected and published in the Special Issue “Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications”. We proposed this topic, being aware of the pivotal role that smart sensors can play in the improvement of healthcare services in both acute and chronic conditions as well as in prevention for a healthy life and active aging. The articles selected in this book cover a variety of topics related to the design, validation, and application of smart sensors to healthcare

Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Methods for Astrophysical Flows in Multi-physics Applications

In engineering applications, discontinuous Galerkin methods (DG) have been proven to be a powerful and flexible class of high order methods for problems in computational fluid dynamics. However, the potential benefits of DG for applications in astrophysical contexts is still relatively unexplored in its entirety. To this day, a decent number of studies surveying DG for astrophysical flows have been conducted. But the adoption of DG by the astrophysics community is just beginning to gain traction and integration of DG into established, multi-physics simulation frameworks for comprehensive astrophysical modeling is still lacking. It is our firm believe, that the full potential of novel approaches for numerically solving the fluid equations only shows under the pressure of real-world simulations with all aspects of multi-physics, challenging flow configurations, resolution and runtime constraints, and efficiency metrics on high-performance systems involved. Thus, we see the pressing need to propel DG from the well-trodden path of cataloguing test results under "optimal" laboratory conditions towards the harsh and unforgiving environment of large-scale astrophysics simulations. Consequently, the core of this work is the development and deployment of a robust DG scheme solving the ideal magneto-hydrodynamics equations with multiple species on three-dimensional Cartesian grids with adaptive mesh refinement. We chose to implement DG within the venerable simulation framework FLASH, with a specific focus on multi-physics problems in astrophysics. This entails modifications of the vanilla DG scheme to make it fit seamlessly within FLASH in such a way that all other physics modules can be naturally coupled without additional implementation overhead. A key ingredient is that our DG scheme uses mean value data organized into blocks - the central data structure in FLASH. Having the opportunity to work on mean values, allows us to rely on a rock-solid, monotone Finite Volume (FV) scheme as "backup" whenever the high order DG method fails in cases when the flow gets too harsh. Finding ways to combine the two schemes in a fail-safe manner without loosing primary conservation while still maintaining high order accuracy for smooth, well-resolved flows involves a series of careful considerations, which we document in this thesis. The result of our work is a novel shock capturing scheme - a hybrid between FV and DG - with smooth transitions between low and high order fluxes according to solution smoothness estimators. We present extensive validations and test cases, specifically its interaction with multi-physics modules in FLASH such as (self-)gravity and radiative transfer. We also investigate the benefits and pitfalls of integrating end-to-end entropy stability into our numerical scheme, with special focus on highly compressible turbulent flows and shocks. Our implementation of DG in FLASH allows us to conduct preliminary yet comprehensive astrophysics simulations proving that our new solver is ready for assessments and investigations by the astrophysics community

Many-body physics meets quantum computation

Quantum computers are built directly from units that follow the laws of quantum mechanics. This allows them to perform computational tasks that are intractable on classical computers. There is an intricate interplay between the fields of quantum computing and many-body physics. First of all, we may gain a better understanding of quantum many-body systems by simulating them on quantum computers. We contribute towards this goal by designing and testing an explicit method for the quantum simulation of the Heisenberg anti-ferromagnet on the kagome lattice. Conversely, as quantum computers are scaled up, they themselves become many-body systems. Hence, we may gain a better understanding of quantum computers by using analytical techniques from many-body physics. We do so by studying the system-size dependence of the decoherence rate in the single-reservoir pure dephasing model. We determine the conditions under which this dependence scales quadratically, rather than linearly with the number of qubits. This difference in system-size staling is especially important for quantum computers with many qubits. Additionally, we study the effects that perturbations of the register-bath interaction have on decoherence-free subspaces. We find that a linear response to these perturbations is not a property of decoherence-free subspaces but is in fact generic for any register subspace. We derive a concise formula for the quadratic, leading order response. This formula can be used to identify the situations where decoherence-free subspaces work well in practice