ARDformer: Agroforestry Road Detection for Autonomous Driving Using Hierarchical Transformer

Road detection is a crucial part of the autonomous driving system, and semantic segmentation is used as the default method for this kind of task. However, the descriptive categories of agroforestry are not directly definable and constrain the semantic segmentation-based method for road detection. This paper proposes a novel road detection approach to overcome the problem mentioned above. Specifically, a novel two-stage method for road detection in an agroforestry environment, namely ARDformer. First, a transformer-based hierarchical feature aggregation network is used for semantic segmentation. After the segmentation network generates the scene mask, the edge extraction algorithm extracts the trail’s edge. It then calculates the periphery of the trail to surround the area where the trail and grass are located. The proposed method is tested on the public agroforestry dataset, and experimental results show that the intersection over union is approximately 0.82, which significantly outperforms the baseline. Moreover, ARDformer is also effective in a real agroforestry environment

Rigid Polyimide Buffering Layer Enabling Silicon Nanoparticles Prolonged Cycling Life for Lithium Storage

Structural design is an effective avenue to alleviate the volume expansion of silicon anode. Surface coating and/or encapsulation shows a significant advantage. However, most coating layers show poor mechanical strength, resulting in fast fading electrochemical performance. In this work, commercial silicon nanoparticles coated with polyimide (PI) film have been synthesized by a simple mechanical stirring process. The polyimide polymer film endows silicon with structural characteristics of intrinsic high ionic conductivity, a stable SEI layer, and structure rigidness. The resulting composites display excellent capacity retention with about 1144 mAh g^–1 after 430 cycles at 1 A g^–1. The LiCoO₂/Si@PI-15% full cell displays a high initial capacity of ∼126 mAh g^–1 based on the cathode mass. After 50 cycles, it delivers 55 mAh g^–1 reversible capacity with an average CE of ∼98% at 140 mA g^–1