Robo-centric ESDF: A Fast and Accurate Whole-body Collision Evaluation Tool for Any-shape Robotic Planning

For letting mobile robots travel flexibly through complicated environments, increasing attention has been paid to the whole-body collision evaluation. Most existing works either opt for the conservative corridor-based methods that impose strict requirements on the corridor generation, or ESDF-based methods that suffer from high computational overhead. It is still a great challenge to achieve fast and accurate whole-body collision evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Robo-centric ESDF (RC-ESDF) that is pre-built in the robot body frame and is capable of seamlessly applied to any-shape mobile robots, even for those with non-convex shapes. RC-ESDF enjoys lazy collision evaluation, which retains only the minimum information sufficient for whole-body safety constraint and significantly speeds up trajectory optimization. Based on the analytical gradients provided by RC-ESDF, we optimize the position and rotation of robot jointly, with whole-body safety, smoothness, and dynamical feasibility taken into account. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments verified the reliability and generalizability of our method.Comment: Accepted at IROS 202

Large-scale identification of odorant-binding proteins and chemosensory proteins from expressed sequence tags in insects

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Insect odorant binding proteins (OBPs) and chemosensory proteins (CSPs) play an important role in chemical communication of insects. Gene discovery of these proteins is a time-consuming task. In recent years, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) of many insect species have accumulated, thus providing a useful resource for gene discovery.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed a computational pipeline to identify OBP and CSP genes from insect ESTs. In total, 752,841 insect ESTs were examined from 54 species covering eight Orders of Insecta. From these ESTs, 142 OBPs and 177 CSPs were identified, of which 117 OBPs and 129 CSPs are new. The complete open reading frames (ORFs) of 88 OBPs and 123 CSPs were obtained by electronic elongation. We randomly chose 26 OBPs from eight species of insects, and 21 CSPs from four species for RT-PCR validation. Twenty two OBPs and 16 CSPs were confirmed by RT-PCR, proving the efficiency and reliability of the algorithm. Together with all family members obtained from the NCBI (OBPs) or the UniProtKB (CSPs), 850 OBPs and 237 CSPs were analyzed for their structural characteristics and evolutionary relationship.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>A large number of new OBPs and CSPs were found, providing the basis for deeper understanding of these proteins. In addition, the conserved motif and evolutionary analysis provide some new insights into the evolution of insect OBPs and CSPs. Motif pattern fine-tune the functions of OBPs and CSPs, leading to the minor difference in binding sex pheromone or plant volatiles in different insect Orders.</p

MobileVLM : A Fast, Strong and Open Vision Language Assistant for Mobile Devices

We present MobileVLM, a competent multimodal vision language model (MMVLM) targeted to run on mobile devices. It is an amalgamation of a myriad of architectural designs and techniques that are mobile-oriented, which comprises a set of language models at the scale of 1.4B and 2.7B parameters, trained from scratch, a multimodal vision model that is pre-trained in the CLIP fashion, cross-modality interaction via an efficient projector. We evaluate MobileVLM on several typical VLM benchmarks. Our models demonstrate on par performance compared with a few much larger models. More importantly, we measure the inference speed on both a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 CPU and an NVIDIA Jeston Orin GPU, and we obtain state-of-the-art performance of 21.5 tokens and 65.3 tokens per second, respectively. Our code will be made available at: https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/MobileVLM.Comment: Tech Repor

High-risk HPV prevalence and genotype distribution among women in Liaocheng, Shandong Province, China from 2016 to 2022

Human papilloma virus (HPV) infection and its associated disease are major problems affecting millions of individuals around the world. The distribution of HPV genotypes is specific to different areas and different populations. Therefore, understanding the prevalence and genotype distribution of HPV in different populations in different geographical regions is essential to optimize HPV vaccination strategies and to maximize vaccine effects. In this study, 34,076 women from January 2016 to July 2022 were retrospectively analyzed at Liaocheng People's Hospital. Of these, 7540 women were high-risk HPV positive and the infection rate was 22.13%. The top ten genotypes were as follows in descending order: HPV16, HPV52, HPV58, HPV53, HPV39, HPV59, HPV66, HPV51, HPV18, and HPV56 and the least frequent genotypes were, in order, HPV 26, HPV45, and HPV82. The HPV16 positive infection rate was 25.37% and was reduced with the increase in the number of individuals who had undergone HPV screening. The HPV52 infection rate increased with increasing numbers of individuals undergoing HPV screening, and then remained unchanged. The proportion of 20–29-year-olds among all positive women began to decrease since the vaccine was available in 2018. The 30–39-year-old group accounted for the highest percentage of positive women, and the 50–59-year-old group of HPV-positive women with cervical cancer accounted for most infections. This study confirmed that HPV16, HPV52, HPV 58, and HPV53 is widely distributed in this population and the total HR-HPV infection rate remains high in this region. Our findings indicate that prevention of HPV infection in this region still faces important challenges

Balancing Herbal Medicine and Functional Food for Prevention and Treatment of Cardiometabolic Diseases through Modulating Gut Microbiota

It has become apparent that gut microbiota is closely associated with cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs), and alteration in microbiome compositions is also linked to the host environment. Next generation sequencing (NGS) has facilitated in-depth studies on the effects of herbal medicine and functional food on gut microbiota. Both herbal medicine and functional food contain fiber, polyphenols and polysaccharides, exerting prebiotics-like activities in the prevention and treatment of CMDs. The administrations of herbal medicine and functional food lead to increased the abundance of phylum Bacteroidetes, and genus Akkermansia, Bifidobacteria, Lactobacillus, Bacteroides and Prevotella, while reducing phylum Firmicutes and Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio in gut. Both herbal medicine and functional food interact with gut microbiome and alter the microbial metabolites including short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), bile acids (BAs) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which are now correlated with metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes (T2D), obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). In addition, trimethylamine (TMA)-N-oxide (TMAO) is recently linked to atherosclerosis (AS) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risks. Moreover, gut-organs axes may serve as the potential strategy for treating CMDs with the intervention of herbal medicine and functional food. In summary, a balance between herbal medicine and functional food rich in fiber, polyphenols and polysaccharides plays a vital role in modulating gut microbiota (phylum Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio, and genus Akkermansia, Bifidobacteria, Lactobacillus, Bacteroides and Prevotella) through SCFAs, BAs, LPS and TMAO signaling regarding CMDs. Targeting gut-organs axes may serve as a new therapeutic strategy for CMDs by herbal medicine and functional food in the future. This review aims to summarize the balance between herbal medicine and functional food utilized for the prevention and treatment of CMDs through modulating gut microbiota

TMRT observations of 26 pulsars at 8.6 GHz

Integrated pulse profiles at 8.6~GHz obtained with the Shanghai Tian Ma Radio Telescope (TMRT) are presented for a sample of 26 pulsars. Mean flux densities and pulse width parameters of these pulsars are estimated. For eleven pulsars these are the first high-frequency observations and for a further four, our observations have a better signal-to-noise ratio than previous observations. For one (PSR J0742-2822) the 8.6~GHz profiles differs from previously observed profiles. A comparison of 19 profiles with those at other frequencies shows that in nine cases the separation between the outmost leading and trailing components decreases with frequency, roughly in agreement with radius-to-frequency mapping, whereas in the other ten the separation is nearly constant. Different spectral indices of profile components lead to the variation of integrated pulse profile shapes with frequency. In seven pulsars with multi-component profiles, the spectral indices of the central components are steeper than those of the outer components. For the 12 pulsars with multi-component profiles in the high-frequency sample, we estimate the core width using gaussian fitting and discuss the width-period relationship.Comment: 33 pages, 49 figures, 5 Tables; accepted by Ap