Bond distortion effects and electric orders in spiral multiferroic magnets

We study in this paper bond distortion effect on electric polarization in spiral multiferroic magnets based on cluster and chain models. The bond distortion break inversion symmetry and modify the $d$-$p$ hybridization. Consequently, it will affect electric polarization which can be divided into spin-current part and lattice-mediated part. The spin-current polarization can be written in terms of $\vec{e}_{i,j}\times(\vec{e}_{i}\times\vec{e}_{j})$ and the lattice-mediated polarization exists only when the M-O-M bond is distorted. The electric polarization for three-atom M-O-M and four-atom M-O$_{2}$-M clusters is calculated. We also study possible electric ordering in three kinds of chains made of different clusters. We apply our theory to multiferroics cuprates and find that the results are in agreement with experimental observations.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Soft Subdivision Motion Planning for Complex Planar Robots

The design and implementation of theoretically-sound robot motion planning algorithms is challenging. Within the framework of resolution-exact algorithms, it is possible to exploit soft predicates for collision detection. The design of soft predicates is a balancing act between easily implementable predicates and their accuracy/effectivity. In this paper, we focus on the class of planar polygonal rigid robots with arbitrarily complex geometry. We exploit the remarkable decomposability property of soft collision-detection predicates of such robots. We introduce a general technique to produce such a decomposition. If the robot is an m-gon, the complexity of this approach scales linearly in m. This contrasts with the O(m^3) complexity known for exact planners. It follows that we can now routinely produce soft predicates for any rigid polygonal robot. This results in resolution-exact planners for such robots within the general Soft Subdivision Search (SSS) framework. This is a significant advancement in the theory of sound and complete planners for planar robots. We implemented such decomposed predicates in our open-source Core Library. The experiments show that our algorithms are effective, perform in real time on non-trivial environments, and can outperform many sampling-based methods

Building an Omnidirectional 3D Color Laser Ranging System through a Novel Calibration Method

3D color laser ranging technology plays a crucial role in many applications. This paper develops a new omnidirectional 3D color laser ranging system. It consists of a 2D laser rangefinder (LRF), a color camera, and a rotating platform. Both the 2D LRF and the camera rotate with the rotating platform to collect line point clouds and images synchronously. The line point clouds and the images are then fused into a 3D color point cloud by a novel calibration method of a 2D LRF and a camera based on an improved checkerboard pattern with rectangle holes. In the calibration, boundary constraint and mean approximation are deployed to accurately compute the centers of rectangle holes from the raw sensor data based on data correction. Then, the data association between the 2D LRF and the camera is directly established to determine their geometric mapping relationship. These steps make the calibration process simple, accurate, and reliable. The experiments show that the proposed calibration method is accurate, robust to noise, and suitable for different geometric structures, and the developed 3D color laser ranging system has good performance for both indoor and outdoor scenes

Mean-squared displacement and variance for confined Brownian motion

For one-dimension Brownian motion in the confined system with the size $L$, the mean-squared displacement(MSD) defined by $\left \langle (x-x_0)^2 \right\rangle$ should be proportional to $t^{\alpha(t)}$. The power $\alpha(t)$ should range from $1$ to $0$ over time, and the MSD turns from $2Dt$ to $c L^2$, here the coefficient $c$ independent of $t$, $D$ being the diffusion coefficient. The paper aims to quantitatively solve the MSD in the intermediate confinement regime. The key to this problem is how to deal with the propagator and the normalization factor of the Fokker-Planck equation(FPE) with the Dirichlet Boundaries. Applying the Euler-Maclaurin approximation(EMA) and integration by parts for the small $t$, we obtain the MSD being $2Dt(1-\frac{2\sqrt{\xi} }{3\pi\sqrt{\pi}})$, with $t_{ch}=\frac{L^2}{4\pi^2D},\xi\equiv \frac{t}{t_{ch}}$, and the power $\alpha(t)$ being $\frac{1-0.18\sqrt{\xi}}{1-0.12\sqrt{\xi}}$. Further, we analysis the MSD and the power for the $d$-dimension system with $\gamma$-dimension confinement. In the case of $\gamma< d$, there exists the sub-diffusive behavior in the intermediate time. The universal description is consistent with the recent experiments and simulations in the micro-nano systems. Finally, we calculate the position variance(PV) meaning $\left\langle (x-\left\langle x \right\rangle)^2 \right\rangle$. Under the initial condition referring to the different probability density function(PDF) being $p_{0}(x)$, MSD and PV should exhibit different dependencies on time, which reflect corresponding diffusion behaviors.As examples, the paper discusses the representative initial PDFs reading $p_{0}(x)=\delta(x-x_0)$, with the midpoint $x_0=\frac{L}{2}$ and the endpoint $x_0=\epsilon$(or $0^+$).The MSD(equal to PV) reads $2Dt(1-\frac{5\pi^3 Dt}{L^2})$,and $\frac{4}{\pi}(2Dt)[1+\frac{2\sqrt{\pi Dt}}{L}]$for the small $t$,respectively.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure