Chat-PM: A Class of Composite Hybrid Aerial/Terrestrial Precise Manipulator

This paper concentrates on the development of Chat-PM, a class of composite hybrid aerial/terrestrial manipulator, in concern with composite configuration design, dynamics modeling, motion control and force estimation. Compared with existing aerial or terrestrial mobile manipulators, Chat-PM demonstrates advantages in terms of reachability, energy efficiency and manipulation precision. To achieve precise manipulation in terrestrial mode, the dynamics is analyzed with consideration of surface contact, based on which a cascaded controller is designed with compensation for the interference force and torque from the arm. Benefiting from the kinematic constraints caused by the surface contact, the position deviation and the vehicle vibration are effectively decreased, resulting in higher control precision of the end gripper. For manipulation on surfaces with unknown inclination angles, the moving horizon estimation (MHE) is exploited to obtain the precise estimations of force and inclination angle, which are used in the control loop to compensate for the effect of the unknown surface. Real-world experiments are performed to evaluate the superiority of the developed manipulator and the proposed controllers

Soliton Molecules and Multisoliton States in Ultrafast Fibre Lasers: Intrinsic Complexes in Dissipative Systems

Benefiting from ultrafast temporal resolution, broadband spectral bandwidth, as well as high peak power, passively mode-locked fibre lasers have attracted growing interest and exhibited great potential from fundamental sciences to industrial and military applications. As a nonlinear system containing complex interactions from gain, loss, nonlinearity, dispersion, etc., ultrafast fibre lasers deliver not only conventional single soliton but also soliton bunching with different types. In analogy to molecules consisting of several atoms in chemistry, soliton molecules (in other words, bound solitons) in fibre lasers are of vital importance for in-depth understanding of the nonlinear interaction mechanism and further exploration for high-capacity fibre-optic communications. In this Review, we summarize the state-of-the-art advances on soliton molecules in ultrafast fibre lasers. A variety of soliton molecules with different numbers of soliton, phase-differences and pulse separations were experimentally observed owing to the flexibility of parameters such as mode-locking techniques and dispersion control. Numerical simulations clearly unravel how different nonlinear interactions contribute to formation of soliton molecules. Analysis of the stability and the underlying physical mechanisms of bound solitons bring important insights to this field. For a complete view of nonlinear optical phenomena in fibre lasers, other dissipative states such as vibrating soliton pairs, soliton rains, rogue waves and coexisting dissipative solitons are also discussed. With development of advanced real-time detection techniques, the internal motion of different pulsing states is anticipated to be characterized, rendering fibre lasers a versatile platform for nonlinear complex dynamics and various practical applications

Constrained Decision Transformer for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem from a novel multi-objective optimization perspective and propose the $\epsilon$-reducible concept to characterize problem difficulties. The inherent trade-offs between safety and task performance inspire us to propose the constrained decision transformer (CDT) approach, which can dynamically adjust the trade-offs during deployment. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed method in learning an adaptive, safe, robust, and high-reward policy. CDT outperforms its variants and strong offline safe RL baselines by a large margin with the same hyperparameters across all tasks, while keeping the zero-shot adaptation capability to different constraint thresholds, making our approach more suitable for real-world RL under constraints.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

Soliton Molecules and Multisoliton States in Ultrafast Fibre Lasers: Intrinsic Complexes in Dissipative Systems

Benefiting from ultrafast temporal resolution, broadband spectral bandwidth, as well as high peak power, passively mode-locked fibre lasers have attracted growing interest and exhibited great potential from fundamental sciences to industrial and military applications. As a nonlinear system containing complex interactions from gain, loss, nonlinearity, dispersion, etc., ultrafast fibre lasers deliver not only conventional single soliton but also soliton bunching with different types. In analogy to molecules consisting of several atoms in chemistry, soliton molecules (in other words, bound solitons) in fibre lasers are of vital importance for in-depth understanding of the nonlinear interaction mechanism and further exploration for high-capacity fibre-optic communications. In this Review, we summarize the state-of-the-art advances on soliton molecules in ultrafast fibre lasers. A variety of soliton molecules with different numbers of soliton, phase-differences and pulse separations were experimentally observed owing to the flexibility of parameters such as mode-locking techniques and dispersion control. Numerical simulations clearly unravel how different nonlinear interactions contribute to formation of soliton molecules. Analysis of the stability and the underlying physical mechanisms of bound solitons bring important insights to this field. For a complete view of nonlinear optical phenomena in fibre lasers, other dissipative states such as vibrating soliton pairs, soliton rains, rogue waves and coexisting dissipative solitons are also discussed. With development of advanced real-time detection techniques, the internal motion of different pulsing states is anticipated to be characterized, rendering fibre lasers a versatile platform for nonlinear complex dynamics and various practical applications

Feasibility of GNSS-R Altimetry Using CyGNSS 8-Satellite Constellation Mission Data

Ponencia expuesta en Scientific Assembly of the International Association of Geodesy (2021) celebrado en Beijing del 28 de junio al 2 de juli

CYGNSS Ocean Altimetry: A Status Report

Comunicación expuesta online en el CYGNSS Science Team Summer Meeting celebrado del 27 al 29 de julio de 202

Global Weak Solutions to a General Liquid Crystals System

We prove the global existence of finite energy weak solutions to the general liquid crystals system. The problem is studied in bounded domain of $R^3$ with Dirichlet boundary conditions and the whole space $R^3$

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data