Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

With the increasing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian applications, critical safety issues need to be specially considered in order to make better and wider use of them. UAVs are usually employed to work in hazardous and complex environments, which may seriously threaten the safety and reliability of UAVs. Therefore, the safety and reliability of UAVs are becoming imperative for development of advanced intelligent control systems. The key challenge now is the lack of fully autonomous and reliable control techniques in face of different operation conditions and sophisticated environments. Further development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems is required to be reliable in the presence of system component faults and to be insensitive to model uncertainties and external environmental disturbances. This thesis research aims to design and develop novel control schemes for UAVs with consideration of all the factors that may threaten their safety and reliability. A novel adaptive sliding mode control (SMC) strategy is proposed to accommodate model uncertainties and actuator faults for an unmanned quadrotor helicopter. Compared with the existing adaptive SMC strategies in the literature, the proposed adaptive scheme can tolerate larger actuator faults without stimulating control chattering due to the use of adaptation parameters in both continuous and discontinuous control parts. Furthermore, a fuzzy logic-based boundary layer and a nonlinear disturbance observer are synthesized to further improve the capability of the designed control scheme for tolerating model uncertainties, actuator faults, and unknown external disturbances while preventing overestimation of the adaptive control parameters and suppressing the control chattering effect. Then, a cost-effective fault estimation scheme with a parallel bank of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is proposed to accurately estimate actuator fault magnitude and an active fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework is established for a closed-loop quadrotor helicopter system. Finally, a reconfigurable control allocation approach is combined with adaptive SMC to achieve the capability of tolerating complete actuator failures with application to a modified octorotor helicopter. The significance of this proposed control scheme is that the stability of the closed-loop system is theoretically guaranteed in the presence of both single and simultaneous actuator faults

WPU-Net: Boundary Learning by Using Weighted Propagation in Convolution Network

Deep learning has driven a great progress in natural and biological image processing. However, in material science and engineering, there are often some flaws and indistinctions in material microscopic images induced from complex sample preparation, even due to the material itself, hindering the detection of target objects. In this work, we propose WPU-net that redesigns the architecture and weighted loss of U-Net, which forces the network to integrate information from adjacent slices and pays more attention to the topology in boundary detection task. Then, the WPU-net is applied into a typical material example, i.e., the grain boundary detection of polycrystalline material. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we propose a new method for object tracking between adjacent slices, which can effectively reconstruct 3D structure of the whole material. Finally, we present a material microscopic image dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in image processing for material science.Comment: technical repor

Sub-6GHz 4G/5G Conformal Glasses Antennas

© 2013 IEEE. The difficulty of antenna design applied to glasses is that the structure of glasses is too single, and the space available for antenna design is greatly limited. In this background, the integrated design of 4G antennas and 5G antennas applied to glasses is proposed in this paper. The most important highlight of this design is that it makes full use of the limited three-dimensional space structure provided by glasses and achieves the perfect combination of the antenna and glasses in the physical structure. Specifically, two antennas for 4G communication are arranged on two glasses frames, and four antennas for 5G communication are arranged on two glasses legs. In this way, we can make full use of the space provided by the glasses to design antennas and ensure that there is a certain distance between the 4G antennas and 5G antennas so that the performance of both 4G antennas and 5G antennas can be guaranteed. The 4G antenna consists of a loop structure printed on the frame and leg of the glasses and a parasitic branch strip printed on the front of the leg of the glasses. The resonance modes of the 4G antenna are mainly loop, monopole, and dipole modes, which can cover two 4G bands of 0.824-0.96 GHz and 1.71-2.69 GHz. Each 5G antenna mainly comes from the open slot mode etched on the metal ground surface of an FR4 substrate of the glasses leg. In addition, the slot antennas operate in two 5G bands of 3.3-3.6 GHz and 4.8-5.0 GHz. Finally, the glasses and the antennas are fabricated based on FR4 substrates and measured. The measured results show that the proposed antennas perform well and have the potential to be used in 4G/5G communications through glasses

(E)-2-Fluoro-N′-(4-nitro­benzyl­idene)benzo­hydrazide

In the title hydrazone compound, C14H10FN3O3, the dihedral angle between the two substituted benzene rings is 13.7 (3)°. The mol­ecule exists in a trans configuration with respect to the central methyl­idene unit. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked through inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming chains along the a axis