Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems are one of the most rapidly developing, highest level and most practical applied unmanned aerial systems. Collision avoidance and trajectory planning are the ...core areas of any UAV system. However, there are theoretical and practical problems associated with the existing methods. To manage these problems, this paper presents an optimized artificial potential field (APF) algorithm for multi-UAV operation in 3-D dynamic space. The classic APF algorithm is restricted to single UAV trajectory planning and usually fails to guarantee the avoidance of collisions. To overcome this challenge, a method is proposed with a distance factor and jump strategy to solve common problems, such as unreachable targets, and ensure that the UAV will not collide with any obstacles. The method considers the UAV companions as dynamic obstacles to realize collaborative trajectory planning. Furthermore, the jitter problem is solved using the dynamic step adjustment method. Several resolution scenarios are illustrated. The method has been validated in quantitative test simulation models and satisfactory results were obtained in a simulated urban environment.
Over the past decades, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have achieved outstanding performance in military, commercial and civilian applications. UAVs are increasingly appearing in the form of swarms or ...formations to meet higher mission requirements. Communication plays an important role in UAV swarm control and coordination. The communication architecture defines how information is exchanged between UAVs or between UAVs and the central control center. Routing protocols help provide reliable end-to-end data transmission. Therefore, it is particularly important to design UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols with high performance and stability. This review article details four communication architectures including the advantages and disadvantages. Applicable scenarios are also discussed. In addition, a systematic overview and feasibility research of routing protocols are presented in this paper. To spur further research, the open research issues of UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols are also investigated.
Human gut microbiota plays critical roles in physiology and disease. Our understanding of ecological principles that govern the dynamics and resilience of this highly complex ecosystem remains ...rudimentary. This knowledge gap becomes more problematic as new approaches to modifying this ecosystem, such as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), are being developed as therapeutic interventions. Here we present an ecological framework to understand the efficacy of FMT in treating conditions associated with a disrupted gut microbiota, using the recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection as a prototype disease. This framework predicts several key factors that determine the efficacy of FMT. Moreover, it offers an efficient algorithm for the rational design of personalized probiotic cocktails to decolonize pathogens. We analyze data from both preclinical mouse experiments and a clinical trial of FMT to validate our theoretical framework. The presented results significantly improve our understanding of the ecological principles of FMT and have a positive translational impact on the rational design of general microbiota-based therapeutics.
In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient, yet robust multiresolution approach to texture classification-binary rotation invariant and noise tolerant (BRINT). The proposed approach is very fast ...to build, very compact while remaining robust to illumination variations, rotation changes, and noise. We develop a novel and simple strategy to compute a local binary descriptor based on the conventional local binary pattern (LBP) approach, preserving the advantageous characteristics of uniform LBP. Points are sampled in a circular neighborhood, but keeping the number of bins in a single-scale LBP histogram constant and small, such that arbitrarily large circular neighborhoods can be sampled and compactly encoded over a number of scales. There is no necessity to learn a texton dictionary, as in methods based on clustering, and no tuning of parameters is required to deal with different data sets. Extensive experimental results on representative texture databases show that the proposed BRINT not only demonstrates superior performance to a number of recent state-of-the-art LBP variants under normal conditions, but also performs significantly and consistently better in presence of noise due to its high distinctiveness and robustness. This noise robustness characteristic of the proposed BRINT is evaluated quantitatively with different artificially generated types and levels of noise (including Gaussian, salt and pepper, and speckle noise) in natural texture images.
The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is an efficient random search algorithm based on swarm intelligence for solving optimization problems. It has the advantages of easy implementation, fast ...convergence, strong optimization ability and good robustness. However, the performance of DE is very sensitive to the design of different operators and the setting of control parameters. To solve these key problems, this paper proposes an improved self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm with a shuffled frog-leaping strategy (SFSADE). It innovatively incorporates the idea of the shuffled frog-leaping algorithm into DE, and at the same time, it cleverly introduces a new strategy of classification mutation, and also designs a new adaptive adjustment mechanism for control parameters. In addition, we have carried out a large number of simulation experiments on the 25 benchmark functions of CEC 2005 and two nonparametric statistical tests to comprehensively evaluate the performance of SFSADE. Finally, the results of simulation experiments and nonparametric statistical tests show that SFSADE is very effective in improving DE, and significantly improves the overall diversity of the population in the process of dynamic evolution. Compared with other advanced DE variants, its global search speed and optimization performance also has strong competitiveness.
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Trajectory data can objectively reflect the moving law of moving objects. Therefore, trajectory prediction has high application value. Hurricanes often cause incalculable losses of life and property, ...trajectory prediction can be an effective means to mitigate damage caused by hurricanes. With the popularization and wide application of artificial intelligence technology, from the perspective of machine learning, this paper trains a trajectory prediction model through historical trajectory data based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. An improved LSTM (ILSTM) trajectory prediction algorithm that improves the prediction of the simple LSTM is proposed, and the Kalman filter is used to filter the prediction results of the improved LSTM algorithm, which is called LSTM-KF. Through simulation experiments of Atlantic hurricane data from 1851 to 2016, compared to other LSTM and ILSTM algorithms, it is found that the LSTM-KF trajectory prediction algorithm has the lowest prediction error and the best prediction effect.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Anti-ship missile coordinated attack mission planning is a complex multi-objective optimization problem with multiple combinations of platforms, strong decision-making constraints, and tightly ...coupled links. To avoid the coupling disorder between path planning and firepower distribution and improve the efficiency of coordinated attack mission planning, a fire-power distribution model under the conditions of path planning is established from the perspective of decoupling optimization and the algorithm is implemented. First, we establish reference coordinate system of firepower distribution to clarify the refer-ence direction of firepower distribution and divide the area of firepower distribution; then, we construct an index table of mem-bership of firepower distribution to obtain alternative firepower distribution plans; finally, the fitness function of firepower distri-bution is established based on damage income, missile loss, ratio of efficiency and cost of firepower distribution, and the mean square deviation of the number of missiles used, and the alternatives are sorted to obtain the optimal firepower distribu-tion plan. According to two simulation experiments, the method in this paper can effectively solve the many-to-many firepower distribution problem of coupled path planning. Under the premise of ensuring that no path crossing occurs, the optimal global solution can be obtained, and the operability and timeli-ness are good.
The problem of collision avoidance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) group is studied in this paper. A collision avoidance method of UAV group formation based on second-order consensus algorithm ...and improved artificial potential field is proposed. Based on the method, the UAV group can form a predetermined formation from any initial state and fly to the target position in normal flight, and can avoid collision according to the improved smooth artificial potential field method when encountering an obstacle. The UAV group adopts the “leader–follower” strategy, that is, the leader UAV is the controller and flies independently according to the mission requirements, while the follower UAV follows the leader UAV based on the second-order consensus algorithm and formations gradually form during the flight. Based on the second-order consensus algorithm, the UAV group can achieve formation maintenance easily and the Laplacian matrix used in the algorithm is symmetric for an undirected graph. In the process of obstacle avoidance, the improved artificial potential field method can solve the jitter problem that the traditional artificial potential field method causes for the UAV and avoids violent jitter. Finally, simulation experiments of two scenarios were designed to verify the collision avoidance effect and formation retention effect of static obstacles and dynamic obstacles while the two UAV groups fly in opposite symmetry in the dynamic obstacle scenario. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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The existing methods in fine-grained visual categorization focus on integrating multiple deep CNN models or complicated attention mechanism, resulting in increasing cumbersome networks. In addition, ...most methods rely on part annotations which requires expensive expert guidance. In this paper, without extra annotation, we propose a novel part fusion network (PFNet) to effectively fuse discriminative image parts for classification. More specifically, PFNet consists of a part feature extractor to extract part features and a two-level classification network to utilize part-level and image-level features simultaneously. Part-level features are trained with the weighted part loss, which embeds a weighting mechanism based on different parts’ characteristics. Easy parts, hard parts and background parts are proposed and discriminatively used for classification. Moreover, part-level features are fused to form an image-level feature so as to introduce global supervision and generate final predictions. Experiments on three popular benchmark datasets show that our framework achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art. Code is available at
https://github.com/MichaelLiang12/PFNet-FGVC
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In this paper, we study the problem of conflict detection and resolution for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. Specially, we propose a distributed conflict detection and resolution method for ...multi-UAVs in formation based on consensus algorithm and strategy coordination. When encountering threat swarms, the UAVs in one swarm act as one unit and are together treated as one control object. Each swarm in conflict selects three candidate collision avoidance maneuvers from the preset strategy pool, generates the corresponding planned trajectories with an uncertainty trajectory modeling, and then broadcasts and shares them. All of the swarms in conflict coordinate and determine an optimal combination of strategies. When a collision is imminent, the primary strategy is activated. Each swarm adopts a "leader-follower" strategy, where the leader UAV is regarded as the controller and flies independently, and the others follow the leader UAV. During motion, a decentralized consensus algorithm is adopted for agents to converge to their positions for the desired formation and to maintain a stable geometric configuration. A temporal and spatially integrated conflict-detection model is improved, especially for UAV swarms. A token-allocation strategy is especially improved for distributed coordination to resolve the partial knowledge of the airspace condition. Damping of the coordination is proposed to address data dropouts and transmission delays. Two typical scenarios are conducted to test the methodology proposed in this paper. The simulation result demonstrates the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed methodology.