Volume 26 (2016): Edizione 2 (June 2016)

The main objective of this article is to present the state of the art concerning approximate controllability of dynamic systems in infinite-dimensional spaces. The presented investigation focuses on obtaining sufficient conditions for approximate controllability of various types of dynamic systems using Schauder’s fixed-point theorem. We describe the results of approximate controllability for nonlinear impulsive neutral fuzzy stochastic differential equations with nonlocal conditions, impulsive neutral functional evolution integro-differential systems, stochastic impulsive systems with control-dependent coefficients, nonlinear impulsive differential systems, and evolution systems with nonlocal conditions and semilinear evolution equation.

Fractional descriptor reduced-order nonlinear observers for a class of fractional descriptor continuous-time nonlinear systems are proposed. Sufficient conditions for the existence of the observers are established. The design procedure for the observers is given and demonstrated on a numerical example.

This paper concerns the problem of designing an EID-based robust output-feedback modified repetitive-control system (ROFMRCS) that provides satisfactory aperiodic-disturbance rejection performance for a class of plants with time-varying structured uncertainties. An equivalent-input-disturbance (EID) estimator is added to the ROFMRCS that estimates the influences of all types of disturbances and compensates them. A continuous-discrete two-dimensional model is built to describe the EID-based ROFMRCS that accurately presents the features of repetitive control, thereby enabling the control and learning actions to be preferentially adjusted. A robust stability condition for the closed-loop system is given in terms of a linear matrix inequality. It yields the parameters of the repetitive controller, the output-feedback controller, and the EID-estimator. Finally, a numerical example demonstrates the validity of the method.

A path planning problem for a heterogeneous vehicle is considered. Such a vehicle consists of two parts which have the ability to move individually, but one of them has a shorter range and is therefore required to keep in a close distance to the main vehicle. The objective is to devise an optimal path of minimal length under the condition that at least one part of the heterogeneous system visits all desired waypoints exactly once. Two versions of the problem are considered. One assumes that the order in which the waypoints are visited is known a priori. In such a case we show that the optimal path can be found by solving a mixed-integer second-order cone problem. The second version assumes that the order in which the waypoints are visited is not known a priori, but can be optimized so as to shorten the length of the path. Two approaches to solve this problem are presented and evaluated with respect to computational complexity.

Object manipulation usually requires dexterity, encoded as the ability to roll, which is very difficult to achieve with robotic hands based on point contact models (subject to holonomic constraints). As an alternative for dexterous manipulation, deformable contact with hemispherical shape fingertips has been proposed to yield naturally a rolling constraint. It entails dexterity at the expense of dealing with normal and tangential forces, as well as more elaborated models and control schemes. Furthermore, the essential feature of the quality of grasp can be addressed with this type of robot hands, but it has been overlooked for deformable contact. In this paper, a passivity-based controller that considers an optimal grasping measure is proposed for robotic hands with hemispherical deformable fingertips, to manipulate circular dynamic objects. Optimal grasping that minimizes the contact wrenches is achieved through fingertip rolling until normal forces pass through the center of mass of the object, aligning the relative angle between these normal forces. The case of a circular object is developed in detail, though our proposal can be extended to objects with an arbitrary shape that admit a local decomposition by a circular curvature. Simulation and experimental results show convergence under various conditions, wherein rolling and tangent forces become instrumental to achieve such a quality of grasp.

Essential ingredients for robust control are the ability to cope with different types of system behavior following modeling imperfections and the ability to assure a certain performance level. In this paper, we propose to use an actuator fault-tolerant control law to govern, during experiments, the stabilization of a bicycle robot with an inertial wheel in order to take into account unmodeled uncertainty introduced by using a linearized model in an LQR fashion. Our proposal is illustrated by signal plots and the values of performance indices obtained from a set of experiments.

The main purpose of this contribution is the control of both torsional and axial vibrations occurring along a rotary oilwell drilling system. The model considered consists of a wave equation coupled to an ordinary differential equation (ODE) through a nonlinear function describing the rock-bit interaction. We propose a systematic method to design feedback controllers guaranteeing ultimate boundedness of the system trajectories and leading consequently to the suppression of harmful dynamics. The proposal of a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional provides stability conditions stated in terms of the solution of a set of linear and bilinear matrix inequalities (LMIs, BMIs). Numerical simulations illustrate the efficiency of the obtained control laws.

A new dynamic programming based parallel algorithm adapted to on-board heterogeneous computers for simulation based trajectory optimization is studied in the context of “high-performance sailing”. The algorithm uses a new discrete space of continuously differentiable functions called the multi-splines as its search space representation. A basic version of the algorithm is presented in detail (pseudo-code, time and space complexity, search space auto-adaptation properties). Possible extensions of the basic algorithm are also described. The presented experimental results show that contemporary heterogeneous on-board computers can be effectively used for solving simulation based trajectory optimization problems. These computers can be considered micro high performance computing (HPC) platforms-they offer high performance while remaining energy and cost efficient. The simulation based approach can potentially give highly accurate results since the mathematical model that the simulator is built upon may be as complex as required. The approach described is applicable to many trajectory optimization problems due to its black-box represented performance measure and use of OpenCL.

A single-server queueing system with an infinite buffer is considered. The service of a customer is possible only in the presence of at least one unit of energy, and during the service the number of available units decreases by one. New units of energy arrive in the system at random instants of time if the finite buffer for maintenance of energy is not full. Customers are impatient and leave the system without service after a random amount of waiting time. Such a queueing system describes, e.g., the operation of a sensor node which harvests energy necessary for information transmission from the environment. Aiming to minimize the loss of customers due to their impatience (and maximize the throughput of the system), a new strategy of control by providing service is proposed. This strategy suggests that service temporarily stops if the number of customers or units of energy in the system becomes zero. The server is switched off (is in sleep mode) for some time. This time finishes (the server wakes up) if both the number of customers in the buffer and the number of energy units reach some fixed threshold values or when the number of energy units reaches some threshold value and there are customers in the buffer. Arrival flows of customers and energy units are assumed to be described by an independent Markovian arrival process. The service time has a phase-type distribution. The system behavior is described by a multi-dimensional Markov chain. The generator of this Markov chain is derived. The ergodicity condition is presented. Expressions for key performance measures are given. Numerical results illustrating the dependence of a customer’s loss probability on the thresholds defining the discipline of waking up the server are provided. The importance of the account of correlation in arrival processes is numerically illustrated.

This paper considers a discrete-time queueing system in which an arriving customer can decide to follow a last come first served (LCFS) service discipline or to become a negative customer that eliminates the one at service, if any. After service completion, the server can opt for a vacation time or it can remain on duty. Changes in the vacation times as well as their associated distribution are thoroughly studied. An extensive analysis of the system is carried out and, using a probability generating function approach, steady-state performance measures such as the first moments of the busy period of the queue content and of customers delay are obtained. Finally, some numerical examples to show the influence of the parameters on several performance characteristics are given.

Internet shopping has been one of the most common online activities, carried out by millions of users every day. As the number of available offers grows, the difficulty in getting the best one among all the shops increases as well. In this paper we propose an integer linear programming (ILP) model and two heuristic solutions, the MinMin algorithm and the cellular processing algorithm, to tackle the Internet shopping optimization problem with delivery costs. The obtained results improve those achieved by the state-of-the-art heuristics, and for small real case scenarios ILP delivers exact solutions in a reasonable amount of time.

We introduce a new n-ary λ similarity classifier that is based on a new n-ary λ-averaging operator in the aggregation of similarities. This work is a natural extension of earlier research on similarity based classification in which aggregation is commonly performed by using the OWA-operator. So far λ-averaging has been used only in binary aggregation. Here the λ-averaging operator is extended to the n-ary aggregation case by using t-norms and t-conorms. We examine four different n-ary norms and test the new similarity classifier with five medical data sets. The new method seems to perform well when compared with the similarity classifier.

In order to effectively retrieve a large database of images, a method of creating an image retrieval system CBIR (contentbased image retrieval) is applied based on a binary index which aims to describe features of an image object of interest. This index is called the binary signature and builds input data for the problem of matching similar images. To extract the object of interest, we propose an image segmentation method on the basis of low-level visual features including the color and texture of the image. These features are extracted at each block of the image by the discrete wavelet frame transform and the appropriate color space. On the basis of a segmented image, we create a binary signature to describe the location, color and shape of the objects of interest. In order to match similar images, we provide a similarity measure between the images based on binary signatures. Then, we present a CBIR model which combines a signature graph and a self-organizing map to cluster and store similar images. To illustrate the proposed method, experiments on image databases are reported, including COREL,Wang and MSRDI.

The K3M thinning algorithm is a general method for image data reduction by skeletonization. It had proved its feasibility in most cases as a reliable and robust solution in typical applications of thinning, particularly in preprocessing for optical character recognition. However, the algorithm had still some weak points. Since then K3M has been revised, addressing the best known drawbacks. This paper presents a modified version of the algorithm. A comparison is made with the original one and two other thinning approaches. The proposed modification, among other things, solves the main drawback of K3M, namely, the results of thinning an image after rotation with various angles.

In this work, a modified version of the elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) algorithm for face recognition is introduced. First, faces are detected by using a fuzzy skin detector based on the RGB color space. Then, the fiducial points for the facial graph are extracted automatically by adjusting a grid of points to the result of an edge detector. After that, the position of the nodes, their relation with their neighbors and their Gabor jets are calculated in order to obtain the feature vector defining each face. A self-organizing map (SOM) framework is shown afterwards. Thus, the calculation of the winning neuron and the recognition process are performed by using a similarity function that takes into account both the geometric and texture information of the facial graph. The set of experiments carried out for our SOM-EBGM method shows the accuracy of our proposal when compared with other state-of the-art methods.

The paper discusses methods of data mining for prediction of air pollution. Two tasks in such a problem are important: generation and selection of the prognostic features, and the final prognostic system of the pollution for the next day. An advanced set of features, created on the basis of the atmospheric parameters, is proposed. This set is subject to analysis and selection of the most important features from the prediction point of view. Two methods of feature selection are compared. One applies a genetic algorithm (a global approach), and the other-a linear method of stepwise fit (a locally optimized approach). On the basis of such analysis, two sets of the most predictive features are selected. These sets take part in prediction of the atmospheric pollutants PM10, SO2, NO2 and O3. Two approaches to prediction are compared. In the first one, the features selected are directly applied to the random forest (RF), which forms an ensemble of decision trees. In the second case, intermediate predictors built on the basis of neural networks (the multilayer perceptron, the radial basis function and the support vector machine) are used. They create an ensemble integrated into the final prognosis. The paper shows that preselection of the most important features, cooperating with an ensemble of predictors, allows increasing the forecasting accuracy of atmospheric pollution in a significant way.

Currently existing solutions rarely protect message integrity, authenticity and user anonymity without burdening the user with details of key management. To address this problem, we present Aldeon-a protocol for anonymous group conversations in a peer-to-peer system. The efficiency of Aldeon is based on a novel tree synchronization algorithm, which is proposed and discussed in this paper. By using this algorithm, a significant reduction in the number of exchanged messages is achieved. In the paper, the formal definition of the proposed hash branch function and the proof of its efficiency are presented.

In recent years, FCA has received significant attention from research communities of various fields. Further, the theory of FCA is being extended into different frontiers and augmented with other knowledge representation frameworks. In this backdrop, this paper aims to provide an understanding of the necessary mathematical background for each extension of FCA like FCA with granular computing, a fuzzy setting, interval-valued, possibility theory, triadic, factor concepts and handling incomplete data. Subsequently, the paper illustrates emerging trends for each extension with applications. To this end, we summarize more than 350 recent (published after 2011) research papers indexed in Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Scopus, SpringerLink, and a few authoritative fundamental papers.