Disturbance exists everywhere in most real networks and systems, which in most cases have a negative effect on the system performance. Disturbance can be modeled from environment interference, measurement noise, friction, load variation of mechanical and electrical systems, and so on. With the rapid development of modern engineering systems, high-precision control has become a priority,…

An Unmanned System refers to the autonomous agent possessing the capability of basic sensing, communication, data processing and actuation. Formation control of unmanned systems has become one of the most active topics in the past decade. The objective is to drive multiple agents to achieve particular tasks cooperatively. Usually, appropriate reference positions or distances are…

Traditional rigid-bodied robots have few degrees of freedom and large stiffness, which may bring limitations in some applications. Recently, more and more scholars pay attention to the soft and flexibility properties of living beings. The concept of bionic soft robotics is proposed and becomes a hot research topic. The main characteristics of the soft robots…

Recently, solar steam and vapor generation has attracted attention as a promising prospect in desalination, sterilization and chemical purification. Tremendous progress has been achieved in absorber designs and thermal management. However, in all the previous designs, because of the minimized optical loss and heat conduction loss, losses related to convection and conduction start to dominate.…

For autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), one of the most important issues is path tracking. Conventionally, steering and velocity control are generally two typical aspects in path tracking problem. Steering control is discussed in this manuscript because it is important to path tracking and related to vehicle lateral stability. Most of the existing algorithms are developed…

As a core communication device, the mobile phone is increasingly popular in our daily lives. A wide variety of functional units and friendly operating systems make mobile phones eminently suitable for smart technological applications, and mobile phones have also attracted the interest of scientists. Recently, sensing applications at multiple scales, such as personal, group, and…

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) designed for plateau missions are usually installed with high span chord ratio wings, which provide more lifting force at a relatively low airspeed. Such UAVs, however, tend to lose their maneuverability. Hence, they usually need a larger turning radius and are unable to maintain altitude during sharp slope turning, as…

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) designed for plateau missions are usually installed with high span chord ratio wings, which provides more lifting force at a relatively low airspeed. The UAVs employ high span chord ratio wings, however, tend to lose their maneuverability. Hence, they usually need larger turning radius and unable to maintain the altitude…

To meet the demands of 2020, the 5G research has attracted global attention and made remarkable progress. 5G will be the first meaningful unified wideband mobile communication system. A recent research has systematically overviewed the latest progress on the 5G research and highlighted the network architecture and several promising techniques which could be employed in…

Big Data presents scientists with unfolding opportunities, including, for instance, the possibility of discovering heterogeneous characteristics in the population leading to the development of personalized treatments and highly individualized services. But ever-expanding data sets introduce new challenges in terms of statistical analysis, bias sampling, computational costs, noise accumulation, spurious correlations, and measurement errors. The era…

A recent study demonstrates the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth’s averaged surface temperature during centuries. This provides a new clue to reveal the phenomenon of global warming in recent years. Their work, entitled “Periodicities of solar activity and the surface temperature variation of the Earth and…

Protocol conformance and performance testing are two branches of testing designed to determine compliance and performance of protocol implementations to their standard. Dr. CHE Xiaoping and Dr. MAAG Stephane from Laboratory UMR 5157 of French Centre national de la recherché scientifique (CNRS) focus on converging these two kinds of testing in a same formal approach.…

Mobile hand-held consumer electronic products have a rapid growing market today, witnessed by the popularity of Apple products. Most people make their first contact to internet, not by a PC, rather by a smart phone. The phone is no longer a phone, but it provides various functions for communication and for entertainment. Not only we…

With the emergence of metamaterials and transformation optics in the past few years, invisibility has become a scientific possibility that has attracted sustainable research interest. Recently, a review paper, entitled “Invisibility cloak from forward design to inverse design”, published in SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, 2013, Vol. 56, reviewed design methodologies and experimental developments of the…

Owing to the prevalence of multicore processors, more and more programs are written in a multi-threaded style to improve performance. However, associated concurrency errors have become an inconvenient cause of system faults. The research group from State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computers, Wuhan University, focused on finding methods to improve the trustworthiness…

COMPASS uses the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Inclined Geosynchronous Satellite Orbit (IGSO) satellites, which are more suitable for regional services. Its constellation is composed of 14 satellites, including 5 GEO, 5 IGSO satellites and 4 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites. As of 2012, 13 satellites have been launched. Except for G2 (unusable) and M1…