We present a cheap, lightweight, and fast fruit counting pipeline. Our pipeline relies only on a monocular camera, and achieves counting performance comparable to a state-of-the-art fruit counting system that utilizes an expensive sensor suite including a monocular camera, LiDAR and GPS/INS on a mango dataset. Our pipeline begins with a fruit and tree trunk detection component that uses state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It then tracks fruits and tree trunks across images, with a Kalman Filter fusing measurements from the CNN detectors and an optical flow estimator. Finally, fruit count and map are estimated by an efficient fruit-as-feature semantic structure from motion (SfM) algorithm which converts 2D tracks of fruits and trunks into 3D landmarks, and uses these landmarks to identify double counting scenarios. There are many benefits of developing such a low cost and lightweight fruit counting system, including applicability to agriculture in developing countries, where monetary constraints or unstructured environments necessitate cheaper hardware solutions.Index Terms-Robotics in agriculture and forestry, deep learning in robotics and automation, visual tracking, mapping, object detection, segmentation and categorization.

Chemical design and physical control of the molecular aggregation of organic semiconductors have been demonstrated to be efficient strategies to prepare high performance organic solar cells (OSCs). Starting from the non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) BTP-4Cl-C9-12, two NFAs named BTP-4Cl-C9-16 and BTP-4Cl-C9-20 with the alkyl chains of 2-ethylhexyl and 2octyldodecyl attached on the pyrrole rings are synthesized in this work. Through molecular dynamics simulations and experimental characterizations, we show that favorable three-dimensional (3D) honeycomb networks, which are beneficial for charge transport, can be formed in NFAs with the moderate alkyl chain length (BTP-4Cl-C9-12 and BTP-4Cl-C9-16), while two-dimensional honeycomb networks form in BTP-4Cl-C9-20 with long alkyl chains. 1,8-Diiodooctane solvent molecules adsorb on all alkyl chains of NFAs, reducing the adsorption energy between NFAs to promote their intermolecular interactions, especially in NFAs with longer alkyl chains. As a result, the synergistic effect of the 3D network and the appropriate domain size leads to a promising power conversion efficiency of 18.0% and 15.9% in thin-(100 nm) and thick-(300 nm) PM6:BTP-4Cl-C9-16 binary OSCs. This work presents a comprehensive understanding of the interaction between the NFA and solvent additive and provides rational guidance for the molecular design and morphology regulation of NFA-based OSCs toward higher performance.

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Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease impacting patients’ quality of life and imposing heavy societal and economic burdens. Apoptosis of intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) has been considered an early event during the onset of UC and plays a crucial role in disease development. Thus, effectively inhibiting apoptosis of IECs is of critical significance for the clinical management of UC, presenting a potential direction for the research and development of pharmacotherapeutic agents. In recent years, research on the ameliorative effects of natural products on UC through inhibiting IECs apoptosis has attracted increasing attention and made remarkable achievements in ameliorating UC. In this review, we summarized the currently available research about the anti-apoptotic effects of natural products on UC and its mechanisms involving the death-receptor mediated pathway, mitochondrial-dependent pathway, ERS-mediated pathway, MAPK-mediated pathway, NF-κB mediated pathway, P13k/Akt pathway, JAK/STAT3 pathway, and NLRP3/ASC/Caspase-1 pathway. Hopefully, this review may yield useful information about the anti-apoptotic effects of natural products on UC and their potential molecular mechanisms and provide helpful insights for further investigations.

One-stop-shop Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced MRI has similar diagnostic accuracy as MDCT-MRCP and can provide additional benefit in terms of costs and convenience in preoperative evaluation for parent donors.

Research on the lower limb exoskeleton for rehabilitation have developed rapidly to meet the need of the aging population. The rehabilitation exoskeleton system is a wearable man–machine integrated mechanical device. In recent years, the vigorous development of exoskeletal technology has brought new ideas to the rehabilitation and medical treatment of patients with motion dysfunction, which is expected to help such people complete their daily physiological activities or even reshape their motion function. The rehabilitation exoskeletons conduct assistance based on detecting intention, control algorithm, and high-performance actuators. In this paper, we review rehabilitation exoskeletons from the aspects of the overall design, driving unit, intention perception, compliant control, and efficiency validation. We discussed the complexity and coupling of the man–machine integration system, and we hope to provide a guideline when designing a rehabilitation exoskeleton system for the lower limbs of elderly and disabled patients.

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Organic semiconductors based upon conjugated frameworks are often isomeric and display distinct optoelectronic properties within minor structural variation. In this work, two isomeric nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs) ThMeCl-1 and ThMeCl-2, having the methyl and chlorine atoms attached on different positions of the electron-withdrawing end group, are synthesized and incorporated as the third component in ternary solar cells. Although these NFA isomers exhibit a similar bandgap, energy levels, and energy loss in their PM6 based binary devices, the efficiency enhancements in ternary devices differ significantly. Compared to ThMeCl-1, the incorporation of ThMeCl-2 in PM6:C5-16 solar cells enables less energy loss, leading to an extra 0.03 eV open-circuit voltage gain and a maximum efficiency increase from 17.8 to 18.9%. Grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction and molecular dynamics simulations reveal that this is attributed to the versatile intermolecular π−π stacking forms between ThMeCl-2 and the host NFA, which result in improved charge transport and suppressed recombination. This work provides a rational guidance for controlling the molecular packing in ternary systems to prepare high performance organic photovoltaics.