Autonomous exploration is an important application of multi-vehicle systems, where a team of networked robots are coordinated to explore an unknown environment collaboratively. This technique has earned significant research interest due to its usefulness in search and rescue, fault detection and monitoring, localization and mapping, etc. In this paper, a novel cooperative exploration strategy is proposed for multiple mobile robots, which reduces the overall task completion time and energy costs compared to conventional methods. To efficiently navigate the networked robots during the collaborative tasks, a hierarchical control architecture is designed which contains a high-level decision making layer and a low-level target tracking layer. The proposed cooperative exploration approach is developed using dynamic Voronoi partitions, which minimizes duplicated exploration areas by assigning different target locations to individual robots. To deal with sudden obstacles in the unknown environment, an integrated deep reinforcement learning based collision avoidance algorithm is then proposed, which enables the control policy to learn from human demonstration data and thus improve the learning speed and performance. Finally, simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Absolute stability attracted much attention in the sixties. Several stability conditions for loops with slope-restricted nonlinearities were developed. Results such as the Circle Criterion and the Popov Criterion form part of the core curriculum for students of control. Moreover, the equivalence of results obtained by different techniques, specifically Lyapunov and Popov's stability theories, led to one of the most important results in control engineering: the KYP Lemma.For Lurye 1 systems this work culminated in the class of multipliers proposed by O'Shea in 1966 and formalised by Zames and Falb in 1968. The superiority of this class was quickly and widely accepted. Nevertheless the result was ahead of its time as graphical techniques were preferred in the absence of readily available computer optimization. Its first systematic use as a stability criterion came twenty years after the initial proposal of the class. A further twenty years have been required to develop a proper understanding of the different techniques that can be used. In this long gestation some significant knowledge has been overlooked or forgotten. Most significantly, O'Shea's contribution and insight is no longer acknowledged; his papers are barely cited despite his original parameterization of the class.This tutorial paper aims to provide a clear and comprehensive introduction to the topic from a user's viewpoint. We review the main results: the stability theory, the properties of the multipliers (including their phase properties, phase-equivalence results and the issues associated with causality), and convex searches. For clarity of exposition we restrict our attention to continuous time multipliers for single-input single-output results. Nevertheless we include several recent significant developments by the authors and others. We illustrate all these topics using an example proposed by O'Shea himself.

In this paper we develop and analyse convex searches for Zames-Falb multipliers. We present two different approaches: Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) and Finite Impulse Response (FIR) multipliers. The set of FIR multipliers is complete in that any IIR multipliers can be phase-substituted by an arbitrarily large order FIR multiplier. We show that searches in discrete-time for FIR multipliers are effective even for large orders. As expected, the numerical results provide the best 2stability results in the literature for slope-restricted nonlinearities. Finally, we demonstrate that the discrete-time search can provide an effective method to find suitable continuous-time multipliers.

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a b s t r a c tThe Kalman conjecture is known to be true for third-order continuous-time systems. We show that it is false in general for second-order discrete-time systems by construction of counterexamples with stable periodic solutions. We discuss a class of second-order discrete-time systems for which it is true provided the nonlinearity is odd, but false in general. This has strong implications for the analysis of saturated systems.

Blade bearings, also termed pitch bearings, are joint components of wind turbines, which can slowly pitch blades at desired angles to optimize electrical energy output. The failure of blade bearings can heavily reduce energy production, so blade bearing fault diagnosis is vitally important to prevent costly repair and unexpected failure. However, the main difficulties in diagnosing low-speed blade bearings are that the weak fault vibration signals are masked by many noise disturbances and the effective vibration data is very limited.To address these problems, this paper firstly deals with a naturally damaged large-scale and low-speed blade bearing which was in operation on a wind farm for over 15 years. Two case studies are conducted to collect the vibration data under the manual rotation condition and the motor driving condition. Then, a method called the empirical wavelet thresholding is applied to remove heavy noise and extract weak fault signals.The diagnostic results show that the proposed method can be an effective tool to diagnose naturally damaged large-scale wind turbine blade bearings.

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