Intelligent unmanned autonomous systems are some of the most important applications of artificial intelligence (AI). The development of such systems can significantly promote innovation in AI technologies. This paper introduces the trends in the development of intelligent unmanned autonomous systems by summarizing the main achievements in each technological platform. Furthermore, we classify the relevant technologies into seven areas, including AI technologies, unmanned vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, service robots, space robots, marine robots, and unmanned workshops/intelligent plants. Current trends and developments in each area are introduced.

With the rapid development of structural determination of target proteins for human diseases, high throughout virtual screening based drug discovery is gaining popularity gradually. In this paper, a fast docking algorithm (H-DOCK) based on hydrogen bond matching and surface shape complementarity was developed. In H-DOCK, firstly a divide-and-conquer strategy based enumeration approach is applied to rank the intermolecular modes between protein and ligand by maximizing their hydrogen bonds matching, then each docked conformation of the ligand is calculated according to the matched hydrogen bonding geometry, finally a simple but effective scoring function reflecting mainly the van der Waals interaction is used to evaluate the docked conformations of the ligand. H-DOCK is tested for rigid ligand docking and flexible one, the latter is implemented by repeating rigid docking for multiple conformations of a small molecule and ranking all together. For rigid ligands, H-DOCK was tested on a set of 271 complexes where there is at least one intermolecular hydrogen bond, and H-DOCK achieved success rate (RMSD<2.0 A) of 91.1%. For flexible ligands, H-DOCK was tested on another set of 93 complexes, where each case was a conformation ensemble containing native ligand conformation as well as 100 decoy ones generated by AutoDock, and the success rate reached 81.7%. The high success rate of H-DOCK indicates that the hydrogen bonding and steric hindrance can grasp the key interaction between protein and ligand. H-DOCK is quite efficient compared with the conventional docking algorithms, and it takes only about 0.14 seconds for a rigid ligand docking and about 8.25 seconds for a flexible one on average. According to the preliminary docking results, it implies that H-DOCK can be potentially used for large scale virtual screening as a pre-filter for a more accurate but less efficient docking algorithm.

A novel butterfly-shaped patch antenna for wireless communication is introduced in this paper. The antenna is designed for wideband wireless communications and radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems. Two symmetrical quasi-circular arms and two symmetrical round holes are incorporated into the patch of a microstrip antenna to expand its bandwidth. The diameter and position of the circular slots are optimized to achieve a wide bandwidth. The validity of the design concept is demonstrated by means of a prototype having a bandwidth of about 40.1%. The return loss of the butterfly-shaped antenna is greater than 10 dB between 4.15 and 6.36 GHz. The antenna can serve simultaneously most of the modern wireless communication standards.

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A systematic optimization model for binding sequence selection in computational enzyme design was developed based on the transition state theory of enzyme catalysis and graph-theoretical modeling. The saddle point on the free energy surface of the reaction system was represented by catalytic geometrical constraints, and the binding energy between the active site and transition state was minimized to reduce the activation energy barrier. The resulting hyperscale combinatorial optimization problem was tackled using a novel heuristic global optimization algorithm, which was inspired and tested by the protein core sequence selection problem. The sequence recapitulation tests on native active sites for two enzyme catalyzed hydrolytic reactions were applied to evaluate the predictive power of the design methodology. The results of the calculation show that most of the native binding sites can be successfully identified if the catalytic geometrical constraints and the structural motifs of the substrate are taken into account. Reliably predicting active site sequences may have significant implications for the creation of novel enzymes that are capable of catalyzing targeted chemical reactions.

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In this paper, a disjunctive cutting-plane-based branch-and-cut algorithm is developed to solve the 0-1 mixedinteger convex nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. In a branch-and-bound framework, the 0-1 MINLP problem is approximated with a 0-1 mixed-integer linear program at each node, and then the lift-and-project technology is used to generate valid cuts to accelerate the branching process. The cut is produced by solving a linear program that is transformed from a projection problem, in terms of the disjunction on a free binary variable, and its dual solutions are applied to lift the cut to become valid throughout the enumeration tree. A strengthening process is derived to improve the coefficients of the cut by imposing integrality on the left free binary variables. Finally, the computational results on four test problems indicate that the added cutting planes can reduce the branching process greatly and show that the proposed algorithm is very promising for largescale 0-1 MINLP problems, because a linear program is always computationally less expensive than a nonlinear program.

Enzyme amino-acid sequences at ligand-binding interfaces are evolutionarily optimized for reactions, and the natural conformation of an enzyme-ligand complex must have a low free energy relative to alternative conformations in native-like or non-native sequences. Based on this assumption, a combined energy function was developed for enzyme design and then evaluated by recapitulating native enzyme sequences at ligand-binding interfaces for 10 enzyme-ligand complexes. In this energy function, the electrostatic interaction between polar or charged atoms at buried interfaces is described by an explicitly orientation-dependent hydrogen-bonding potential and a pairwise-decomposable generalized Born model based on the general side chain in the protein design framework. The energy function is augmented with a pairwise surface-area based hydrophobic contribution for nonpolar atom burial. Using this function, on average, 78% of the amino acids at ligand-binding sites were predicted correctly in the minimum-energy sequences, whereas 84% were predicted correctly in the most-similar sequences, which were selected from the top 20 sequences for each enzyme-ligand complex. Hydrogen bonds at the enzyme-ligand binding interfaces in the 10 complexes were usually recovered with the correct geometries. The binding energies calculated using the combined energy function helped to discriminate the active sequences from a pool of alternative sequences that were generated by repeatedly solving a series of mixed-integer linear programming problems for sequence selection with increasing integer cuts.