Accurate position-force control is a core and challenging problem in robotics, especially for manipulators with redundant DOFs. For example, trajectory tracking based control usually fails for grinding robots due to intolerable impact forces imposed onto the end-effectors. The main difficulties lie in the coupling of motion and contact force, redundancy resolution and physical constraints, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel motionforce control strategy in the framework of projection recurrent neural networks. Tracking error and contact force are described in orthogonal spaces respectively, and by selecting minimizing joint torque as secondary task, the control problem is formulated as a quadratic-programming (QP) problem under multiple constraints. In order to obtain real-time optimization of joint toque which is non-convex relative to joint angles, the original QP is reconstructed in velocity level, where the original objective function is replaced by its time derivative. Then a dynamic neural network which is convergence provable is established to solve the modified QP problem online. This work generalizes projection recurrent neural network based position control of manipulators to that of position-force control, which opens a new avenue to shift position-force control of manipulators from pure control perspective to cross design with both convergence and optimality consideration. Numerical and experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves accurate position-force control, and is capable of handling inequality constraints such as joint angular, velocity and torque limitations, simultaneously, consumption of joint torque can be decreased effectively.

The application of near infrared spectroscopy for quantitative analysis of cotton-polyester textile was investigated in the present work. A total of 214 cotton-polyester fabric samples, covering the range from 0% to 100% cotton were measured and analyzed. Partial least squares and least-squares support vector machine models with all variables as input data were established. Furthermore, successive projection algorithm was used to select effective wavelengths and establish the successive projection algorithm-least-squares support vector machine models, with the comparison of two other effective wavelength selection methods: loading weights analysis and regression coefficient analysis. The calibration and validation results show that the successive projection algorithm-least-squares support vector machine model outperformed not only the partial least squares and least-squares support vector machine models with all variables as inputs, but also the least-squares support vector machine models with loading weights analysis and regression coefficient analysis effective wavelength selection. The root mean squared error of calibration and root mean squared error of prediction values of the successive projection algorithm-least-squares support vector machine regression model with the optimal performance were 0.77% and 1.17%, respectively. The overall results demonstrated that near infrared spectroscopy combined with least-squares support vector machine and successive projection algorithm could provide a simple, rapid, economical and non-destructive method for determining the composition of cotton-polyester textiles.

Adulteration in dairy products has received world-wide attention, and at the same time, near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has proven to be a promising tool for adulteration detection given its advantages of real-time response and non-destructive analysis. Regardless, the accurate and robust NIR model for adulteration detection is hard to achieve in practice. Convolutional neural network (CNN), as a promising deep learning architecture, is difficult to apply to such chemometrics tasks due to the high risk of overfitting, despite the breakthroughs it has made in other fields. In this paper, the ensemble learning method based on CNN estimators was developed to address the overfitting and random initialization problems of CNN and applied to the determination of two infant formula adulterants, namely hydrolyzed leather protein (HLP) and melamine. Moreover, a probabilistic wavelength selection method based on the attention mechanism was proposed for the purpose of finding the best trade-off between the accuracy and the diversity of the sub-models in ensemble learning. The overall results demonstrate that the proposed method yielded superiority regression performance over the comparison methods for both studied data sets, and determination coefficients (R²) of 0.961 and 0.995 were obtained for the HLP and the melamine data sets, respectively.

The ensemble pruning system is an effective machine learning framework that combines several learners as experts to classify a test set. Generally, ensemble pruning systems aim to define a region of competence based on the validation set to select the most competent ensembles from the ensemble pool with respect to the test set. However, the size of the ensemble pool is usually fixed, and the performance of an ensemble pool heavily depends on the definition of the region of competence. In this paper, a dynamic pruning framework called margin-based Pareto ensemble pruning is proposed for ensemble pruning systems. The framework explores the optimized ensemble pool size during the overproduction stage and finetunes the experts during the pruning stage. The Pareto optimization algorithm is used to explore the size of the overproduction ensemble pool that can result in better performance. Considering the information entropy of the learners in the indecision region, the marginal criterion for each learner in the ensemble pool is calculated using margin criterion pruning, which prunes the experts with respect to the test set. The effectiveness of the proposed method for classification tasks is assessed using datasets. The results show that margin-based Pareto ensemble pruning can achieve smaller ensemble sizes and better classification performance in most datasets when compared with state-of-the-art models.

Hyperspectral imaging combined with chemometric approaches is proven to be a powerful tool for the quality evaluation and control of fruits. In fruit defect-detection scenarios, developing an unsupervised anomaly detection framework is vital, as defect sample preparation is labor-intensive and time-consuming, especially for exploring potential defects. In this paper, a spectral–spatial, information-based, self-supervised anomaly detection (SSAD) approach is proposed. During training, an auxiliary classifier is proposed to identify the projection axes of principal component (PC) images that were transformed from the hyperspectral data cubes. In test time, the fully connected layer of the learned classifier was used as a ‘spectral–spatial’ feature extractor, and the feature similarity metric was adopted as the score function for the downstream anomaly evaluation task. The proposed network was evaluated with two fruit data sets: a strawberry data set with bruised, infected, chilling-injured, and contaminated test samples and a blueberry data set with bruised, infected, chilling-injured, and wrinkled samples as anomalies. The results show that the SSAD yielded the best anomaly detection performance (AUC = 0.923 on average) over the baseline methods, and the visualization results further confirmed its advantage in extracting effective ‘spectral–spatial’ latent representation. Moreover, the robustness of SSAD is verified with the data pollution experiment; it performed significantly better than the baselines when a portion of anomalous samples was involved in the training process.