Road surfaces in Taiwan, as well as other developed countries, often experience structural failures, such as patches, bumps, longitudinal and lateral cracking, and potholes, which cause discomfort and pose direct safety risks to motorists. To minimize damage to vehicles from pavement defects or provide the corresponding comfortable ride promotion strategy later, in this study, we developed a pavement defect detection system using a deep learning perception scheme for implementation on Xilinx Edge AI platforms. To increase the detection distance and accuracy of pavement defects, two cameras with different fields of view, at ${70}^{\circ }$ and ${30}^{\circ }$, respectively, were used to capture the front views of a car, and then the YOLOv3 (you only look once, version 3) model was employed to recognize the pavement defects, such as potholes, cracks, manhole covers, patches, and bumps. In addition, to promote continuous pavement defect recognition rate, a tracking-via-detection strategy was employed, which first detects pavement defects in each frame and then associates them to different frames using the Kalman filter method. Thus, the average detection accuracy of the pothole category could reach 71%, and the miss rate was about 29%. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed detection strategy, experiments were conducted on an established Taiwan pavement defect image dataset (TPDID), which is the first dataset for Taiwan pavement defects. Moreover, different AI methods were used to detect the pavement defects for quantitative comparative analysis. Finally, a field-programmable gate-array-based edge computing platform was used as an embedded system to implement the proposed YOLOv3-based pavement defect detection system; the execution speed reached 27.8 FPS while maintaining the accuracy of the original system model.

This work presents an application of self-attention networks for cryptocurrency trading. Cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile and unpredictable. Thus, cryptocurrency trading is challenging and involves higher risks than trading traditional financial assets such as stocks. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for cryptocurrency trading. The proposed trading system contains a self-attention network trained using an actor-critic DRL algorithm. Cryptocurrency markets contain hundreds of assets, allowing greater investment diversification, which can be accomplished if all the assets are analyzed against one another. Self-attention networks are suitable for dealing with the problem because the attention mechanism can process long sequences of data and focus on the most relevant parts of the inputs. Transaction fees are also considered in formulating the studied problem. Systems that perform trades in high frequencies cannot overlook this issue, since, after many trades, small fees can add up to significant expenses. To validate the proposed approach, a DRL environment is built using data from an important cryptocurrency market. We test our method against a state-of-the-art baseline in two different experiments. The experimental results show the proposed approach can obtain higher daily profits and has several advantages over existing methods.

This study focuses on presenting a development trend from the perspective of data-oriented evidence, especially open data and technologies, as those numbers can verify and prove current technology trends and user information requirements. According to the practical progress of Dr. What-Info I and II, this paper continues to develop Dr. What-Info III. Moreover, big data technology, the MapReduce paralleled decrement mechanism of the cloud information agent CEOntoIAS, which is supported by a Hadoop-like framework, Software R, and time series analysis are adopted to enhance the precision, reliability, and integrity of cloud information. Furthermore, the proposed system app receives a collective satisfaction score of 80% in terms of Quesenbery’s 5Es and Nielsen ratings. In addition, the verification results of the interface design show that the human-machine interface of our proposed system can meet important design preferences and provide approximately optimal balance. The top-n experiment shows that the top-5 recommendations would be better for solving the traditional tradeoff between output quality and processing time. Finally, the system effectiveness experiments indicate that the proposed system receives an overall up-to-standard function rate of 87.5%, and such recommendations provide this system with high information correctness and user satisfaction. Although there is plenty of room for improvement in experience, the feasibility of this service architecture has been proven.

This work presents a new concept for selecting restoration plans in power distribution systems using the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. The GRA is used to analyze the preference ranking of each restoration plan, and the AHP is adopted to deal with assessing the weighting values of each objective function in a rational way. The proposed decision analysis framework can be applied to assist distribution system operators to make right decisions during a power system restoration process. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a numerical example. The test results show that the proposed method can rank each restoration plan in a quantitative way and obtain a preferable restoration plan correctly.

Accurate distance estimation is a requirement for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to provide drivers with safety-related functions such as adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance. Radars and lidars can be used for providing distance information; however, they are either expensive or provide poor object information compared to image sensors. In this study, we propose a lightweight convolutional deep learning model that can extract object-specific distance information from monocular images. We explore a variety of training and five structural settings of the model and conduct various tests on the KITTI dataset for evaluating seven different road agents, namely, person, bicycle, car, motorcycle, bus, train, and truck. Additionally, in all experiments, a comparison with the Monodepth2 model is carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms Monodepth2 by 15% in terms of the average weighted mean absolute error (MAE).

In this study, we proposed a behavior analysis for increasing the efficiency of human–robot collaboration in an assembly task. This study was inspired by previous research, in which a set of operator intentions in assembly was translated into an intention graph to formulate a probabilistic decision model for planning robot actions in the presence of operator intention ambiguity and perception uncertainty. Here, we achieved improvement by considering the analysis of human behavior in the form of fatigue and adaptation ability. We also switched the collaboration scheme from cooperative to collaborative, in which both the robot and operator work in parallel, not sequentially. We then tested the proposed method with chair assembly and the results indicated that shortening the assembly duration increased the effectiveness of the assembly process. The results also indicated that the proposed method for assembling 50 chairs was 4.68 s faster than the previous method.