Sampling-based methods are popular in the motion planning of robots, especially in high-dimensional spaces. Among the many such methods, the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm has been widely used in multi-degree-of-freedom manipulators and has yielded good results. However, existing RRT planners have low exploration efficiency and slow convergence speed and have been unable to meet the requirements of the intelligence level in the Industry 4.0 mode. To solve these problems, a general autonomous path planning algorithm of Node Control (NC-RRT) is proposed in this paper based on the architecture of the RRT algorithm. Firstly, a method of gradually changing the sampling area is proposed to guide exploration, thereby effectively improving the search speed. In addition, the node control mechanism is introduced to constrain the extended nodes of the tree and thus reduce the extension of invalid nodes and extract boundary nodes (or near-boundary nodes). By changing the value of the node control factor, the random tree is prevented from falling into a so-called “local trap” phenomenon, and boundary nodes are selected as extended nodes. The proposed algorithm is simulated in different environments. Results reveal that the algorithm greatly reduces the invalid exploration in the configuration space and significantly improves planning efficiency. In addition, because this method can efficiently use boundary nodes, it has a stronger applicability to narrow environments compared with existing RRT algorithms and can effectively improve the success rate of exploration.

The inverse kinematics of robot manipulators is a crucial problem with respect to automatically controlling robots. In this work, a Newton-improved cyclic coordinate descent (NICCD) method is proposed, which is suitable for robots with revolute or prismatic joints with degrees of freedom of any arbitrary number. Firstly, the inverse kinematics problem is transformed into the objective function optimization problem, which is based on the least-squares form of the angle error and the position error expressed by the product-of-exponentials formula. Thereafter, the optimization problem is solved by combining Newton’s method with the improved cyclic coordinate descent (ICCD) method. The difference between the proposed ICCD method and the traditional cyclic coordinate descent method is that consecutive prismatic joints and consecutive parallel revolute joints are treated as a whole in the former for the purposes of optimization. The ICCD algorithm has a convenient iterative formula for these two cases. In order to illustrate the performance of the NICCD method, its simulation results are compared with the well-known Newton–Raphson method using six different robot manipulators. The results suggest that, overall, the NICCD method is effective, accurate, robust, and generalizable. Moreover, it has advantages for the inverse kinematics calculations of continuous trajectories.

The study of mental workload has attracted much interest in neuroergonomics, a frontier field of research. However, there appears no consensus on how to measure mental workload effectively because the mental workload is not only regulated by task difficulty but also affected by individual skill level reflected as mental schema. In this study, we investigated the alterations in the functional brain network induced by a 10-day simulated piloting task with different difficulty levels. Topological features quantifying global and local information communication and network organization were analyzed. It was found that during different tests, the global efficiency did not change, but the gravity center of the local efficiency of the network moved from the frontal to the posterior area; the small-worldness of the functional brain network became stronger. These results demonstrate the reconfiguration of the brain network during the development of mental schema. Furthermore, for the first two tests, the global and local efficiency did not have a consistent change trend under different difficulty levels, but after forming the developed mental schema, both of them decreased with the increase in task difficulty, showing sensitivity to the increase in mental workload. Our results demonstrate brain network reconfiguration during the motor learning process and reveal the importance of the developed mental schema for the accurate assessment of mental workload. We concluded that the efficiency of the brain network was associated with mental workload with developed mental schema.