Swarm robotics is a specific research field of multirobotics where a large number of mobile robots are controlled in a coordinated way. Formation control is one of the most challenging goals for the coordination control of swarm robots. In this paper, a behavior‐based control design approach is proposed for two kinds of important formation control problems: efficient initial formation and formation control while avoiding obstacles. In this approach, a classification‐based searching method for generating large‐scale robot formation is presented to reduce the computational complexity and speed up the initial formation process for any desired formation. The behavior‐based method is applied for the formation control of swarm robot systems while navigating in an unknown environment with obstacles. Several groups of experimental results demonstrate the success of the proposed approach. These methods have potential applications for various swarm robot systems in both the simulation and the practical environments.

The training process analysis and termination condition of the training process of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) system have always been the key issues to train an RL agent. In this paper, a new approach based on State Entropy and Exploration Entropy is proposed to analyse the training process. The concept of State Entropy is used to denote the uncertainty for an RL agent to select the action at every state that the agent will traverse, while the Exploration Entropy denotes the action selection uncertainty of the whole system. Actually, the action selection uncertainty of a certain state or the whole system reflects the degree of exploration and the stage of the learning process for an agent. The Exploration Entropy is a new criterion to analyse and manage the training process of RL. The theoretical analysis and experiment results illustrate that the curve of Exploration Entropy contains more information than the existing analytical methods.

The digging depth is an important factor affecting the mechanized garlic harvesting quality. At present, the digging depth of the garlic combine harvester (GCH) is adjusted manually, which leads to disadvantages such as slow response, poor accuracy, and being very dependent on the operator’s experience. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a machine vision-based automatic digging depth control system for the original garlic digging device. The system uses the improved YOLOv5 algorithm to calculate the length of the garlic root at the front end of the clamping conveyor chain in real-time, and the calculation result is sent back to the system as feedback. Then, the STM32 microcontroller is used to control the digging depth by expanding and contracting the electric putter of the garlic digging device. The experimental results of the presented control system show that the detection time of the system is 30.4 ms, the average accuracy of detection is 99.1%, and the space occupied by the model deployment is 11.4 MB, which suits the design of the real-time detection of the system. Moreover, the length of the excavated garlic roots is shorter than that of the system before modification, which represents a lower energy consumption of the system and a lower rate of impurities in harvesting, and the modified system is automatically controlled, reducing the operator’s workload.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a powerful and promising learning paradigm for classifying instances that have not been seen in training. Although graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently shown great potential for the ZSL tasks, these models cannot adjust the constant connection weights between the nodes in knowledge graph and the neighbor nodes contribute equally to classify the central node. In this study, we apply an attention mechanism to adjust the connection weights adaptively to learn more important information for classifying unseen target nodes. First, we propose an attention graph convolutional network for zero-shot learning (AGCNZ) by integrating the attention mechanism and GCN directly. Then, in order to prevent the dilution of knowledge from distant nodes, we apply the dense graph propagation (DGP) model for the ZSL tasks and propose an attention dense graph propagation model for zero-shot learning (ADGPZ). Finally, we propose a modified loss function with a relaxation factor to further improve the performance of the learned classifier. Experimental results under different pre-training settings verified the effectiveness of the proposed attention-based models for ZSL.