This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Automatica and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2013.03.026A continuous nonsingular terminal sliding mode control approach is proposed for mismatched disturbance attenuation. A novel nonlinear dynamic sliding mode surface is designed based on a finite-time disturbance observer. The time taken to reach the desired setpoint from any initial states under mismatched disturbance is guaranteed to be finite time. In addition, the\ud proposed method exhibits the fine properties of nominal performance recovery as well as chattering alleviation

A new continuous dynamic sliding-mode control (CDSMC) method is proposed for high-order mismatched disturbance attenuation in motion control systems using a high-order sliding-mode differentiator. First, a new dynamic sliding surface is developed by incorporating the information of the estimates of disturbances and their high-order derivatives. A CDSMC law is then designed for a general motion control system with both high-order matched and mismatched disturbances, which can attenuate the effects of disturbances from the system output. The proposed control method is finally applied for the airgap control of a MAGnetic LEViation (MAGLEV) suspension vehicle. Simulation results show that the proposed method exhibits promising control performance in the presence of high-order matched and mismatched disturbances.

Agriculture is facing severe challenges from crop stresses, threatening its sustainable development and food security. This work exploits aerial visual perception for yellow rust disease monitoring, which seamlessly integrates state-of-the-art techniques and algorithms including UAV sensing, multispectral imaging, vegetation segmentation and deep learning U-Net. A field experiment is designed by infecting winter wheat with yellow rust inoculum, on top of which multispectral aerial images are captured by DJI Matrice 100 equipped with RedEdge camera. After image calibration and stitching, multispectral orthomosaic is labelled for system evaluation by inspecting high-resolution RGB images taken by Parrot Anafi Drone. The merits of the developed framework drawing spectral-spatial information concurrently are demonstrated by showing improved performance over purely spectral based classifier by the classical random forest algorithm. Moreover, various network input band combinations are tested including three RGB bands and five selected spectral vegetation indices by Sequential Forward Selection strategy of Wrapper algorithm.

Land cover classification is able to reflect the potential natural and social process in urban development, providing vital information to stakeholders. Recent solutions on land cover classification are generally addressed by remotely sensed imagery and supervised classification methods. However, a high-performance classifier is desirable but challenging due to the existence of model hyperparameters. Conventional approaches generally rely on manual tuning, which is time-consuming and far from satisfying. Therefore, this work aims to propose a systematic method to automatically tune the hyperparameters by Bayesian parameter optimization for the random forest classifier. The recently launched Sentinel-2A/B satellites are drawn to provide the remote sensing imageries for land cover classification case study in Beijing, China, which have the best spectral/spatial resolutions among the freely available satellites. The improved random forest with Bayesian parameter optimization is compared against the support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) with default hyperparameters by discriminating five land cover classes including building, tree, road, water, and crop field. Comparative experimental results show that the optimized RF classifier outperforms the conventional SVM and the RF with default hyperparameters in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall. The effects of band/feature number and the band usefulness are also assessed. It is envisaged that the improved classifier for Sentinel-2 satellite image processing can find a wide range of applications where high-resolution satellite imagery classification is applicable.