This paper presents an optimal NARX neural network identification model for a magnetorheological (MR) damper with the force-distortion behavior. An intensive experimental study is conducted for designing the NARX network architecture to enhance modeling accuracy and availability, and the activation function selection, weights, and biases of the selected network are optimized by differential evolution algorithm. Different experimental training and validation samples are used for network training. The prediction capability of the optimal NARX model is verified by new measured test data. The test and comparative results show that the optimal NARX network model can satisfactorily emulate the dynamic behavior of MR damper and effectively capture its distortion behavior occurred with the increased current. The developed inverse NARX network model can effectively estimate the required current and track desired damping force. Moreover, the effects of different noise disturbance on the NARX network model performance are analyzed, and the model error varies slightly with a small noise disturbance. The accuracy of the results supports the use of this modeling technique for identifying irregular non-linear models of MR damper and similar devices.

Image super-resolution (SR) reconstruction technology can improve the quality of low-resolution (LR) images. There are many available deep learning networks different from traditional machine learning algorithms. However, these networks are usually prone to poor performance on complex computation, vanishing gradients, and loss of useful information. In this work, we propose a sub-pixel convolutional neural network (SPCNN) for image SR reconstruction. First, to reduce the strong correlation, the RGB mode was translated into YC_bC_r mode, and the Y channel data was chosen as the input LR image. Meanwhile, the LR image was chosen as the network input to reduce computation instead of the interpolation reconstructed image as used in the super-resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN). Then, two convolution layers were built to obtain more features, and four non-linear mapping layers were used to achieve different level features. Furthermore, the residual network was introduced to transfer the feature information from the lower layer to the higher layer to avoid the gradient explosion or vanishing gradient phenomenon. Finally, the sub-pixel convolution layer based on up-sampling was designed to reduce the reconstruction time. Experiments on three different data sets proved that the proposed SPCNN performs superiorly to the Bicubic, sparsity constraint super-resolution (SCSR), anchored neighborhood regression (ANR), and SRCNN methods on reconstruction precision and time consumption.

Obstacle detection is one of the essential capabilities for autonomous robots operated on unstructured terrain. In this paper, a novel laser-based approach is proposed for obstacle detection by autonomous robots, in which the Sobel operator is deployed in the edge-detection process of 3D laser point clouds. The point clouds of unstructured terrain are filtered by VoxelGrid, and then processed by the Gaussian kernel function to obtain the edge features of obstacles. The Euclidean clustering algorithm is optimized by super-voxel in order to cluster the point clouds of each obstacle. The characteristics of the obstacles are recognized by the Levenberg–Marquardt back-propagation (LM-BP) neural network. The algorithm proposed in this paper is a post-processing algorithm based on the reconstructed point cloud. Experiments are conducted by using both the existing datasets and real unstructured terrain point cloud reconstructed by an all-terrain robot to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach.