Aerial Robot Arms (ARAs) enable aerial drones to interact and influence objects in various environments. Traditional ARA controllers need the availability of a high-precision model to avoid high control chattering. Furthermore, in practical applications of aerial object manipulation, the payloads that ARAs can handle vary, depending on the nature of the task. The high uncertainties due to modeling errors and an unknown payload are inversely proportional to the stability of ARAs. To address the issue of stability, a new adaptive robust controller, based on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network, is proposed. A three-tier approach is also followed. Firstly, a detailed new model for the ARA is derived using the Lagrange–d’Alembert principle. Secondly, an adaptive robust controller, based on a sliding mode, is designed to manipulate the problem of uncertainties, including modeling errors. Last, a higher stability controller, based on the RBF neural network, is implemented with the adaptive robust controller to stabilize the ARAs, avoiding modeling errors and unknown payload issues. The novelty of the proposed design is that it takes into account high nonlinearities, coupling control loops, high modeling errors, and disturbances due to payloads and environmental conditions. The model was evaluated by the simulation of a case study that includes the two proposed controllers and ARA trajectory tracking. The simulation results show the validation and notability of the presented control algorithm.

Due to the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, there is a remarkable demand for robots, especially in the clinical sector. SARS-CoV-2 mainly propagates due to close human interactions and contaminated surfaces, and hence, maintaining social distancing has become a mandatory preventive measure. This generates the need to treat patients with minimal doctor-patient interaction. Introducing robots in the healthcare sector protects the frontline healthcare workers from getting exposed to the coronavirus as well as decreases the need for medical personnel as robots can partially take over some medical roles. The aim of this paper is to highlight the emerging role of robotic applications in the healthcare sector and allied areas. To this end, a systematic review was conducted regarding the various robots that have been implemented worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic to attenuate and contain the virus. The results obtained from this study reveal that the implementation of robotics into the healthcare field has a substantial effect in controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2, as it blocks coronavirus propagation between patients and healthcare workers, along with other advantages such as disinfection or cleaning.

During the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc in many areas of the world, as the infection spreads through person-to-person contact. Transmission and prognosis, once infected, are potentially influenced by many factors, including indoor air pollution. Particulate Matter (PM) is a complex mixture of solid and/or liquid particles suspended in the air that can vary in size, shape, and composition and recent scientific work correlate this index with a considerable risk of COVID-19 infections. Early Warning Systems (EWS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have given rise to the development of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) based on sensors, which measure PM levels and monitor In-door Air pollution Quality (IAQ) in real-time. This article proposes an open-source platform architecture and presents the development of a Long Range (LoRa) based sensor network for IAQ and PM measurement. A few air quality sensors were tested, a network platform was implemented after simulating setup topologies, emphasizing feasible low-cost open platform architecture.

It is every parent’s wish to protect their children from online pornography, cyber bullying and cyber predators. Several existing approaches analyze a limited amount of information stemming from the interactions of the child with the corresponding online party. Some restrict access to websites based on a blacklist of known forbidden URLs, others attempt to parse and analyze the exchanged multimedia content between the two parties. However, new URLs can be used to circumvent a blacklist, and images, video, and text can individually appear to be safe, but need to be judged jointly. We propose a highly modular framework of analyzing content in its final form at the user interface, or Human Computer Interaction (HCI) layer, as it appears before the child: on the screen and through the speakers. Our approach is to produce Children’s Agents for Secure and Privacy Enhanced Reaction (CASPER), which analyzes screen captures and audio signals in real time in order to make a decision based on all of the information at its disposal, with limited hardware capabilities. We employ a collection of deep learning techniques for image, audio and text processing in order to categorize visual content as pornographic or neutral, and textual content as cyberbullying or neutral. We additionally contribute a custom dataset that offers a wide spectrum of objectionable content for evaluation and training purposes. CASPER demonstrates an average accuracy of 88% and an F1 score of 0.85 when classifying text, and an accuracy of 95% when classifying pornography.

The presence of faulty valves has been studied in the literature with various machine learning approaches. The impact of using fault data only to train the system could solve the class imbalance problem in the machine learning approach. The data sets used for fault detection contain many independent variables, where the salient ones were selected using stepwise regression and applied to various machine learning techniques. A significant test for the given regression technique was used to validate the outcome. Machine learning techniques, such as decision trees and deep learning, are applied to the given data and the results reveal that the decision tree was able to obtain more than 95% accuracy and performed better than other algorithms when considering the tradeoff between the processing time and accuracy.