To reduce the convergence time and improve the anti-disturbance capability of the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drivers, a fast sliding mode speed controller based on a new compound reaching law (NCRL) and disturbance observer compensation technique is proposed. Firstly, to solve the conflict between fast convergence rate and chattering reduction in the existing solutions, the NCRL is proposed by introducing the exponential function and the power term piecewise function. The convergence of NCRL is proved and the reaching time is certified to be independent of the system’s initial state. The proposed NCRL can effectively reduce the reaching time, and smooth the output signal while maintaining the high tracking performance of the controller under different conditions. However, external load disturbances may degrade the performance of the proposed NCRL-based speed controller. The proposed controller is then combined with an improved sliding mode observer (ISMO), named the NCRL+ISMO method, to improve the estimation accuracy of the lumped disturbance and the robustness of the system. The stability of the proposed method is analyzed by the Lyapunov function. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce speed fluctuation and convergence time, and enhance anti-disturbance capability.

Faced with the increasingly severe global aging population with fewer children, the research, development, and application of elderly-care robots are expected to provide some technical means to solve the problems of elderly care, disability and semi-disability nursing, and rehabilitation. Elderly-care robots involve biomechanics, computer science, automatic control, ethics, and other fields of knowledge, which is one of the most challenging and most concerned research fields of robotics. Unlike other robots, elderly-care robots work for the frail elderly. There is information exchange and energy exchange between people and robots, and the safe human-robot interaction methods are the research core and key technology. The states of the art of elderly-care robots and their various nursing modes and safe interaction methods are introduced and discussed in this paper. To conclude, considering the disparity between current elderly care robots and their anticipated objectives, we offer a comprehensive overview of the critical technologies and research trends that impact and enhance the feasibility and acceptance of elderly care robots. These areas encompass the collaborative assistance of diverse assistive robots, the establishment of a novel smart home care model for elderly individuals using sensor networks, the optimization of robot design for improved flexibility, and the enhancement of robot acceptability.

This paper proposes a frequency regulation strategy applied to wind turbine generators (WTGs) in an isolated grid. In order to complement active power shortage caused by load or wind speed change, an improved deloading method is proposed to improve the regulation capabilities in different speed sections and to provide WTG power reserves. Considering torque compensation may cause power fluctuation, speed reference of conventional pitch control system should be reset. Moreover, to suppress disturbances caused by load and wind speed as well as overcome dependence on system parameters, a model predictive controller (MPC) is presented to generate torque compensation for each deloaded WTG, which allows each WTG to react to the disturbance differently, depending on its generator speed and the frequency deviation. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation and experimental results show that the proposed strategy can enhance frequency response ability during load changes and smoothen power fluctuations resulting from wind speed variations.

In the power sector, microgrids play a supportive role in bridging the adequacy gap in the conventional electricity supply. Trading of the generated energy has recently been improved by blockchain technology which offers a new cheap, secure, and decentralized transaction approach. Its operation is however associated with an undesired inherent delay during energy transactions initiated by the prosumers, thus, failure to timely attend to incidences of urgent demand could end up in catastrophe at the consumer’s side. This paper thus proposes a cyber-enhanced transactive microgrid model using blockchain technology with optimized participants’ permission protocol to ameliorate this challenge. It is demonstrated that the optimized blockchain participants’ permission model leads to improved transaction speed and greater convenience. The transaction speed simulation is thereafter performed and it was also demonstrated that the node population has a greater effect than the transaction block size on the transaction speed improvement.