This paper proposes a novel incremental training mode to address the problem of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based path planning for a mobile robot. Firstly, we evaluate the related graphic search algorithms and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in a lightweight 2D environment. Then, we design the algorithm based on DRL, including observation states, reward function, network structure as well as parameters optimization, in a 2D environment to circumvent the time-consuming works for a 3D environment. We transfer the designed algorithm to a simple 3D environment for retraining to obtain the converged network parameters, including the weights and biases of deep neural network (DNN), etc. Using these parameters as initial values, we continue to train the model in a complex 3D environment. To improve the generalization of the model in different scenes, we propose to combine the DRL algorithm Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradients (TD3) with the traditional global path planning algorithm Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) as a novel path planner (PRM+TD3). Experimental results show that the incremental training mode can notably improve the development efficiency. Moreover, the PRM+TD3 path planner can effectively improve the generalization of the model.

Human activity recognition is a core problem in intelligent automation systems due to its far-reaching applications including ubiquitous computing, health-care services and smart living. Due to the non-intrusive property of smartphones, smartphone sensors are widely used for the identification of human activities. However, unlike applications in vision or data mining domain, feature embedding from deep neural networks performs much worse in terms of recognition accuracy than properly designed handcrafted features. In this paper, we posit that feature embedding from deep neural networks may convey complementary information and propose a novel knowledge distilling strategy to improve its performance. More specifically, an efficient shallow network, i.e. Single Layer Feedforward Neural Network (SLFN), with handcrafted features is utilized to assist the deep LSTM network. On the one hand, the deep LSTM network is able to learn features from raw sensory data to encode temporal dependencies. On the other hand, the deep LSTM network can also learn from SLFN to mimic how it generalize. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of recognition accuracy against several state-of-the-art methods in the literature.

In the field of robotics, soft robots have been showing great potential in the areas of medical care, education, service, rescue, exploration, detection, and wearable devices due to their inherently high flexibility, good compliance, excellent adaptability, and natural and safe interactivity. Pneumatic soft robots occupy an essential position among soft robots because of their features such as lightweight, high efficiency, non-pollution, and environmental adaptability. Thanks to its mentioned benefits, increasing research interests have been attracted to the development of novel types of pneumatic soft robots in the last decades. This article aims to investigate the solutions to develop and research the pneumatic soft robot. This paper reviews the status and the main progress of the recent research on pneumatic soft robots. Furthermore, a discussion about the challenges and benefits of the recent advancement of the pneumatic soft robot is provided.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a common and significant tool for aiding in the diagnosis of epilepsy and studying the human brain electrical activity. Previously, the traditional machine learning (ML)-based classifier are used to identify the seizure by extracting features from the EEG signals manually. Although the effectiveness of these contributions have already been proved, they cannot achieve multiple class classification with automatic feature extraction. Meanwhile, the identifiable EEG segment is too long to limit the capability of real-time epileptic seizure detection. In this paper, a novel deep convolutional long short-term memory (C-LSTM) model is proposed for detecting seizure and tumor in human brain and identifying two eyes statuses (open and close). It achieves to predict a result in every 0.006 seconds with a short detection duration (one second). By comparing with other two types deep learning approaches (DCNN and LSTM), the presented deep C-LSTM obtains the best performance for classifying these five classes. All of the obtained total accuracy are over 98.80%.

Fingerprinting based indoor positioning system (IPS) is gaining more research interest under the umbrella of location-based services. However, existing works have certain limitations in addressing issues such as noisy measurements, high computational complexity, poor generalization ability. In this work, a random vector functional link network based approach is introduced to address these issues. In the proposed system, a subset of informative features from many randomized noisy features are selected to both reduce the computational complexity and boost the generalization ability. Moreover, the feature selector and predictor are jointly learned iteratively in a single framework based on Augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed system is appealing as it can be naturally fit into parallel or distributed computing environment. Extensive realworld indoor localization experiments are conducted on users with smartphone devices and results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing approaches.

Accurately detecting tumors and estimating the depth of tumors is essential in the surgical removal of tumors. In robotic-assisted surgery, autonomous robotic palpation has the potential to provide more precise detection, tumors' depth estimation, and less intrusion when normal tissues surround tumors. In this article, by mimicking the human finger touch, we propose a tactile sensing-based deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture to improve the accuracy of the detection and depth estimation of tumors embedded in soft tissue. In the experimental setup, the hard inclusions simulate the tumors, while the phantom tissue is fabricated by silicon to simulate the soft tissue. During the experiment, the data from the force sensor and displacement of the robot palpation probe are for detection and depth estimation purposes. The collected sequential data set of the force and the displacement of the probe during one completed palpation process will go through the proposed DRNN network with deep LSTM architecture, in which the temporal dependencies of the sequential data will be captured in the cell states in the deep LSTM layers. Subsequently, the softmax classifier is adopted to determine if there is any hard inclusion exists and offer the depth estimation of the hard inclusions. Experiments based on 396 real data sets demonstrate that the detection accuracy for the testing data set is 99.2% and the depth estimation accuracy for the testing data set is 95.8%. The accuracy of the proposed method is best when comparing with other widely used methods.