In the past two decades, unmanned amphibious robots have proven the most promising and efficient systems ranging from scientific, military, and commercial applications. The applications like monitoring, surveillance, reconnaissance, and military combat operations require platforms to maneuver on challenging, complex, rugged terrains and diverse environments. The recent technological advancements and development in aquatic robotics and mobile robotics have facilitated a more agile, robust, and efficient amphibious robots maneuvering in multiple environments and various terrain profiles. Amphibious robot locomotion inspired by nature, such as amphibians, offers augmented flexibility, improved adaptability, and higher mobility over terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial mediums. In this review, amphibious robots’ locomotion mechanism designed and developed previously are consolidated, systematically The review also analyzes the literature on amphibious robot highlighting the limitations, open research areas, recent key development in this research field. Further development and contributions to amphibious robot locomotion, actuation, and control can be utilized to perform specific missions in sophisticated environments, where tasks are unsafe or hardly feasible for the divers or traditional aquatic and terrestrial robots.

In electric vehicle technology, battery energy conservation is paramount due to the dependency of all system operations on the available battery. The proportional, integral and derivative (PID) controller parameters in the electric power assisted steering system for electric vehicle need to be tuned with the optimal performance setting so that less current is needed for its operation. This proposed two methods under the umbrella of swarm-intelligence technique namely particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ant colony optimization (ACO) in order to reduce current consumption and to improve controller performance. The investigation involves an analysis on the convergence behavior of both techniques in search for accurate controller parameters. A comprehensive assessment on the assist current supplied to the assist motor of the system is also presented. Investigation reveals that the proposed controllers, PID-PSO and PID-ACO are able to reduce the assist current supplied to the assist motor as compared to the conventional PID controller. This study also demonstrate the feasibility of applying both swarm-intelligence tuning method in terms of reduced time taken to tune the PID controller as compared to the conventional tuning method.

It is known that temperature variations inside a battery may greatly affect its performance, life, and reliability. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the heat generation in Lithium ion batteries, a simple heat generation models were constructed in order to predict the thermal behaviour of a battery pack. The Lithium ion battery presents in this paper is Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4). The results show that the model can be viewed as an acceptable approximation for the variation of the battery pack temperature at a continuous discharge current from data provided by the manufacturer and literature.

According to an extensive evaluation of published studies, there is a shortage of research on systematic literature reviews related to machine learning prediction techniques and methodologies in soil improvement using green materials. A literature review suggests that machine learning algorithms are effective at predicting various soil characteristics, including compressive strength, deformations, bearing capacity, California bearing ratio, compaction performance, stress–strain behavior, geotextile pullout strength behavior, and soil classification. The current study aims to comprehensively evaluate recent breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms for soil improvement using a systematic procedure known as PRISMA and meta-analysis. Relevant databases, including Web of Science, ScienceDirect, IEEE, and SCOPUS, were utilized, and the chosen papers were categorized based on: the approach and method employed, year of publication, authors, journals and conferences, research goals, findings and results, and solution and modeling. The review results will advance the understanding of civil and geotechnical designers and practitioners in integrating data for most geotechnical engineering problems. Additionally, the approaches covered in this research will assist geotechnical practitioners in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of artificial intelligence algorithms compared to other traditional mathematical modeling techniques.

In Wireless Sensor Networks which are deployed in remote and isolated tropical areas; such as forest; jungle; and open dirt road environments; wireless communications usually suffer heavily because of the environmental effects on vegetation; terrain; low antenna height; and distance. Therefore; to solve this problem; the Wireless Sensor Network communication links must be designed for their best performance using the suitable electromagnetic wave behavior model in a given environment. This study introduces and analyzes the behavior of the LoRa pathloss propagation model for signals that propagate at near ground or that have low transmitter and receiver antenna heights from the ground (less than 30 cm antenna height). Using RMSE and MAE statistical analysis tools; we validate the developed model results. The developed Fuzzy ANFIS model achieves the lowest RMSE score of 0.88 at 433 MHz and the lowest MAE score of 1.61 at 433 MHz for both open dirt road environments. The Optimized FITU-R Near Ground model achieved the lowest RMSE score of 4.08 at 868 MHz for the forest environment and lowest MAE score of 14.84 at 868 MHz for the open dirt road environment. The Okumura-Hata model achieved the lowest RMSE score of 6.32 at 868 MHz and the lowest MAE score of 26.12 at 868 MHz for both forest environments. Finally; the ITU-R Maximum Attenuation Free Space model achieved the lowest RMSE score of 9.58 at 868 MHz for the forest environment and the lowest MAE score of 38.48 at 868 MHz for the jungle environment. These values indicate that the proposed Fuzzy ANFIS pathloss model has the best performance in near ground propagation for all environments compared to other benchmark models.