Planning the energy-efficient and collision-free paths for reconfigurable robots in complex environments is more challenging than conventional fixed-shaped robots due to their flexible degrees of freedom while navigating through tight spaces. This article presents a novel algorithm, energy-efficient batch informed trees* (BIT*) for reconfigurable robots, which incorporates BIT*, an informed, anytime sampling-based planner, with the energy-based objectives that consider the energy cost for robot’s each reconfigurable action. Moreover, it proposes to improve the direct sampling technique of informed RRT* by defining an $L^2$ greedy informed set that shrinks as a function of the state with the maximum admissible estimated cost instead of shrinking as a function of the current solution, thereby improving the convergence rate of the algorithm. Experiments were conducted on a tetromino hinged-based reconfigurable robot as a case study to validate our proposed path planning technique. The outcome of our trials shows that the proposed approach produces energy-efficient solution paths, and outperforms existing techniques on simulated and real-world experiments.

In this paper, the advantages of multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) assisted wireless systems and direct link between two terminals are exploited by considering a cooperative communication system where reflecting links created by multiple RISs and the direct link are combined at the receiver. We mathematically analyze the performance of the cooperative multiple RISs - direct link (RIS-D) system over Nakagami- $m$ fading channels by obtaining the symbol error probability (SEP) expression. In addition, the SEP of the single-input single-output (SISO) system without RISs (i.e., there is only direct link between two terminals) is also obtained for convenience in comparison the performance of the cooperative RIS-D and SISO systems. We demonstrate the correctness of the derived expressions via Monte-Carlo simulations. Numerical results show that the SEP of the cooperative RIS-D system significantly lower than that of the SISO system for a certain transmission power of the transmitter. Also, for a certain SEP target, the cooperative RIS-D system can greatly save energy consumption in comparison with the SISO system. Specifically, increasing the number of RISs or the number of reflecting elements (REs) in the RISs can remarkably reduce the SEP of the cooperative RIS-D system. On the other hand, the impacts of the system parameters such as the number of RISs, the number of REs, and the Nakagami- $m$ fading channels are fully investigated to clearly indicate their influences on the SEP of the cooperative RIS-D system.

In this paper, we exploit the benefits of full-duplex (FD) transmission and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) by considering a bidirectional full-duplex wireless communication system with the support of RISs. Specifically, cooperative communications are applied at two FD terminals in a RISs-assisted bidirectional full-duplex (RIS-FD) system. In this context, we successfully derive the mathematical expressions of the outage probability (OP) and the ergodic capacity (EC) of the RIS-FD system with a direct link between two terminals and multiple reflecting paths created by RISs over the Rayleigh fading channel. Numerical results show that the performance of the considered RIS-FD system depends significantly on the total number of reflecting elements in the RISs. Particularly, when the total number of reflecting elements is small, the OP and EC saturate at a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, when the total number of reflecting elements is large enough, OP decreases greatly while EC enhances significantly. In addition, the effect of residual self-interference (SI) caused by FD transmission on OP and EC is remarkable, even the residual SI level is very small. On the other hand, the influence of other system parameters such as the number of RISs ( $N$ ) and the number of reflecting elements ( $L$ ) are also investigated to fully consider the performance of the RIS-FD system. An important observation is that when current techniques cannot completely eliminate SI in FD transmission, the use of multiple RISs with larger $L$ can indirectly reduce the impact of SI and significantly improve the performance of the proposed RIS-FD system. Finally, the obtained expressions are validated via Monte-Carlo simulations.

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) resulting from traumatic brain injury is a serious issue, often leading to death or long-term disability if not promptly diagnosed. Currently, doctors primarily use Computerized Tomography (CT) scans to detect and precisely locate a hemorrhage, typically interpreted by radiologists. However, this diagnostic process heavily relies on the expertise of medical professionals. To address potential errors, computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed. In this study, we propose a new method that enhances the localization and segmentation of ICH lesions in CT scans by using multiple images created through different data augmentation techniques. We integrate residual connections into a U-Net-based segmentation network to improve the training efficiency. Our experiments, based on 82 CT scans from traumatic brain injury patients, validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an IOU score of 0.807 ± 0.03 for ICH segmentation using 10-fold cross-validation.

Future wireless communications are expected to serve a wide range of emerging applications, such as Online Gaming, Extended Reality (XR), Metaverses, Healthcare or Telemetry, where communication from diverse connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices require not only stringent conditions such as ultra-reliability and low-latency communication (URLLC) together with high bandwidth but also concerns about content security as well as copyright protection. To deal with URLLC demands, ShortPacket Communication (SPC) has been recently considered a vital solution. Meanwhile, to meet high spectrum utilization, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has emerged as a potential technology in the last decade, for its ability to serve multi-user communication simultaneously by exploiting powerdomain rather than time or frequency domains. Especially, incorporating Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) with NOMA/SPC-based systems can further boost the system’s spectral efficiency as well as enhance communication coverage. However, NOMA-based systems hugely demand a reliable user-paring process, which imposes challenges in ensuring secure short-packet delivery for emerging IoT applications. Hence, this paper studies downlink RIS-assisted short-packet NOMA systems with the focus of improving the secure performance of the pairing process with untrusted users. Our study contributes a new strategy for arbitrary paring users by designing a joint power allocation policy and RIS’s phase shifter, where untrustworthy users will be allocated with higher power levels while trustworthy users will be configured with sub-optimal phase shift criterion at RIS to maximize its cascaded channel gain. Besides, we also derive closed-form expressions for the average block-error rate (BLER) to analyze the performance of trustworthy users as well as the average secure BLER to quantify the secure performance when untrustworthy users wiretap trustworthy users’ information using successive interference mechanisms. Moreover, we further develop asymptotic expressions for both cases to measure the diversity gain and induce key parameters. Subsequently, Monte Carlo simulations are provided as a benchmark to corroborate the theoretical findings. This work can be used as a copyright protection technique for digital content such as games.