A new path planning strategy integrating improved ACO and DWA algorithms for mobile robots in dynamic environments.

This article is concerned with the path planning of mobile robots in dynamic environments. A new path planning strategy is proposed by integrating the improved ant colony optimization (ACO) and dynamic window approach (DWA) algorithms. An improved ACO is developed to produce a globally optimal path for mobile robots in static environments. Through improvements in the initialization of pheromones, heuristic function, and updating of pheromones, the improved ACO can lead to a shorter path with fewer turning points in fewer iterations. Based on the globally optimal path, a modified DWA is presented for the path planning of mobile robots in dynamic environments. By deleting the redundant nodes, optimizing the initial orientation, and improving the evaluation function, the modified DWA can result in a more efficient path for mobile robots to avoid moving obstacles. Some simulations are conducted in different environments, which confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed path planning algorithms.

Joint state and actuator fault estimation for networked systems under improved accumulation-based event-triggered mechanism.

The joint state and actuator fault estimation problem is investigated in this paper for a type of networked systems subject to loss of the actuator effectiveness (LAE). A so-called improved accumulation-based event-triggered mechanism (ETM) is used to regulate the transmission of signals between the sensors and the estimator for the purpose of communication resource saving. Compared with the traditional ETM schemes, such accumulation-based ETM is robust against the "undesired" abrupt changes of signals (which would occur due to certain big noises). Different from the integral-based ETM for continuous-time systems, the improved accumulation-based ETM proposed in this paper is a "weighted" ETM, where a given weight coefficient is employed to "balance" the weights of output measurements in different time instants. The multiplicative LAE is described by an unknown diagonal matrix. The object of this paper is to design a remote estimator such that both the fault signals and system states can be simultaneously estimated in the sense of minimizing an upper bound of the corresponding estimation error covariance at each sampling instant. First, the upper bound of the estimation error covariance is given by means of the induction method. Then, the desired estimator gain is calculated recursively by solving two sets of coupled matrix equations. Finally, two simulation examples are given to verify the usefulness of the strategy we proposed subject to the LAE under the improved accumulation-based ETM.