Exploring the celestial expanse of optimization and its transformative applications, our featured reprint comprises a compilation that delves into the heart of optimization, unraveling the convergence of theory and practice across various domains.

Wearable exoskeletons are electro-mechanical systems designed to assist, augment, or enhance motion and mobility in a variety of human motion applications and scenarios. The applications, ranging from providing power supplementation to assist the wearers to situations where human motion is resisted for exercising applications, cover a wide range of domains such as medical devices for patient rehabilitation training recovering from trauma, movement aids for disabled persons, personal care robots for providing daily living assistance, and reduction of physical burden in industrial and military applications. The development of effective and affordable wearable exoskeletons poses several design, control and modelling challenges to researchers and manufacturers. Novel technologies are therefore being developed in adaptive motion controllers, human-robot interaction control, biological sensors and actuators, materials and structures, etc. In this book, the authors report recent advances and technology breakthroughs in exoskeleton developments. It will be of interest to engineers and researchers in academia and industry as well as manufacturing companies interested in developing new markets in wearable exoskeleton robotics.

This book includes a selection of 30 reviewed and enhanced manuscripts published during the 15th SpaceOps Conference held in May 2018 in Marseille, France. The selection was driven by their quality and relevance to the space operations community.

Combinatorial (or discrete) optimization is one of the most active fields in the interface of operations research, computer science, and applied math­ ematics. Combinatorial optimization problems arise in various applications, including communications network design, VLSI design, machine vision, air­ line crew scheduling, corporate planning, computer-aided design and man­ ufacturing, database query design, cellular telephone frequency assignment, constraint directed reasoning, and computational biology. Furthermore, combinatorial optimization problems occur in many diverse areas such as linear and integer programming, graph theory, artificial intelligence, and number theory.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to more complex problems and a wider set of applications, the ability to take advantage of the computational power of distributed and parallel hardware architectures and to match these architec­ tures with the inherent distributed aspects of applications (spatial, functional, or temporal) has become an important research issue. Out of these research concerns, an AI subdiscipline called distributed problem solving has emerged. Distributed problem-solving systems are broadly defined as loosely-coupled, distributed networks of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents that perform sophisticated problem solving and cooperatively interact to solve problems. N odes operate asynchronously and in parallel with limited internode commu­ nication. Limited internode communication stems from either inherent band­ width limitations of the communication medium or from the high computa­ tional cost of packaging and assimilating information to be sent and received among agents. Structuring network problem solving to deal with consequences oflimited communication-the lack of a global view and the possibility that the individual agents may not have all the information necessary to accurately and completely solve their subproblems-is one of the major focuses of distributed problem-solving research. It is this focus that also is one of the important dis­ tinguishing characteristics of distributed problem-solving research that sets it apart from previous research in AI.

Variational Inequalities and Frictional Contact Problems contains a carefully selected collection of results on elliptic and evolutionary quasi-variational inequalities including existence, uniqueness, regularity, dual formulations, numerical approximations and error estimates ones. By using a wide range of methods and arguments, the results are presented in a constructive way, with clarity and well justified proofs. This approach makes the subjects accessible to mathematicians and applied mathematicians. Moreover, this part of the book can be used as an excellent background for the investigation of more general classes of variational inequalities. The abstract variational inequalities considered in this book cover the variational formulations of many static and quasi-static contact problems. Based on these abstract results, in the last part of the book, certain static and quasi-static frictional contact problems in elasticity are studied in an almost exhaustive way.

A unified approach is proposed for applied mechanics and optimal control theory. The Hamilton system methodology in analytical mechanics is used for eigenvalue problems, vibration theory, gyroscopic systems, structural mechanics, wave-guide, LQ control, Kalman filter, robust control etc. All aspects are described in the same unified methodology. Numerical methods for all these problems are provided and given in meta-language, which can be implemented easily on the computer. Precise integration methods both for initial value problems and for two-point boundary value problems are proposed, which result in the numerical solutions of computer precision.

A complete reference to adaptive control of systems with nonsmooth industrial nonlinearities such as: backlash; dead-zones; component failure; friction; hysteresis; saturation; and time delays.

This book presents the most recent state-of-the-art algorithms on robust environmental perception and reliability control for intelligent vehicle systems. By integrating object detection, semantic segmentation, trajectory prediction, multi-object tracking, multi-sensor fusion, and reliability control in a systematic way, this book is aimed at guaranteeing that intelligent vehicles can run safely in complex road traffic scenes.

The volume set LNAI 11740 until LNAI 11745 constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2019, held in Shenyang, China, in August 2019.
The total of 378 full and 25 short papers presented in these proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 522 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows:

Over the last thirty years an abundance of papers have been writ­ ten on adaptive dynamic control systems. Nevertheless, now it may be predicted with confidence that the adaptive mechanics, a new division, new line of inquiry in one of the violently developing fields of cybernetic mechanics, is emerging. The birth process falls far short of being com­ pleted. There appear new problems and methods of their solution in the framework of adaptive nonlinear dynamics. Therefore, the present work cannot be treated as a certain polished, brought-to-perfection school textbook. More likely, this is an attempt to show a number of well­ known scientific results in the parametric synthesis of nonlinear systems (this, strictly speaking, accounts for the availability of many reviews), as well as to bring to notice author's developments on this question undoubtedly modern and topical. The nonlinear, and practically La­ grangian, systems cover a wide class of classical objects in theoretical mechanics, and primarily solid-body (robotic, gyroscopic, rocket-cosmic, and other) systems. And what is rather important, they have a direct trend to practical application.

This book includes original, peer-reviewed research papers from the 37th Annual Conference of Power System and Automation in Chinese Universities (CUS-EPSA), held in Hangzhou, China on October 23-25, 2022. These papers cover topics as Evolution and development path of the power system, Resilience assessment, analysis and planning of power system, Power system planning and reliability, Modelling and simulation of novel power system, Power electronic for power system stability analysis, Power system relay protection and automation and so on.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of wireless technologies for industrial network systems. The authors first describe the concept of industrial network systems and their application to industrial automation. They then go on to cover the role of sensing and control in industrial network systems, and the challenge of sensing and control in the industrial wireless environment.

An invaluable addition to the literature on UAV guidance and cooperative control, Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is a dedicated, practical guide to computational path planning for UAVs. One of the key issues facing future development of UAVs is path planning: it is vital that swarm UAVs/ MAVs can cooperate together in a coordinated manner, obeying a pre-planned course but able to react to their environment by communicating and cooperating. An optimized path is necessary in order to ensure a UAV completes its mission efficiently, safely, and successfully.