The problem of triangular lattice formation in robot swarms has been investigated extensively in the literature, but the existing algorithms can hardly keep comparative performance from swarm simulation to real multi‐robot scenarios, due to the limited computation power or the restricted field of view (FOV) of robot sensors. Eventually, a distributed solution for triangular lattice formation in robot swarms with minimal sensing and computation is proposed and developed in this study. Each robot is equipped with a sensor with a limited FOV providing only a ternary digit of information about its neighbouring environment. At each time step, the motion command is directly determined by using only the ternary sensing result. The circular motions with a certain level of randomness lead the robot swarms to stable triangular lattice formation with high quality and robustness. Extensive numerical simulations and multi‐robot experiments are conducted. The results have demonstrated and validated the efficiency of the proposed approach. The minimised sensing and computation requirements pave the way for massive deployment at a low cost and implementation within swarms of miniature robots.

The task of few‐shot object detection is to classify and locate objects through a few annotated samples. Although many studies have tried to solve this problem, the results are still not satisfactory. Recent studies have found that the class margin significantly impacts the classification and representation of the targets to be detected. Most methods use the loss function to balance the class margin, but the results show that the loss‐based methods only have a tiny improvement on the few‐shot object detection problem. In this study, the authors propose a class encoding method based on the transformer to balance the class margin, which can make the model pay more attention to the essential information of the features, thus increasing the recognition ability of the sample. Besides, the authors propose a multi‐target decoding method to aggregate RoI vectors generated from multi‐target images with multiple support vectors, which can significantly improve the detection ability of the detector for multi‐target images. Experiments on Pascal visual object classes (VOC) and Microsoft Common Objects in Context datasets show that our proposed Few‐Shot Object Detection via Class Encoding and Multi‐Target Decoding significantly improves upon baseline detectors (average accuracy improvement is up to 10.8% on VOC and 2.1% on COCO), achieving competitive performance. In general, we propose a new way to regulate the class margin between support set vectors and a way of feature aggregation for images containing multiple objects and achieve remarkable results. Our method is implemented on mmfewshot, and the code will be available later.

In this study, a practical adaptive control scheme is proposed for the trajectory tracking of an unmanned surface vehicle via the characteristic modelling approach. Therefore, accurate tracking control can be achieved in the presence of unknown time‐varying model parameters and environmental disturbances. The control scheme comprises a trajectory guidance module based on the virtual target approach and a tracking control module designed by characteristic modelling theory. Firstly, the ideal control commands of the yaw speed and surge speed are generated using the position errors between the vehicle and the virtual target. Then, a second‐order characteristic model for the heading and surge speed channel is developed. The parameters of the model are updated by a real‐time parameter identification algorithm. Based on this model, an integrated adaptive control law is designed which consists of golden‐section control, feed‐forward control and integral control. Finally, the development processes of the vehicle platform and the control algorithms are described, and the results of simulation and field experiments are presented and discussed.

Robotic fish actuated by smart materials has attracted extensive attention and has been widely used in many applications. In this study, a robotic fish actuated by dielectric elastomer (DE) films is proposed. The tensile behaviours of DE film VHB4905 are studied, and the Ogden constitutive equation is employed to describe the stress‐strain behaviour of the DE film. The fabrication processes of the robotic fish, including pre‐stretching treatment of the DE films, electrode coating with carbon paste, and waterproof treatment, are illustrated in detail. The dynamic response of the fabricated DE actuators under different excitation voltages is tested based on the experimental setup. Experimental results show that the first‐order natural frequencies of the obtained DE actuator in air is 4.05 Hz. Finally, the swimming performances of the proposed robotic fish at different driving levels are demonstrated, and it achieves an average swimming speed of 20.38 mm/s, with a driving voltage of 5kV at 0.8 Hz.

Considering the wheeled mobile robot (WMR) tracking problem with velocity saturation, we developed a data‐driven iterative learning double loop control method with constraints. First, the authors designed an outer loop controller to provide virtual velocity for the inner loop according to the position and pose tracking error of the WMR kinematic model. Second, the authors employed dynamic linearisation to transform the dynamic model into an online data‐driven model along the iterative domain. Based on the measured input and output data of the dynamic model, the authors identified the parameters of the inner loop controller. The authors considered the velocity saturation constraints; we adjusted the output velocity of the WMR online, providing effective solutions to the problem of velocity saltation and the saturation constraint in the tracking process. Notably, the inner loop controller only uses the output data and input of the dynamic model, which not only enables the reliable control of WMR trajectory tracking, but also avoids the influence of inaccurate model identification processes on the tracking performance. The authors analysed the algorithm's convergence in theory, and the results show that the tracking errors of position, angle and velocity can converge to zero in the iterative domain. Finally, the authors used a simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.