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The article focuses on the problem of mechanisms’ co-design for robotic systems to perform adaptive physical interaction with an unstructured environment, including physical human robot interaction. The co-design means simultaneous optimization of mechanics and control system, ensuring optimal behavior and performance of the system. Mechanics optimization refers to the search for optimal structure, geometric parameters, mass distribution among the links and their compliance; control refers to the search for motion trajectories for mechanism’s joints. The paper presents a generalized method of structural-parametric synthesis of underactuated mechanisms with closed kinematics for robotic systems for various purposes, e. g., it was previously used for the co-design of fingers’ mechanisms for anthropomorphic gripper and legs’ mechanisms for galloping robots. The method implements the concept of morphological computation of control laws due to the features of mechanical design, minimizing the control effort from the algorithmic component of the control system, which reduces the requirements for the level of technical equipment and reduces energy consumption. In this paper, the proposed method is used to optimize the structure and geometric parameters of the passive mechanism of the back support module of an industrial exosuit. Human movements are diverse and non-deterministic when compared with the movements of autonomous robots, which complicates the design of wearable robotic devices. To reduce injuries, fatigue and increase the productivity of workers, the synthesized industrial exosuit should not only compensate for loads, but also not interfere with the natural human motions. To test the developed exosuit, kinematic datasets from motion capture of an entire human body during industrial operations were used. The proposed method of structural-parametric synthesis was used to improve the ergonomics of a wearable robotic device. Verification of the synthesized mechanism was carried out using simulation: the passive module of the back is attached to two geometric primitives that move the chest and pelvis of the exosuit operator in accordance with the motion capture data. The ergonomics of the back module is quantified by the distance between the joints connecting the upper and bottom parts of the exosuit; minimizing deviation from the average value corresponds to a lesser limitation of the operator’s movement, i. e. greater ergonomics. The article provides a detailed description of the method of structural-parametric synthesis, an example of synthesis of an exosuit module and the results of simulation.

We study the influence of fishery on a structured fish population under random changes of habitat conditions. The population parameters correspond to dominant pelagic fish species of Far-Eastern seas of the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean (pollack, herring, sardine). Similar species inhabit various parts of the Word Ocean. The species body size distribution was chosen as a main population feature. This characteristic is easy to measure and adequately defines main specimen qualities such as age, maturity and other morphological and physiological peculiarities. Environmental fluctuations have a great influence on the individuals in early stages of development and have little influence on the vital activity of mature individuals. The fishery revenue was chosen as an optimality criterion. The main control characteristic is fishing effort. We have chosen quadratic dependence of fishing revenue on the fishing effort according to accepted economic ideas stating that the expenses grow with the production volume. The model study shows that the population structure ensures the increased population stability. The growth and drop out of the individuals’ due to natural mortality smoothens the oscillations of population density arising from the strong influence of the fluctuations of environment on young individuals. The smoothing part is played by diffusion component of the growth processes. The fishery in its turn smooths the fluctuations (including random fluctuations) of the environment and has a substantial impact upon the abundance of fry and the subsequent population dynamics. The optimal time-dependent fishing effort strategy was compared to stationary fishing effort strategy. It is shown that in the case of quickly changing habitat conditions and stochastic dynamics of population replenishment there exists a stationary fishing effort having approximately the same efficiency as an optimal time-dependent fishing effort. This means that a constant or weakly varying fishing effort can be very efficient strategy in terms of revenue.

The Exner equation in conjunction phenomenological sediment transport models is widely used for mathematical modeling non-cohesive river bed. This approach allows to obtain an accurate solution without any difficulty if one models evolution of simple shape bed. However if one models evolution of complex shape bed with unstable soil the numerical instability occurs in some cases. It is difficult to detach this numerical instability from the natural physical instability of bed.

This paper analyses the causes of numerical instability occurring while modeling evolution of complex shape bed by using the Exner equation and phenomenological sediment rate models. The paper shows that two kinds of indeterminateness may occur while solving numerically the Exner equation closed by phenomenological model of sediment transport. The first indeterminateness occurs in the bed area where sediment transport is transit and bed is not changed. The second indeterminateness occurs at the extreme point of bed profile when the sediment rate varies and the bed remains the same. Authors performed the closure of the Exner equation by the analytical sediment transport model, which allowed to transform the Exner equation to parabolic type equation. Analysis of the obtained equation showed that it’s numerical solving does not lead to occurring of the indeterminateness mentioned above. Parabolic form of the transformed Exner equation allows to apply the effective and stable implicit central difference scheme for this equation solving.

The model problem of bed evolution in presence of periodic distribution of the bed shear stress is carried out. The authors used the explicit central difference scheme with and without filtration method application and implicit central difference scheme for numerical solution of the problem. It is shown that the explicit central difference scheme is unstable in the area of the bed profile extremum. Using the filtration method resulted to increased dissipation of the solution. The solution obtained by using the implicit central difference scheme corresponds to the distribution law of bed shear stress and is stable throughout the calculation area.

Laser interference microscopy was used to study morphology and intracellular dynamics of erythrocytes, neurons and mast cells. We have found that changes of the local refractive index (RI) of cells have regular components that relate to the cooperative processes in the cellular submembrane and centre regions. We have shown that characteristic frequencies of RI dynamics differ for various cell types and can be used as markers of specific cellular processes.

Corrosion damage to metals and alloys is one of the main problems of strength and durability of metal structures and products operated in contact with chemically aggressive environments. Recently, there has been a growing interest in computer modeling of the evolution of corrosion damage, especially pitting corrosion, for a deeper understanding of the corrosion process, its impact on the morphology, physical and chemical properties of the surface and mechanical strength of the material. This is mainly due to the complexity of analytical and high cost of experimental in situ studies of real corrosion processes. However, the computing power of modern computers allows you to calculate corrosion with high accuracy only on relatively small areas of the surface. Therefore, the development of new mathematical models that allow calculating large areas for predicting the evolution of corrosion damage to metals is currently an urgent problem.

In this paper, the evolution of the corrosion front in the interaction of a polycrystalline metal surface with a liquid aggressive medium was studied using a computer model based on a cellular automat. A distinctive feature of the model is the specification of the solid body structure in the form of Voronoi polygons used for modeling polycrystalline alloys. Corrosion destruction was performed by setting the probability function of the transition between cells of the cellular automaton. It was taken into account that the corrosion strength of the grains varies due to crystallographic anisotropy. It is shown that this leads to the formation of a rough phase boundary during the corrosion process. Reducing the concentration of active particles in a solution of an aggressive medium during a chemical reaction leads to corrosion attenuation in a finite number of calculation iterations. It is established that the final morphology of the phase boundary has a fractal structure with a dimension of 1.323 ± 0.002 close to the dimension of the gradient percolation front, which is in good agreement with the fractal dimension of the etching front of a polycrystalline aluminum-magnesium alloy AlMg6 with a concentrated solution of hydrochloric acid. It is shown that corrosion of a polycrystalline metal in a liquid aggressive medium is a new example of a topochemical process, the kinetics of which is described by the Kolmogorov–Johnson– Meil–Avrami theory.

At the middle of the 2000-th, scientists studying the functioning of insect communities identified four basic patterns of the organizational structure of such communities. (i) Cooperation is more developed in groups with strong kinship. (ii) Cooperation in species with large colony sizes is often more developed than in species with small colony sizes. And small-sized colonies often exhibit greater internal reproductive conflict and less morphological and behavioral specialization. (iii) Within a single species, brood size (i. e., in a sense, efficiency) per capita usually decreases as colony size increases. (iv) Advanced cooperation tends to occur when resources are limited and intergroup competition is fierce. Thinking of the functioning of a group of organisms as a two-level competitive market in which individuals face the problem of allocating their energy between investment in intergroup competition and investment in intragroup competition, i. e., an internal struggle for the share of resources obtained through intergroup competition, we can compare such a biological situation with the economic phenomenon of “coopetition” — the cooperation of competing agents with the goal of later competitively dividing the resources won in consequence In the framework of economic researches the effects similar to (ii) — in the framework of large and small group competition the optimal strategy of large group would be complete squeezing out of the second group and monopolization of the market (i. e. large groups tend to act cooperatively) and (iii) — there are conditions, in which the size of the group has a negative impact on productivity of each of its individuals (this effect is called the paradox of group size or Ringelman effect). The general idea of modeling such effects is the idea of proportionality — each individual (an individual/rational agent) decides what share of his forces to invest in intergroup competition and what share to invest in intragroup competition. The group’s gain must be proportional to its total investment in competition, while the individual’s gain is proportional to its contribution to intra-group competition. Despite the prevalence of empirical observations, no gametheoretic model has yet been introduced in which the empirically observed effects can be confirmed. This paper proposes a model that eliminates the problems of previously existing ones and the simulation of Nash equilibrium states within the proposed model allows the above effects to be observed in numerical experiments.

Despite numerous achievements of modern science the problem of lightning initiation in an electrodeless thundercloud, the maximum electric field strength inside which is approximately an order of magnitude lower than the dielectric strength of air, remains unsolved. Although there is no doubt that discharge activity begins with the appearance of positive streamers, which can develop under approximately half the threshold electric field as compared to negative ones, it remains unexplored how cold weakly conducting streamer systems unite in a joint hot well-conducting leader channel capable of self-propagation due to effective polarization in a relatively small external field. In this study, we present a self-organizing transport model which is applied to the case of electric discharge tree formation in a thundercloud. So, the model is aimed at numerical simulation of the initial stage of lightning discharge development. Among the innovative features of the model are the absence of grid spacing, high spatiotemporal resolution, and consideration of temporal evolution of electrical parameters of transport channels. The model takes into account the widely known asymmetry between threshold fields needed for positive and negative streamers development. In our model, the resulting well-conducting leader channel forms due to collective effect of combining the currents of tens of thousands of interacting streamer channels each of which initially has negligible conductivity and temperature that does not differ from the ambient one. The model bipolar tree is a directed graph (it has both positive and negative parts). It has morphological and electrodynamic characteristics which are intermediate between laboratory long spark and developed lightning. The model has universal character which allows to use it in other tasks related to the study of transport (in the broad sense of the word) networks.

In this paper, we proposed a two-dimensional chemo-mechanical model of the growth of invasive carcinoma in epithelial tissue. Each cell is modeled by an elastic polygon, changing its shape and size under the influence of pressure forces acting from the tissue. The average size and shape of the cells have been calibrated on the basis of experimental data. The model allows to describe the dynamic deformations in epithelial tissue as a collective evolution of cells interacting through the exchange of mechanical and chemical signals. The general direction of tumor growth is controlled by a pre-established linear gradient of nutrient concentration. Growth and deformation of the tissue occurs due to the mechanisms of cell division and intercalation. We assume that carcinoma has a heterogeneous structure made up of cells of different phenotypes that perform various functions in the tumor. The main parameter that determines the phenotype of a cell is the degree of its adhesion to the adjacent cells. Three main phenotypes of cancer cells are distinguished: the epithelial (E) phenotype is represented by internal tumor cells, the mesenchymal (M) phenotype is represented by single cells and the intermediate phenotype is represented by the frontal tumor cells. We assume also that the phenotype of each cell under certain conditions can change dynamically due to epithelial-mesenchymal (EM) and inverse (ME) transitions. As for normal cells, we define the main E-phenotype, which is represented by ordinary cells with strong adhesion to each other. In addition, the normal cells that are adjacent to the tumor undergo a forced EM-transition and form an M-phenotype of healthy cells. Numerical simulations have shown that, depending on the values of the control parameters as well as a combination of possible phenotypes of healthy and cancer cells, the evolution of the tumor can result in a variety of cancer structures reflecting the self-organization of tumor cells of different phenotypes. We compare the structures obtained numerically with the morphological structures revealed in clinical studies of breast carcinoma: trabecular, solid, tubular, alveolar and discrete tumor structures with ameboid migration. The possible scenario of morphogenesis for each structure is discussed. We describe also the metastatic process during which a single cancer cell of ameboid phenotype moves due to intercalation in healthy epithelial tissue, then divides and undergoes a ME transition with the appearance of a secondary tumor.

The early embryos developing in vitro to the blastocyst stage have low implantation potential. In the current work the microinjection was used to evaluate the most viable blastocysts with high implantation ability on the basis of morphology changing. The recovery rate of the embryo volume allows assessing the functional activity of trophoblast cells that involved in implantation. The predictive model is suggested to forecast the development effectiveness of blastocysts in vitro. It’s shown the recovery rate of the blastocyst volume after microinjection is the most important feature of implantation potential of early embryos. The maximal recovery rate of blastocyst volume (35.7 % of initial volume per 1 h) correlates with the embryos ability to generate the colonies 72 h after microinjection. By the area under receiver operator curve (AUC) it was shown that combination of such characteristics as blastocyst stage (middle and late) and recovery rate after microinjection allowed to predict the blastocyst development.

In the article, a quasi-periodic two-component dynamical model with possibility of defining the cardio-cycle morphology, that provides the model with an ability of generating a temporal and a spectral cardiosignal characteristics, including heart rate variability is described. A technique for determining the cardio-cycle morphology to provide realistic cardio-signal form is defined. A method for defining cardio-signal dynamical system by the way of determining a three-dimensional state space and equations which describe a trajectory of point’s motion in this space is presented. A technique for solving equations of motion in the three-dimensional state space of dynamical cardio-signal system using the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is presented. Based on this model, algorithm and software package are developed. Using software package, a cardio-signal synthesis experiment is conducted and the relationship of cardio-signal diagnostic features is analyzed.