All issues

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.

We examine a phenomenological algorithm for generating morphology of astrocytes, a major class of glial brain cells, based on morphometric data of rat brain protoplasmic astrocytes and observations of general cell development trends in vivo, based on current literature. We adapted the Space Colonization Algorithm (SCA) for procedural generation of astrocytic morphology from scratch. Attractor points used in generation were spatially distributed in the model volume according to the synapse distribution density in the rat hippocampus tissue during the first week of postnatal brain development. We analyzed and compared astrocytic morphology reconstructions at different brain development stages using morphometry estimation techniques such as Sholl analysis, number of bifurcations, number of terminals, total tree length, and maximum branching order. Using morphometric data from protoplasmic astrocytes of rats at different ages, we selected the necessary generation parameters to obtain the most realistic three-dimensional cell morphology models. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm allows not only to obtain individual cell geometry but also recreate the phenomenon of tiling domain organization in the cell populations. In our algorithm tiling emerges due to the cell competition for territory and the assignment of unique attractor points to their processes, which then become unavailable to other cells and their processes. We further extend the original algorithm by splitting morphology generation in two phases, thereby simulating astrocyte tree structure development during the first and third-fourth weeks of rat postnatal brain development: rapid space exploration at the first stage and extensive branching at the second stage. To this end, we introduce two attractor types to separate two different growth strategies in time. We hypothesize that the extended algorithm with dynamic attractor generation can explain the formation process of fine astrocyte cell structures and maturation of astrocytic arborizations.

The accurate characterization of particle size and morphology is crucial across numerous scientific and industrial fields. While microscopy is a powerful tool for visualizing particle geometry, traditional image analysis often relies on basic parameters like area and equivalent circular diameter, which are insufficient for describing non-spherical or complex particles. This paper presents a novel methodology for the analysis of particles from micrographs, combining deep learningbased segmentation with parametric polygon approximation. Optical microscopy images were obtained for model systems of increasing complexity: monodisperse polystyrene spheres, SAPO-34 cubes, ZSM-5 hexagonal prisms, and a multi-component mixture of all three. Neural network segmentation was performed using the DLgram01 cloud service, trained on manually annotated images. A custom Python program was developed to process the resulting segmentation polygons. The core of the method involves fitting a parameterized polygon to each segmented particle’s contour. The optimal value of geometric parameters for each particle is determined by minimizing a “dissimilarity” function that measures the discrepancy between the segmentation and the parametric shape. This approach was validated on the simple spherical system, yielding a size distribution consistent with conventional projected diameter methods. For more complex cubic SAPO-34 particles, the rectangle fit revealed deviations from the ideal shape, providing a more complete morphological description than using a single size parameter. In the mixture of particles, the method successfully classified and extracted distinct parameter distributions for each particle type. The results for each class in the mixture were statistically consistent with those obtained from the single-component systems, demonstrating the method’s robustness and accuracy. The proposed methodology provides a powerful and universal tool for automated, high-throughput particle analysis, enabling the extraction of detailed shape parameters and the construction of comprehensive size and morphology distributions for complex particulate systems.

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.

We propose an approach for the reconstruction and quantitative phenotyping of plant morphological traits at early ontogenetic stages based on digital image analysis. The proposed algorithm combines deep learning and graph-based representations while incorporating biological principles of morphogenesis. This integration enables the transition from binary segmentation to the reconstruction of a topologically consistent plant structure with accurate separation of intersecting root systems in images containing multiple plants. At the first stage, binary masks of seeds, shoots, and root systems are generated using a U-Net convolutional neural network architecture. The resulting image is transformed into a graph model in which edges correspond to root and shoot segments, while vertices represent key morphological points, including branching and intersection nodes. A directed traversal algorithm initialized from the seed point, combined with watershed-based graph partitioning and a composite scoring function for primary axis selection, identifies individual plants as isolated subgraphs and accurately distinguishes the primary root, lateral roots, and shoot. The validity of the algorithm was confirmed through a multi-level validation procedure, including comparison of graph reconstruction results on segmented images and end-to-end evaluation of the complete computational pipeline on original images against existing software solutions and expert manual annotations. The proposed approach is robust to variability in root system morphology and image noise and provides high accuracy in morphological trait extraction. The results of this study can be applied in plant breeding programs.