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.

This paper presents the results of experimental validation of some structural issues concerning the practical use of methods to overcome catastrophic forgetting of neural networks. A comparison of current effective methods like EWC (Elastic Weight Consolidation) and WVA (Weight Velocity Attenuation) is made and their advantages and disadvantages are considered. It is shown that EWC is better for tasks where full retention of learned skills is required on all the tasks in the training queue, while WVA is more suitable for sequential tasks with very limited computational resources, or when reuse of representations and acceleration of learning from task to task is required rather than exact retention of the skills. The attenuation of the WVA method must be applied to the optimization step, i. e. to the increments of neural network weights, rather than to the loss function gradient itself, and this is true for any gradient optimization method except the simplest stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The choice of the optimal weights attenuation function between the hyperbolic function and the exponent is considered. It is shown that hyperbolic attenuation is preferable because, despite comparable quality at optimal values of the hyperparameter of the WVA method, it is more robust to hyperparameter deviations from the optimal value (this hyperparameter in the WVA method provides a balance between preservation of old skills and learning a new skill). Empirical observations are presented that support the hypothesis that the optimal value of this hyperparameter does not depend on the number of tasks in the sequential learning queue. And, consequently, this hyperparameter can be picked up on a small number of tasks and used on longer sequences.

A model of combustion of premixed mixture of gases with one global chemical reaction is considered, the model includes equations of the second order for temperature of mixture and concentrations of fuel and oxidizer, and the right-hand sides of these equations contain the reaction rate function. This function depends on five unknown parameters of the global reaction and serves as approximation to multistep reaction mechanism. The model is reduced, after replacement of variables, to one equation of the second order for temperature of mixture that transforms to a first-order equation for temperature derivative depending on temperature that contains a parameter of flame propagation velocity. Thus, for computing the parameter of burning velocity, one has to solve Dirichlet problem for first-order equation, and after that a model dependence of burning velocity on mixture equivalence ratio at specified reaction rate parameters will be obtained. Given the experimental data of dependence of burning velocity on mixture equivalence ratio, the problem of optimal selection of reaction rate parameters is stated, based on minimization of the mean square deviation of model values of burning velocity on experimental ones. The aim of our study is analysis of uniqueness of this problem solution. To this end, we apply computational experiment during which the problem of global search of optima is solved using multistart of gradient descent. The computational experiment clarifies that the inverse problem in this statement is underdetermined, and every time, when running gradient descent from a selected starting point, it converges to a new limit point. The structure of the set of limit points in the five-dimensional space is analyzed, and it is shown that this set can be described with three linear equations. Therefore, it might be incorrect to tabulate all five parameters of reaction rate based on just one match criterion between model and experimental data of flame propagation velocity. The conclusion of our study is that in order to tabulate reaction rate parameters correctly, it is necessary to specify the values of two of them, based on additional optimality criteria.

The paper presents various modifications of the Frank–Wolfe algorithm in the equilibrium traffic assignment problem. The Beckman model is used as a model for experiments. In this article, first of all, attention is paid to the choice of the direction of the basic step of the Frank–Wolfe algorithm. Algorithms will be presented: Conjugate Frank–Wolfe (CFW), Bi-conjugate Frank–Wolfe (BFW), Fukushima Frank –Wolfe (FFW). Each modification corresponds to different approaches to the choice of this direction. Some of these modifications are described in previous works of the authors. In this article, following algorithms will be proposed: N-conjugate Frank–Wolfe (NFW), Weighted Fukushima Frank–Wolfe (WFFW). These algorithms are some ideological continuation of the BFW and FFW algorithms. Thus, if the first algorithm used at each iteration the last two directions of the previous iterations to select the next direction conjugate to them, then the proposed algorithm NFW is using more than $N$ previous directions. In the case of Fukushima Frank–Wolfe, the average of several previous directions is taken as the next direction. According to this algorithm, a modification WFFW is proposed, which uses a exponential smoothing from previous directions. For comparative analysis, experiments with various modifications were carried out on several data sets representing urban structures and taken from publicly available sources. The relative gap value was taken as the quality metric. The experimental results showed the advantage of algorithms using the previous directions for step selection over the classic Frank–Wolfe algorithm. In addition, an improvement in efficiency was revealed when using more than two conjugate directions. For example, on various datasets, the modification 3FW showed the best convergence. In addition, the proposed modification WFFW often overtook FFW and CFW, although performed worse than NFW.

The presence of a contact boundary between water and transformer oil greatly reduces the electrical strength of the oil phase. The presence of an electric field leads to varying degrees of polarization at the interface and the appearance of a force acting on a liquid with a higher dielectric constant (water) in the direction of a liquid with a lower dielectric constant (oil). This leads to the contact surface instability development. Instability as a result of its development leads to a stream of water being drawn into oil volume and a violation of the insulating gap. In this work, we experimentally and numerically study electrohydrodynamic instability at the phase boundary between electrically weakly conductive water and transformer oil in a highly inhomogeneous electric field directed perpendicular to the contact boundary. The results of a full-scale and numerical experiment of studying of the electrohydrodynamic instability development in a strong electric field at the interface between water and transformer oil are presented. The system consists of a spherical electrode with a radius of 3.5 mm, placed in water with a conductivity of 5 $\mu S/cm$, and a thin blade electrode 0.1 mm thick, placed in transformer oil of the GK brand. The contact boundary passes at the same distance from the nearest points of the electrodes, equal to 3 mm. The work shows that at a certain electric field strength, the cone-shaped structure of water grows towards the electrode immersed in transformer oil. A numerical correspondence was obtained for both the shape of the resulting water structure (cone) during the entire growth time and the size measured from its top to the level of the initial contact boundary of phase separation. The dynamics of this structure growth has been studied. Both in numerical calculations and in experiment, it was found that the size of the resulting cone along the electrode connection line depends linearly on time.

In this paper, the structure of a shock wave in a binary gas mixture is studied on the basis of direct solution of the Boltzmann kinetic equation. The conservative projection method is used to evaluate the collision integral in the kinetic equation. The applied evaluation formulas and numerical methods are described in detail. The model of hard spheres is used as an interaction potential of molecules. Numerical simulation is performed using the developed simulation environment software, which makes it possible to study both steady and non-steady flows of gas mixtures in various flow regimes and for an arbitrary geometry of the problem. Modeling is performed on a cluster architecture. Due to the use of code parallelization technologies, a significant acceleration of computations is achieved. With a fixed accuracy controlled by the simulation parameters, the distributions of macroscopic characteristics of the mixture components through the shock wave front were obtained. Computations were conducted for various ratios of molecular masses and Mach numbers. The total accuracy of at least 1% for the local values of molecular density and temperature and 3% for the shock front width was achieved. The obtained results were compared with existing computation data. The results presented in this paper are of theoretical significance, and can serve as a test computation, since they are obtained using the exact Boltzmann equation.

In traditional CNC systems, each segment of a piecewise linear trajectory is described by a separate block of the control program. In this case, a trapezoidal trajectory of movement is formed, and the stitching of individual sections is carried out at zero values of speed and acceleration. Increased productivity is associated with continuous processing, which in modern CNC systems is achieved through the use of spline interpolation. For a piecewise linear trajectory, which is basic for most products, the most appropriate is a first-degree spline. However, even in the simplest case of spline interpolation, the closed nature of the basic software from leading manufacturers of CNC systems limits the capabilities of not only developers, but also users. Taking this into account, the purpose of this work is a detailed study of the structural organization and operation algorithms of the simulation model of piecewise linear spline interpolation. Limitations on jerk and acceleration are considered as the main measure to reduce dynamic processing errors. In this case, special attention is paid to the S-shaped shape of the speed curve in the acceleration and deceleration sections. This is due to the conditions for the implementation of spline interpolation, one of which is the continuity of movement, which is ensured by the equality of the first and second derivatives when joining sections of the trajectory. Such a statement corresponds to the principles of implementing combined control systems of a servo electric drive, which provide partial invariance to control and disturbing effects. The reference model of a spline interpolator is adopted as the basis of the structural organization. The issues of processing scaling, which are based on a decrease in the vector speed in relation to the base value, are also considered. This allows increasing the accuracy of movements. It is shown that the range of changes in the speed of movements can be more than ten thousand, and is limited only by the speed control capabilities of the actuators.

In this paper, we consider the interaction of a kink of the $\varphi^4$ equation with two identical extended impurities. An extended impurity is described using a rectangular function. The case of an attractive impurity is analyzed. Using analytical methods, we consider the case of small amplitudes of localized waves, when it is possible to linearize the equations of motion. For the numerical solution, the method of lines for partial differential equations was used. To find the oscillation frequencies of waves localized on impurities, the discrete Fourier transform is used. The kink was launched in the direction of the impurities with different initial velocities. The distance between the two impurities was also varied. It is shown that when a kink interacts with impurities, long-lived localized breather-type waves are excited on them. Their structure and coupled dynamics are investigated. It is determined how, by changing the parameters of the impurities and the distance between them, it is possible to control the type and dynamic parameters of the coupled oscillations of the waves localized on the impurities. Possible solutions in the form of in-phase, antiphase oscillations, in the form of beats are found. The oscillations of localized waves occur with the emission of small-amplitude waves. The spectrum of these emissions consists of two frequencies. The first is approximately equal to $\sqrt{2}$, which corresponds to the frequency value for the wobbling breather tail of the $\varphi^4$ equation. The second is approximately equal to the doubled frequency of impurity mode oscillations. The presence of two possible frequencies for coupled localized oscillations is found both analytically and numerically. It is shown that the frequencies strongly depend on the distance between impurities. With increasing distance between impurities, the frequencies merge into one — frequency obtained for the case of a single impurity. The dependences of the frequencies on the distance between impurities found numerically and analytically coincide well for large distances, when the interaction between impurities is weak, and begin to differ noticeably at small distances, when the interaction between impurities is strong. The analytical value of the obtained frequencies is always greater than the numerical ones. It is shown that the dependence of the amplitude of localized waves on the initial kink velocity has several minima and maxima.

The article was retracted on May 3, 2022 at the request of the authors due to the fact that the data included in the article were published in the article by Nechipurenko Y.D., Golovkin M.V., Nechipurenko D.Yu., Ilyicheva I.A., Panchenko L. .A., Polozov R.V., Grokhovsky S.L. Kharakternye osobennosti rasshchepleniya DNK ul'trazvukom [Characteristic features of DNA cleavage by ultrasound]. Journal of Structural Chemistry, 2009, volume 50, number 5, pages 1045-1052 (in Russian).

Complex geometric organization of subcellular structures such as photosynthetic or mitochondrial membranes determines mechanism of electron and proton transfer processes. We propose new approach in modeling processes, where geometric shape of membranes is accurately taken into account. Different stages of charge transfer process are simulated using different approaches, which are integrated into a combined model. We implemented this model as software which utilizes parallel computations on high-performance clusters and GPUs for better performance.