Autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in an unknown environment with highly cluttered obstacles is a fundamental issue in mobile robotics research. We propose an adaptive network fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based navigation controller for a differential drive mobile robot in an unknown environment with cluttered obstacles. Ultrasonic sensors are used to capture the environmental information around the mobile robot. A training data set required to train the ANFIS controller has been obtained by designing a fuzzy logic based navigation controller. Additive white Gaussian noise has been added to the sensor readings and fed to the trained ANFIS controller during mobile robot navigation, to account for the effect of environmental noise on sensor readings. The robustness of the proposed navigation controller has been evaluated by navigating the mobile robot in three different environments. The performance of the proposed controller has been verified by comparing the travelled path length/efficiency and bending energy obtained by the proposed method with reference mobile robot navigation controllers, such as neural network, fuzzy logic, and ANFIS. Simulation results presented in this paper show that the proposed controller has better performance compared with reference controllers and can successfully navigate in different environments without any collision with obstacles.

Traditional exoskeletons have made considerable contributions to people in terms of providing wearable assistance and rehabilitation. However, exoskeletons still have some disadvantages, such as being heavy, bulky, stiff, noisy, and having a fixed center of rotation that can be a burden on elders and patients with weakened muscles. Conversely, artificial muscles based on soft, smart materials possess the attributes of being lightweight, compact, highly flexible, and have mute actuation, for which they are considered to be the most similar to natural muscles. Among these materials, dielectric elastomer (DE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel exhibit considerable actuation strain, high actuation stress, high response speed, and long life span, which give them great potential for application in wearable assistance and rehabilitation. Unfortunately, there is very little research on the application of these two materials in these fields. In this review, we first introduce the working principles of the DE and PVC gel separately. Next, we summarize the DE materials and the preparation of PVC gel. Then, we review the electrodes and self-sensing systems of the two materials. Lastly, we present the initial applications of these two materials for wearable assistance and rehabilitation.

The evolutionary algorithm, a subset of computational intelligence techniques, is a generic population-based stochastic optimization algorithm which uses a mechanism motivated by biological concepts. Bio-inspired computing can implement successful optimization methods and adaptation approaches, which are inspired by the natural evolution and collective behavior observed in species, respectively. Although all the meta-heuristic algorithms have different inspirational sources, their objective is to find the optimum (minimum or maximum), which is problem-specific. We propose and evaluate a novel synergistic fibroblast optimization (SFO) algorithm, which exhibits the behavior of a fibroblast cellular organism in the dermal wound-healing process. Various characteristics of benchmark suites are applied to validate the robustness, reliability, generalization, and comprehensibility of SFO in diverse and complex situations. The encouraging results suggest that the collaborative and self-adaptive behaviors of fibroblasts have intellectually found the optimum solution with several different features that can improve the effectiveness of optimization strategies for solving non-linear complicated problems.

Correlation analysis is an effective mechanism for studying patterns in data and making predictions. Many interesting discoveries have been made by formulating correlations in seemingly unrelated data. We propose an algorithm to quantify the theory of correlations and to give an intuitive, more accurate correlation coefficient. We propose a predictive metric to calculate correlations between paired values, known as the general rank-based correlation coefficient. It fulfills the five basic criteria of a predictive metric: independence from sample size, value between −1 and 1, measuring the degree of monotonicity, insensitivity to outliers, and intuitive demonstration. Furthermore, the metric has been validated by performing experiments using a real-time dataset and random number simulations. Mathematical derivations of the proposed equations have also been provided. We have compared it to Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The comparison results show that the proposed metric fares better than the existing metric on all the predictive metric criteria.

Behavior-based malware analysis is an important technique for automatically analyzing and detecting malware, and it has received considerable attention from both academic and industrial communities. By considering how malware behaves, we can tackle the malware obfuscation problem, which cannot be processed by traditional static analysis approaches, and we can also derive the as-built behavior specifications and cover the entire behavior space of the malware samples. Although there have been several works focusing on malware behavior analysis, such research is far from mature, and no overviews have been put forward to date to investigate current developments and challenges. In this paper, we conduct a survey on malware behavior description and analysis considering three aspects: malware behavior description, behavior analysis methods, and visualization techniques. First, existing behavior data types and emerging techniques for malware behavior description are explored, especially the goals, principles, characteristics, and classifications of behavior analysis techniques proposed in the existing approaches. Second, the inadequacies and challenges in malware behavior analysis are summarized from different perspectives. Finally, several possible directions are discussed for future research.

The segmentation of brain tumor plays an important role in diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical simulation. The precise segmentation of brain tumor can help clinicians obtain its location, size, and shape information. We propose a fully automatic brain tumor segmentation method based on kernel sparse coding. It is validated with 3D multiple-modality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this method, MRI images are pre-processed first to reduce the noise, and then kernel dictionary learning is used to extract the nonlinear features to construct five adaptive dictionaries for healthy tissues, necrosis, edema, non-enhancing tumor, and enhancing tumor tissues. Sparse coding is performed on the feature vectors extracted from the original MRI images, which are a patch of m×m×m around the voxel. A kernel-clustering algorithm based on dictionary learning is developed to code the voxels. In the end, morphological filtering is used to fill in the area among multiple connected components to improve the segmentation quality. To assess the segmentation performance, the segmentation results are uploaded to the online evaluation system where the evaluation metrics dice score, positive predictive value (PPV), sensitivity, and kappa are used. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has good performance on the complete tumor region (dice: 0.83; PPV: 0.84; sensitivity: 0.82), while slightly worse performance on the tumor core (dice: 0.69; PPV: 0.76; sensitivity: 0.80) and enhancing tumor (dice: 0.58; PPV: 0.60; sensitivity: 0.65). It is competitive to the other groups in the brain tumor segmentation challenge. Therefore, it is a potential method in differentiation of healthy and pathological tissues.