Group Hybrid Coordination Control of Multi-Agent Systems With Time-Delays and Additive Noises

A new kind of group coordination control problemgroup hybrid coordination control is investigated in this paper.The group hybrid coordination control means that in a whole multi-agent system(MAS)that consists of two subgroups with communications between them,agents in the two subgroups achieve consensus and containment,respectively.For MASs with both time-delays and additive noises,two group control protocols are proposed to solve this problem for the containment-oriented case and consensus-oriented case,respectively.By developing a new analysis idea,some sufficient conditions and necessary conditions related to the communication intensity betw een the two subgroups are obtained for the following two types of group hybrid coordination behavior:1)Agents in one subgroup and in another subgroup achieve weak consensus and containment,respectively;2)Agents in one subgroup and in another subgroup achieve strong consensus and containment,respectively.It is revealed that the decay of the communication impact betw een the two subgroups is necessary for the consensus-oriented case.Finally,the validity of the group control results is verified by several simulation examples.

Synthesis of Branched Chains with Actuation Redundancy for Eliminating Interior Singularities of 3T1R Parallel Mechanisms

Although it is common to eliminate the singularity of parallel mechanism by adding the branched chain with actuation redundancy, there is no theory and method for the configuration synthesis of the branched chain with actuation redundancy in parallel mechanism. Branched chains with actuation redundancy are synthesized for eliminating interior singularity of 3-translational and 1-rotational（3T1R） parallel mechanisms. Guided by the discriminance method of hybrid screw group according to Grassmann line geometry, all the possibilities are listed for the occurrence of interior singularities in 3T1R parallel mechanism. Based on the linear relevance of screw system and the principles of eliminating parallel mechanism singularity with actuation redundancy, different types of branched chains with actuation redundancy are synthesized systematically to indicate the layout and the number of the branched chainsinterior with actuation redundancy. A general method is proposed for the configuration synthesis of the branched chains with actuation redundancy of the redundant parallel mechanism, and it builds a solid foundation for the subsequent performance optimization of the redundant actuation parallel mechanism.

Hybrid Predictive Ensembles:Synergies Between Human and Computational Forecasts

An increasing proportion of decisions,design choices,and predictions are being made by hybrid groups consisting of humans and artificial intelligence(AI).In this paper,we provide analytic foundations that explain the potential benefits of hybrid groups on predictive tasks,the primary use of AI.Our analysis relies on interpretive and generative signal frameworks as well as a distinction between the big data used by AI and the thick,often narrative data used by humans.We derive several conditions on accuracy and correlation necessary for humans to remain in the loop.We conclude that human adaptability along with the potential for atypical cases that mislead AI will likely mean that humans always add value on predictive tasks.