Special issue on Control and Automation in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

This special issue consists of ten previously unpublished papers selected from over 130 submissions to the 2011 International Conference on Cyber Technology in Automation, Control, and Intelligent Systems (IEEE-CYBER 2011) held on 20–23 March 2011 in Kunming, China. A cyber-physical system (CPS) is typically designed as a network of interacting elements with physical input and output. In the near future, the expected advances in science and engineering will not only enhance the links between computational and physical elements, but also significantly improve the autonomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability and safety level of CPS. These advances will expand the applicability of CPS in many technical fields including intervention (e.g. collision avoidance), precision (e.g. robotic surgery and nanoscale manufacturing), operation in dangerous or inaccessible environments (e.g. search and rescue, fire fighting and deep-sea exploration), and augmentation of human capabilities (e.g. telerobotics, haptic interface and healthcare monitoring/delivery). The selected papers illustrate a wide range of ongoing work in the areas of controller design, engineering applications and information engineering. Tan et al. present a novel hierarchical and structural 3D object model description for wireless camera networks. They describe the concrete data structure, reconstruction method and fusion method of the model with experimental results showing the feasibility, efficiency and effectiveness of the networks. Liu et al. show a new approach for adaptive torque distribution of 4-powered caster vehicle (4-PCV) on complex terrain without any additional sensor. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed estimation approach and the performance of the torque distribution schemes. Pei et al. introduce the influence of visual feedback indicator scales on human upright postural control. They demonstrate a reduction of the visual feedback indicator scale inspires a postural power to shift to a higher frequency, and this reduction also induces a fall-after-rise pattern of postural energy distribution. Yao et al. develop a novel microfluidic based telemedicine system capable of detecting insulin and conveying the results to physicians located off-site through the Internet. They combine an integrated polydimethylsiloxane-based microfluidic device with a telemedicine strategy to offer new opportunities for diabetes care, especially for facilitating patients in the rural areas. Shi et al. present a novel translation system that can capture human gestures through micro IMUs and then translate the gestures into specific meanings. The experimental performance shows that the correct recognition rate ranges from 27.5% to 100% with an overall correction rate of 66.25%. Bi et al. propose a systematic trajectory generation method for a biped robot walking on slopes utilizing the inverted pendulum model. They also demonstrate that this robot can adapt to uneven floor conditions by employing control algorithms. Pan et al. elucidate the automatic generation of a modular reconfigurable robot, including single-open-chain robots and multi-chain robots. They also show an illustrative example and conduct experiment studies to affirm the theoretical analysis. Jing et al. investigate a radial basis function neural network modelling approach applied for compensating the noncontact inductive gap sensor in the high-speed maglev train. They experimentally show that the compensated gap signal meets the requirement of the levitation control system. Chen et al. introduce an ordinal isolated algorithm extracting outliers in terms of the order of being isolated in a recursive uniform data space partition process. The experiments show that the CPU time of ordinal isolation increases linearly with linearly growing data sets. Mu et al. present a new algorithm called the iterated square-root cubature Kalman filter. The new algorithm is applied to the state estimation of a re-entry ballistic target with unknown ballistic coefficient. Simulation results show that this novel algorithm has a superior performance and robustness over the unscented Kalman filter and the squareroot cubature Kalman filter. As a whole, the aforementioned Ten papers present a general introduction to recent progress in the areas of intelligent control, biomedical engineering, information engineering and engineering applications in which networking plays a fastgrowing role to facilitate the performance. It is hoped that this issue will serve as a catalytic agent for future research in similar areas. Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers who have helped with the review process of this special issue and the authors for their effort in revising their papers according to the reviewers’ comments.