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Scrub typhus is a vectorborne zoonosis caused by Orientia spp. bacteria; infection carries a potentially severe outcome (1). Although widely underrecognized, scrub typhus is considered one of the most important [...]

Bartonelloses are major emerging infectious bacterial diseases because of the high prevalence of chronic Bartonella infections in mammals and humans and their increasing risk for infection of immunocompromised populations (1-4). [...]

The stratospheric airship has important value in both commercial and military use. The altitude position control is very crucial for the airship to conduct specific missions, which is also a challenge because of both the severe relative aerodynamic mismatches and the large lag due to the quite low speed of the airship within 15 m/s. In this paper, a coordinated altitude and attitude control method was proposed to realize satisfactory altitude position control while maintaining the attitude stability by properly employing the two actuators, the propeller thrust and the elevator, in a consistent manner. In this process, the references for the vertical speed and the pitch were specified in a straightforward way of proportionating them by considering their physical characteristics and the inherent symmetrical relationship between them, which can be obtained through the kinematics. An extended disturbance observer was used to eliminate the severe aerodynamic uncertainties to symmetrically distribute the two actuator outputs by dynamically decoupling the vertical speed and the pitch angular rate loops into the two independent integrators. As a result, the explicit proportional controllers were sufficient to realize efficient command tracking. Rigorous theoretical investigation was provided to symmetrically prove the quantitative bounded property of the estimation and tracking errors. The simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which can realize a 500-m altitude difference tracking within 200 s with less than 0.5 deg/s pitch angular rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rickettsial diseases, scrub typhus, and Q fever are increasingly recognized as key causes of undifferentiated fevers in humans in Africa (1-6). According to a recent study in western Kenya, respiratory [...]

Accurately predicting the concentration trend of dissolved gas in oil has a positive effect on the evaluation of transformer status and life assessment. In order to improve the accuracy of dissolved gas in oil prediction, a dissolved gas in oil prediction method based on complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and time convolution network (TCN) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the CEEMDAN method is used to decompose the original sequence of dissolved gas in oil into multiple intrinsic mode functions(IMFs), separating the stable and unstable IMFs. Secondly, TCN are established for IMFs, then predictions based on these trained TCNs are made. Finally, the prediction results of IMFs are overlaid to reconstruct the prediction results of the original sequence. Analysis in this paper shows that the root mean square error, mean absolute error and maximum error of the prediction method are 1.01 μL/L, 1.53 μL/L, 5.54 μL/L respectively, which are reduced by 53.47%, 41.18%, 13.36% compared to the case without using the CEEMDAN. When using CEEMDAN, the three errors are the smallest compared to commonly used recurrent neural networks. The proposed dissolved gas in oil prediction method has higher prediction accuracy and can provide more effective support for condition based maintenance strategy.

This paper addresses the resilient formation control problem for heterogeneous multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAV) under false data injection (FDI) attacks and prescribed performance constraints. The case of both actuator and sensor attacks is considered simultaneously, and the multi-UAV can exchange the information through a directed communication network. A fuzzy adaptive observer (FAO) is first proposed to estimate the FDI attacks and the unmeasurable velocity information for each UAV. In order to transform the formation control of heterogeneous multi-UAV into a trajectory tracking control problem of individual UAVs, a bank of distributed estimators is designed to achieve the leader's states by only using local information among neighboring UAVs. Then, by incorporating a novel tracking error transform method and fractional-order sliding mode control technique, a resilient prescribed performance tracking controller without velocity measurements is constructed. Furthermore, it is proved that all signals of the closed-loop formation control systems are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) stable under FDI attacks. Finally, the simulation results are given to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]