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This qualitative study was conducted in the context of ongoing debates on "marriage fraud" to explore the underlying social structural and individual reasons for entering mixed‐orientation marriages affecting men who have sex with men (tongzhi in Chinese) and non‐complicit women (tongqi) who married tongzhi in China. Using a phenomenological approach, sixty‐eight (34 tongzhi and 34 tongqi, unpaired) semi‐structured interviews were conducted through in‐person interviews or WeChat audio interviews between 2018 and 2019 in China. Guided by thematic analysis, three themes explaining the shared pressure from the societal, family, and individual levels that drove individuals' decisions about whom they partnered with, and when and how they entered marriage among tongzhi and tongqi: marriage normativity, filial piety, and conformity with conventional marriage. The findings showed that marital decisions for tongzhi and tongqi were constrained by the similar social power of marriage normativity, filial piety, and heteronormativity in China. Some marriages fell within the scope of marriage fraud, but most of them fell within the scope of performing conventional marriages. This phenomenon was beyond simple explanations of marriage fraud. Future studies need to investigate multi‐level constraints concerning family relations for sexual minorities in China on a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper addresses the problem of stabilizing multiple aerial robots cooperatively transporting a cable‐suspended payload by an aeromechanic method. Instead of relying on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) or vision and communication for agents to actively estimate and control the state of the multibody dynamics, lightweight air dampers to make the multiagent system inherently stable at its equilibrium state, permitting the robots to safely carry a load at a constant velocity are employed. This is achieved without additional state estimation or active correction. The proposed framework is proven stable and verified by simulations and extensive flight experiments. Lightweight mechanical dampers (under 7 g) are shown to be effective in attenuating undesired oscillations and overcoming disturbances. To this end, a team of four robots cooperatively transporting a payload over 20 m in open space is demonstrated, and three robots safely transporting a point‐mass payload over a distance of 45 m outdoors. The promising outcomes highlight the benefits of the passive strategy, which demands minimal hardware components and computation to realize the sophisticated aerial transport task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disturbances acting on flexible structures at spatially varying locations instead of fixed points may lead to deteriorated vibration control performance. To tackle this problem, this article presents an optimal sensor/actuator placement method, in which the closed-loop spatial ℋ 2 norm is employed as the optimization criterion. In addition, a new way to calculate the spatial ℋ 2 norm is proposed, which is independent of the modal orthogonality assumption in previous research. An optimization framework is established to optimize sensor/actuator placement by minimizing the closed-loop spatial ℋ 2 norm using the genetic algorithm. Comprehensive numerical simulations are implemented on a fixed-fixed plate to validate the proposed method. Results show that magnitude of vibrations is reduced and decays faster after the optimization, which indicates that the proposed method markedly improves control performance when spatially varying disturbances exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]