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This paper presents an affordable, yet efficient approach to Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) design for automated water quality monitoring. Mechanically, the USV employs a catamaran design with robust hardware components, including aluminium structural frames, PVC inflatable tubes, and waterproof enclosures for housing electronics and batteries. The water quality monitoring function is achieved through a multi-parameter sonde controlled by an onboard processing unit, enabling fully automated environmental data collection. With the capability of both GPS-guided and telemetry operation, the USV is suitable to perform various missions/tasks of vast environmental surveillance application on both static water and river setting while maintaining communication with ground control station and server via wireless RF/4G/LTE/GPRS/Wi-Fi networks.

This paper presents a trajectory control scheme for a non-holonomic differential drive mobile robot using the Non-singular Terminal Sliding Mode (NTSM) control method. The proposed approach, in fact, is a cascade control system scheme with the NTSM based dynamic controller at the internal loop which tracks the robot’s velocity quantities and a kinematic controller at the outer loop to regulate the robot’s position. In this manner, the control performance is robust to both disturbances and model’s uncertainties, as well as guarantees fast, finite-time convergence at better tracking precision. The simulation results demonstrate the merit of the anticipated control scheme.

This paper presents an efficient approach to the non-invasive estimation of Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP) using just a single photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor and self-calibration procedure. In this scheme, two features of the measured PPG signal, which are systolic upstroke time (SUT) and PPG inter-beat interval (IBI), are extracted to be used in the estimation model. Here, for each individual, a unique model is self-calibrated in order to provide better accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated the merits and promising potentials for future application of the proposed approach.

This paper proposes a second-order terminal sliding mode (2TSM) approach to the trajectory tracking of the differential drive mobile robot (DDMR). Within this cascaded control scheme, the 2TSM dynamic controller, at the innermost loop, tracks the robot's velocity quantities while a kinematic controller, at the outermost loop, regulates the robot's positions. In this manner, chattering is greatly attenuated, and finite-time convergence is guaranteed by the second-order TSM manifold, which involves higher-order derivatives of the state variables, resulting in an inherently robust as well as fast and better tracking precision. The simulation results demonstrate the merit of the proposed control methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]