Zhiwen Zeng

Zhiwen Zeng, Xiangke Wang, Zhiqiang Zheng

This study develops an original and innovative matrix representation with respect to the information flow for networked multi-agent system. To begin with, the general concepts of the edge Laplacian of digraph are proposed with its algebraic properties. Benefit from this novel graph-theoretic tool, we can build a bridge between the consensus problem and the edge agreement problem; we also show that the edge Laplacian sheds a new light on solving the leaderless consensus problem. Based on the edge agreement framework, the technical challenges caused by unknown but bounded disturbances and inherently nonlinear dynamics can be well handled. In particular, we design an integrated procedure for a new robust consensus protocol that is based on a blend of algebraic graph theory and the newly developed cyclic-small-gain theorem. Besides, to highlight the intricate relationship between the original graph and cyclic-small-gain theorem, the concept of edge-interconnection graph is introduced for the first time. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis.

Zhiwen Zeng, Xiangke Wang, Zhiqiang Zheng

This work explores the edge agreement problem of second-order nonlinear multi-agent system under quantized measurements. Under the edge agreement framework, we introduce an important concept about the \emph{essential edge Laplacian} and also obtain a reduced model of the edge agreement dynamics based on the spanning tree subgraph. The quantized edge agreement problem of second-order nonlinear multi-agent system is studied, in which both uniform and logarithmic quantizers are considered. We do not only guarantee the stability of the proposed quantized control law, but also reveal the explicit mathematical connection of the quantized interval and the convergence properties for both uniform and logarithmic quantizers, which has not been addressed before. Particularly, for uniform quantizers, we provide the upper bound of the radius of the agreement neighborhood and indicate that the radius increases with the quantization interval. While for logarithmic quantizers, the agents converge exponentially to the desired agreement equilibrium. In addition, we figure out the relationship of the quantization interval and the convergence speed and also provide the estimates of the convergence rate. Finally, simulation results are given to verify the theoretical analysis.

Shuaifeng Jiao, Zhiwen Zeng, Zhuoqun Su et al.

As lunar exploration missions grow increasingly complex, ensuring safe and autonomous rover-based surface exploration has become one of the key challenges in lunar exploration tasks. In this work, we have developed a lunar surface simulation system called the Lunar Exploration Simulator System (LESS) and the LunarSeg dataset, which provides RGB-D data for lunar obstacle segmentation that includes both positive and negative obstacles. Additionally, we propose a novel two-stage segmentation network called LuSeg. Through contrastive learning, it enforces semantic consistency between the RGB encoder from Stage I and the depth encoder from Stage II. Experimental results on our proposed LunarSeg dataset and additional public real-world NPO road obstacle dataset demonstrate that LuSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance for both positive and negative obstacles while maintaining a high inference speed of approximately 57\,Hz. We have released the implementation of our LESS system, LunarSeg dataset, and the code of LuSeg at:https://github.com/nubot-nudt/LuSeg.

Zhiqian Zhou, Pengming Zhu, Zhiwen Zeng et al.

It is still an open and challenging problem for mobile robots navigating along time-efficient and collision-free paths in a crowd. The main challenge comes from the complex and sophisticated interaction mechanism, which requires the robot to understand the crowd and perform proactive and foresighted behaviors. Deep reinforcement learning is a promising solution to this problem. However, most previous learning methods incur a tremendous computational burden. To address these problems, we propose a graph-based deep reinforcement learning method, SG-DQN, that (i) introduces a social attention mechanism to extract an efficient graph representation for the crowd-robot state; (ii) directly evaluates the coarse q-values of the raw state with a learned dueling deep Q network(DQN); and then (iii) refines the coarse q-values via online planning on possible future trajectories. The experimental results indicate that our model can help the robot better understand the crowd and achieve a high success rate of more than 0.99 in the crowd navigation task. Compared against previous state-of-the-art algorithms, our algorithm achieves an equivalent, if not better, performance while requiring less than half of the computational cost.

Zhiwen Zeng, Matloob Khushi

Every change of trend in the forex market presents a great opportunity as well as a risk for investors. Accurate forecasting of forex prices is a crucial element in any effective hedging or speculation strategy. However, the complex nature of the forex market makes the predicting problem challenging, which has prompted extensive research from various academic disciplines. In this paper, a novel approach that integrates the wavelet denoising, Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN), and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) are proposed. Wavelet transform removes the noise from the time series to stabilize the data structure. ARNN model captures the robust and non-linear relationships in the sequence and ARIMA can well fit the linear correlation of the sequential information. By hybridization of the three models, the methodology is capable of modelling dynamic systems such as the forex market. Our experiments on USD/JPY five-minute data outperforms the baseline methods. Root-Mean-Squared-Error (RMSE) of the hybrid approach was found to be 1.65 with a directional accuracy of ~76%.

Xiangke Wang, Xun Li, Yirui Cong et al.

In this paper, the recent developments on distributed coordination control, especially the consensus and formation control, are summarized with the graph theory playing a central role, in order to present a cohesive overview of the multi-agent distributed coordination control, together with brief reviews of some closely related issues including rendezvous/alignment, swarming/flocking and containment control.In terms of the consensus problem, the recent results on consensus for the agents with different dynamics from first-order, second-order to high-order linear and nonlinear dynamics, under different communication conditions, such as cases with/without switching communication topology and varying time-delays, are reviewed, in which the algebraic graph theory is very useful in the protocol designs, stability proofs and converging analysis. In terms of the formation control problem, after reviewing the results of the algebraic graph theory employed in the formation control, we mainly pay attention to the developments of the rigid and persistent graphs. With the notions of rigidity and persistence, the formation transformation, splitting and reconstruction can be completed, and consequently the range-based formation control laws are designed with the least required information in order to maintain a formation rigid/persistent. Afterwards, the recent results on rendezvous/alignment, swarming/flocking and containment control, which are very closely related to consensus and formation control, are briefly introduced, in order to present an integrated view of the graph theory used in the coordination control problem. Finally, towards the practical applications, some directions possibly deserving investigation in coordination control are raised as well.