Explore the vast range of titles available.

Navigation without Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) poses a significant challenge in aerospace engineering, particularly in the environments where satellite signals are obstructed or unavailable. This paper offers an in-depth review of various methods, sensors, and algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) localization in outdoor environments where GNSS signals are unavailable or denied. A key contribution of this study is the establishment of a critical classification system that divides GNSS-denied navigation techniques into two primary categories: absolute and relative localization. This classification enhances the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different strategies in various operational contexts. Vision-based localization is identified as the most effective approach in GNSS-denied environments. Nonetheless, it’s clear that no single-sensor-based localization algorithm can fulfill all the needs of a comprehensive navigation system in outdoor environments. Therefore, it’s vital to implement a hybrid strategy that merges various algorithms and sensors for effective outcomes. This detailed analysis emphasizes the challenges and possible solutions for achieving reliable and effective outdoor UAV localization in environments where GNSS is unreliable or unavailable. This multi-faceted analysis, highlights the complexities and potential pathways for achieving efficient and dependable outdoor UAV localization in GNSS-denied environments.

Driver fatigue is one of the most common causes of road accidents, which means that there is a great need for robust and adaptive monitoring systems. Current models of fatigue detection suffer from domain-specific limitations in generalizing across diverse environments, sensor variability, and individual differences. Moreover, they are not resilient to real-time sensor quality issues or missing data, which limits their practical applicability. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose a holistic Dynamic Cross-Domain Transfer Learning framework for fatigue monitoring application using multi-modal sensor data fusion. There are four innovations involved with this framework. Firstly, the domain adversarial neural network in EEG, ECG, and video inputs ensures cross-domain invariance of features. The gap of adaptation at the domain goes below 5%, while there is an improvement of the cross-domain accuracy to as high as 15% from 10%. The ASF-Transformer uses adaptive cross-modal attention for fusing heterogeneous sensor data effectively. Accuracy improves by 5–8% and remains robust under modality dropout conditions. Third, the GMSN dynamically evaluates sensor quality and selectively enables modalities to mitigate performance drops to < 5% even with noisy or missing inputs in process. Fourth, Online Personalized Fine-Tuning (OPFT) allows for real-time adaptation of the model to individual drivers, achieving an improvement in accuracy by 5–7% within 2 h with a latency of < 50ms. Thorough evaluations show that the framework can achieve 85–90% accuracy on target domains while maintaining robustness under 20% sensor dropout. Addressing the issue of domain variability, sensor quality, and personalization, this work has improved the reliability, adaptability, and real-time feasibility of fatigue monitoring systems to provide significant advancements for driver safety in dynamic real-world environments.

Pedestrian-vehicle collisions produce a rich kinematic record that is entirely lost by the time a forensic investigation begins. Recovering this record constitutes a state-estimation problem. This paper presents a Phase 1 design for a multimodal sensor fusion and signal-processing framework utilising 128-channel LiDAR, 1080p NIR stereo cameras, and a 2 kHz IMU, all fused via Kalman filtering and Savitzky-Golay polynomial differentiation. The framework is evaluated through Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation and sensitivity analysis applied to a constructed simulation scenario; no real clinical or forensic data are used in this Phase 1 report. Under simulated conditions with throw-distance measurement uncertainty of ±0.5 m, velocity reconstruction shows an estimated propagated uncertainty of ±2.03 km/h under expanded simulation conditions with vehicle-coefficient variance activated. Sensitivity analysis indicates that a 10% noise spike in acceleration would theoretically amplify injury metrics by 26.9%, providing quantitative justification for noise-optimal pre-filtering. The bimodal kinematic-acoustic architecture is proposed as a physically interpretable foundation for collision reconstruction; its experimental performance awaits Phase 2-4 validation. A five-phase validation roadmap is presented, progressing from FEA simulation to independent multi-site replication before any forensic deployment is proposed.

Real-time object detection on resource-constrained edge devices remains a critical challenge in precision agriculture and autonomous systems, particularly when integrating advanced multi-modal sensors (RGB-D, thermal, hyperspectral). This paper introduces FEGW-YOLO, a lightweight detection framework explicitly designed to bridge the efficiency-accuracy gap for fine-grained visual perception on edge hardware while maintaining compatibility with multiple sensor modalities. The core innovation is a Feature Complexity Descriptor (FCD) metric that enables adaptive, layer-wise compression based on the information-bearing capacity of network features. This compression-guided approach is coupled with (1) Feature Engineering-driven Ghost Convolution (FEG-Conv) for parameter reduction, (2) Efficient Multi-Scale Attention (EMA) for compensating compression-induced information loss, and (3) Wise-IoU loss for improved localization in dense, occluded scenes. The framework follows a principled “Compress, Compensate, and Refine” philosophy that treats compression and compensation as co-designed objectives rather than isolated knobs. Extensive experiments on a custom strawberry dataset (11,752 annotated instances) and cross-crop validation on apples, tomatoes, and grapes demonstrate that FEGW-YOLO achieves 95.1% mAP@0.5 while reducing model parameters by 54.7% and computational cost (GFLOPs) by 53.5% compared to a strong YOLO-Agri baseline. Real-time inference on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier achieves 38 FPS at 12.3 W, enabling 40+ hours of continuous operation on typical agricultural robotic platforms. Multi-modal fusion experiments with RGB-D sensors demonstrate that the lightweight architecture leaves sufficient computational headroom for parallel processing of depth and visual data, a capability essential for practical advanced sensing systems. Field deployment in commercial strawberry greenhouses validates an 87.3% harvesting success rate with a 2.1% fruit damage rate, demonstrating feasibility for autonomous systems. The proposed framework advances the state-of-the-art in efficient agricultural sensing by introducing a principled metric-guided compression strategy, comprehensive multi-modal sensor integration, and empirical validation across diverse crop types and real-world deployment scenarios. This work bridges the gap between laboratory research and practical edge deployment of advanced sensing systems, with direct relevance to autonomous harvesting, precision monitoring, and other resource-constrained agricultural applications.

Advances in sensing technologies are increasingly transforming cutting operations by enabling data-driven condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, and process optimization. This review surveys recent developments in sensing modalities for cutting systems, including vibration sensors, acoustic emission sensors, optical and vision-based systems, eddy-current sensors, force sensors, and emerging hybrid/multi-modal sensing frameworks. Each sensing approach offers unique advantages in capturing mechanical, acoustic, geometric, or electromagnetic signatures related to tool wear, process instability, and fault development, while also showing modality-specific limitations such as noise sensitivity, environmental robustness, and integration complexity. Recent trends show a growing shift toward hybrid and multi-modal sensor fusion, where data from multiple sensors are combined using advanced data analytics and machine learning to improve diagnostic accuracy and reliability under changing cutting conditions. The review also discusses how artificial intelligence, Internet of Things connectivity, and edge computing enable scalable, real-time monitoring solutions, along with the challenges related to data needs, computational costs, and system integration. Future directions highlight the importance of robust fusion architectures, physics-informed and explainable models, digital twin integration, and cost-effective sensor deployment to accelerate adoption across various manufacturing environments. Overall, these advancements position advanced sensing and hybrid monitoring strategies as key drivers of intelligent, Industry 4.0-oriented cutting processes.

Multi-modal sensor fusion-based LiDAR SLAM is a key capability for reliable mobile robot operation in complex indoor environments. However, it remains susceptible to localization drift and global inconsistency in typical degenerate scenarios such as feature sparsity, repetitive structures, and dynamic disturbances. To address these challenges, we propose a LiDAR-inertial SLAM method enhanced with visual QR-code landmarks. The front-end employs a lightweight EKF-based LiDAR-IMU odometry to ensure real-time and robust motion estimation, while the back-end constructs a unified factor graph that tightly couples LiDAR, IMU, loop-closure, and QR-code landmark factors within a single state space to achieve globally consistent cross-modal constraints. QR codes are further incorporated as persistent artificial landmarks to provide strong global anchoring in long corridors and repetitive or feature-degraded environments. In addition, an adaptive covariance and hierarchical weighting mechanism dynamically adjusts factor influence based on residual statistics and observation quality, thereby improving robustness under occlusion, degradation, and sensor noise variations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves localization accuracy and mapping stability across various challenging indoor scenarios. These findings validate the effectiveness of deeply integrating visual landmarks with LiDAR-inertial information, offering new scientific evidence and practical value for robust multi-modal SLAM in indoor robotic perception—fully aligning with the research scope of Scientific Reports.

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is a primary bottleneck for the real-world application of autonomous robots, requiring advanced frameworks for sensing, perception, modeling, planning, and control. When fragile objects such as soft tissues or fruits are involved, ensuring safety becomes the paramount concern, fundamentally altering the manipulation problem from one of pure trajectory optimization to one of constrained optimization and real-time adaptive control. Existing DOM methodologies, however, often fall short of addressing fragility constraints as a core design feature, leading to significant gaps in real-time adaptiveness and generalization. This review systematically examines individual components in DOM with a focus on their effectiveness in handling fragile objects. We identified key limitations in current approaches and, based on this analysis, discussed a promising framework that utilizes both low-latency reflexive mechanisms and global optimization to dynamically adapt to specific object instances.

Currently, multi-modal 3D object detection methods have become a key area of research in the field of autonomous driving. Fusion is an essential factor affecting performance in multi-modal object detection. However, previous methods still suffer from the inability to effectively fuse features from LiDAR and RGB images, resulting in a low utilization rate of complementary information between depth and semantic texture features. At the same time, existing methods may not adequately capture the structural information in Region of Interest (RoI) features when extracting them. Structural information plays a crucial role in RoI features. It encompasses the position, size, and orientation of objects, as well as the relative positions and spatial relationships between objects. Its absence can result in false or missed detections. To solve the above problems, we propose a multi-modal sensor fusion network, Bi-Att3DDet, which mainly consists of a Self-Attentive RoI Feature Extraction module (SARoIFE) and a Feature Bidirectional Interactive Fusion module (FBIF). Specifically, SARoIFE captures the relationship between different positions in RoI features to obtain high-quality RoI features through the self-attention mechanism. SARoIFE prepares for the fusion stage. FBIF performs bidirectional interaction between LiDAR and pseudo RoI features to make full use of the complementary information. We perform comprehensive experiments on the KITTI dataset, and our method notably demonstrates a 1.55% improvement in the hard difficulty level and a 0.19% improvement in the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric on the test dataset.

Nowadays, recommender system has become one of the main tools to search for users’ interested papers. Since one paper often contains only a part of keywords that a user is interested in, recommender system returns a set of papers that satisfy the user’s need of keywords. Besides, to satisfy the users’ requirements of further research on a certain domain, the recommended papers must be correlated. However, each paper of an existing paper citation network hardly has cited relationships with others, so the correlated links among papers are very sparse. In addition, while a mass of research approaches have been put forward in terms of link prediction to address the network sparsity problems, these approaches have no relationship with the effect of self-citations and the potential correlations among papers (i.e., these correlated relationships are not included in the paper citation network as their published time is close). Therefore, we propose a link prediction approach that combines time, keywords, and authors’ information and optimizes the existing paper citation network. Finally, a number of experiments are performed on the real-world Hep-Th datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal and achieve good performance.

Large-scale applications of Internet of things (IoT), which require considerable computing tasks and storage resources, are increasingly deployed in cloud environments. Compared with the traditional computing model, characteristics of the cloud such as pay-as-you-go, unlimited expansion, and dynamic acquisition represent different conveniences for these applications using the IoT architecture. One of the major challenges is to satisfy the quality of service requirements while assigning resources to tasks. In this paper, we propose a deadline and cost-aware scheduling algorithm that minimizes the execution cost of a workflow under deadline constraints in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. Considering the virtual machine (VM) performance variation and acquisition delay, we first divide tasks into different levels according to the topological structure so that no dependency exists between tasks at the same level. Three strings are used to code the genes in the proposed algorithm to better reflect the heterogeneous and resilient characteristics of cloud environments. Then, HEFT is used to generate individuals with the minimum completion time and cost. Novel schemes are developed for crossover and mutation to increase the diversity of the solutions. Based on this process, a task scheduling method that considers cost and deadlines is proposed. Experiments on workflows that simulate the structured tasks of the IoT demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a high success rate and performs well compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.