Lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion) have revolutionized energy storage technology, becoming integral to our daily lives by powering a diverse range of devices and applications. Their high energy density, fast power response, recyclability, and mobility advantages have made them the preferred choice for numerous sectors. This paper explores the seamless integration of Prognostics and Health Management within batteries, presenting a multidisciplinary approach that enhances the reliability, safety, and performance of these powerhouses. Remaining useful life (RUL), a critical concept in prognostics, is examined in depth, emphasizing its role in predicting component failure before it occurs. The paper reviews various RUL prediction methods, from traditional models to cutting-edge data-driven techniques. Furthermore, it highlights the paradigm shift toward deep learning architectures within the field of Li-ion battery health prognostics, elucidating the pivotal role of deep learning in addressing battery system complexities. Practical applications of PHM across industries are also explored, offering readers insights into real-world implementations.This paper serves as a comprehensive guide, catering to both researchers and practitioners in the field of Li-ion battery PHM.

Accurately estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of lithium-ion batteries is crucial for maintaining the safe and stable operation of rechargeable battery management systems. However, this task is often challenging due to the complex temporal dynamics involved. Recently, attention-based networks, such as Transformers and Informer, have been the popular architecture in time series forecasting. Despite their effectiveness, these models with abundant parameters necessitate substantial training time to unravel temporal patterns. To tackle these challenges, we propose a simple MLP-Mixer-based architecture named 'Intra-Inter Patch Mixer' (IIP-Mixer), which is an architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), extracting information by mixing operations along both intra-patch and inter-patch dimensions for battery RUL prediction. The proposed IIP-Mixer comprises parallel dual-head mixer layers: the intra-patch mixing MLP, capturing local temporal patterns in the short-term period, and the inter-patch mixing MLP, capturing global temporal patterns in the long-term period. Notably, to address the varying importance of features in RUL prediction, we introduce a weighted loss function in the MLP-Mixer-based architecture, marking the first time such an approach has been employed. Our experiments demonstrate that IIP-Mixer achieves competitive performance in battery RUL prediction, outperforming other popular time-series frameworks

Navigating multi-robot systems in complex terrains has always been a challenging task. This is due to the inherent limitations of traditional robots in collision avoidance, adaptation to unknown environments, and sustained energy efficiency. In order to overcome these limitations, this research proposes a solution by integrating living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control, and proposing a novel control algorithm for swarming. Although these creatures, called cyborg insects, have the ability to instinctively avoid collisions with neighbors and obstacles while adapting to complex terrains, there is a lack of literature on the control of multi-cyborg systems. This research gap is due to the difficulty in coordinating the movements of a cyborg system under the presence of insects' inherent individual variability in their reactions to control input. In response to this issue, we propose a novel swarm navigation algorithm addressing these challenges. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through an experimental validation in which a cyborg swarm was successfully navigated through an unknown sandy field with obstacles and hills. This research contributes to the domain of swarm robotics and showcases the potential of integrating biological organisms with robotics and control theory to create more intelligent autonomous systems with real-world applications.

This paper proposes an Emergency Battery Service (EBS) for drones in which an EBS drone flies to a drone in the field with a depleted battery and transfers a fresh battery to the exhausted drone. The authors present a unique battery transfer mechanism and drone localization that uses the Cross Marker Position (CMP) method. The main challenges include a stable and balanced transfer that precisely localizes the receiver drone. The proposed EBS drone mitigates the effects of downwash due to the vertical proximity between the drones by implementing diagonal alignment with the receiver, reducing the distance to 0.5 m between the two drones. CFD analysis shows that diagonal instead of perpendicular alignment minimizes turbulence, and the authors verify the actual system for change in output airflow and thrust measurements. The CMP marker-based localization method enables position lock for the EBS drone with up to 0.9 cm accuracy. The performance of the transfer mechanism is validated experimentally by successful mid-air transfer in 5 seconds, where the EBS drone is within 0.5 m vertical distance from the receiver drone, wherein 4m/s turbulence does not affect the transfer process.

Building a predictive model that rapidly adapts to real-time condition monitoring (CM) signals is critical for engineering systems/units. Unfortunately, many current methods suffer from a trade-off between representation power and agility in online settings. For instance, parametric methods that assume an underlying functional form for CM signals facilitate efficient online prediction updates. However, this simplification leads to vulnerability to model specifications and an inability to capture complex signals. On the other hand, approaches based on over-parameterized or non-parametric models can excel at explaining complex nonlinear signals, but real-time updates for such models pose a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a neural process-based approach that addresses this trade-off. It encodes available observations within a CM signal into a representation space and then reconstructs the signal's history and evolution for prediction. Once trained, the model can encode an arbitrary number of observations without requiring retraining, enabling on-the-spot real-time predictions along with quantified uncertainty and can be readily updated as more online data is gathered. Furthermore, our model is designed to incorporate qualitative information (i.e., labels) from individual units. This integration not only enhances individualized predictions for each unit but also enables joint inference for both signals and their associated labels. Numerical studies on both synthetic and real-world data in reliability engineering highlight the advantageous features of our model in real-time adaptation, enhanced signal prediction with uncertainty quantification, and joint prediction for labels and signals.

This study focuses on two important problems related to applying offline model-based optimization to real-world industrial control problems. The first problem is how to create a reliable probabilistic model that accurately captures the dynamics present in noisy industrial data. The second problem is how to reliably optimize control parameters without actively collecting feedback from industrial systems. Specifically, we introduce a novel cGAN ensemble-based uncertainty-aware surrogate model for reliable offline model-based optimization in industrial control problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through extensive experiments conducted on two representative cases, namely a discrete control case and a continuous control case. The results of these experiments show that our method outperforms several competitive baselines in the field of offline model-based optimization for industrial control.

Accurate positioning of remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) in confined environments is crucial for inspection and mapping tasks and is also a prerequisite for autonomous operations. Presently, there are no positioning systems available that are suited for real-world use in confined underwater environments, unconstrained by environmental lighting and water turbidity levels and have sufficient accuracy for long-term, reliable and repeatable navigation. This shortage presents a significant barrier to enhancing the capabilities of ROVs in such scenarios. This paper introduces an innovative positioning system for ROVs operating in confined, cluttered underwater settings, achieved through the collaboration of an omnidirectional surface vehicle and an ROV. A formulation is proposed and evaluated in the simulation against ground truth. The experimental results from the simulation form a proof of principle of the proposed system and also demonstrate its deployability. Unlike many previous approaches, the system does not rely on fixed infrastructure or tracking of features in the environment and can cover large enclosed areas without additional equipment.

Our study introduces a Generative AI method that employs a cooling-guided diffusion model to optimize the layout of battery cells, a crucial step for enhancing the cooling performance and efficiency of battery thermal management systems. Traditional design processes, which rely heavily on iterative optimization and extensive guesswork, are notoriously slow and inefficient, often leading to suboptimal solutions. In contrast, our innovative method uses a parametric denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) with classifier and cooling guidance to generate optimized cell layouts with enhanced cooling paths, significantly lowering the maximum temperature of the cells. By incorporating position-based classifier guidance, we ensure the feasibility of generated layouts. Meanwhile, cooling guidance directly optimizes cooling-efficiency, making our approach uniquely effective. When compared to two advanced models, the Tabular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (TabDDPM) and the Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN), our cooling-guided diffusion model notably outperforms both. It is five times more effective than TabDDPM and sixty-six times better than CTGAN across key metrics such as feasibility, diversity, and cooling efficiency. This research marks a significant leap forward in the field, aiming to optimize battery cell layouts for superior cooling efficiency, thus setting the stage for the development of more effective and dependable battery thermal management systems.

Experimental (design) optimization is a key driver in designing and discovering new products and processes. Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an effective tool for optimizing expensive and black-box experimental design processes. While Bayesian optimization is a principled data-driven approach to experimental optimization, it learns everything from scratch and could greatly benefit from the expertise of its human (domain) experts who often reason about systems at different abstraction levels using physical properties that are not necessarily directly measured (or measurable). In this paper, we propose a human-AI collaborative Bayesian framework to incorporate expert preferences about unmeasured abstract properties into the surrogate modeling to further boost the performance of BO. We provide an efficient strategy that can also handle any incorrect/misleading expert bias in preferential judgments. We discuss the convergence behavior of our proposed framework. Our experimental results involving synthetic functions and real-world datasets show the superiority of our method against the baselines.

Subsea exploration, inspection, and intervention operations heavily rely on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). However, the inherent complexity of the underwater environment presents significant challenges to the operators of these vehicles. This paper delves into the challenges associated with navigation and maneuvering tasks in the teleoperation of ROVs, such as reduced situational awareness and heightened teleoperator workload. To address these challenges, we introduce an underwater Digital Twin (DT) system designed to enhance underwater teleoperation, enable autonomous navigation, support system monitoring, and facilitate system testing through simulation. Our approach involves a dynamic representation of the underwater robot and its environment using desktop virtual reality, as well as the integration of mapping, localization, path planning and simulation capabilities within the DT system. Our research demonstrates the system's adaptability, versatility and feasibility, highlighting significant challenges and, in turn, improving the teleoperators' situational awareness and reducing their workload.