Motion planning is a key aspect of robotics. A common approach to address motion planning problems is trajectory optimization. Trajectory optimization can represent the high-level behaviors of robots through mathematical formulations. However, current trajectory optimization approaches have two main challenges. Firstly, their solution heavily depends on the initial guess, and they are prone to get stuck in local minima. Secondly, they face scalability limitations by increasing the number of constraints. This thesis endeavors to tackle these challenges by introducing four innovative trajectory optimization algorithms to improve reliability, scalability, and computational efficiency. There are two novel aspects of the proposed algorithms. The first key innovation is remodeling the kinematic constraints and collision avoidance constraints. Another key innovation lies in the design of algorithms that effectively utilize parallel computation on GPU accelerators. By using reformulated constraints and leveraging the computational power of GPUs, the proposed algorithms of this thesis demonstrate significant improvements in efficiency and scalability compared to the existing methods. Parallelization enables faster computation times, allowing for real-time decision-making in dynamic environments. Moreover, the algorithms are designed to adapt to changes in the environment, ensuring robust performance. Extensive benchmarking for each proposed optimizer validates their efficacy. Overall, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the field of trajectory optimization algorithms. It introduces innovative solutions that specifically address the challenges faced by existing methods. The proposed algorithms pave the way for more efficient and robust motion planning solutions in robotics by leveraging parallel computation and specific mathematical structures.

Power-to-Hydrogen is crucial for the renewable energy transition, yet existing literature lacks business models for the significant excess heat it generates. This study addresses this by evaluating three models for selling electrolyzer-generated heat to district heating grids: constant, flexible, and renewable-source hydrogen production, with and without heat sales. Using agent-based modeling and multi-criteria decision-making methods (VIKOR, TOPSIS, PROMETHEE), it finds that selling excess heat can cut hydrogen production costs by 5.6%. The optimal model operates flexibly with electricity spot prices, includes heat sales, and maintains a hydrogen price of 3.3 EUR/kg. Environmentally, hydrogen production from grid electricity could emit up to 13,783.8 tons of CO2 over four years from 2023. The best economic and environmental model uses renewable sources and sells heat at 3.5 EUR/kg

Change detection is a crucial task in remote sensing, enabling the monitoring of environmental changes, urban growth, and disaster impact. Conventional change detection techniques, such as image differencing and ratioing, often struggle with noise and fail to capture complex variations in imagery. Recent advancements in machine learning, particularly generative models like diffusion models, offer new opportunities for enhancing change detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel change detection framework that combines the strengths of Stable Diffusion models with the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) to create robust and interpretable change maps. Our approach, named Diffusion Based Change Detector, is evaluated on both synthetic and real-world remote sensing datasets and compared with state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional differencing techniques and recent deep learning-based methods, particularly in scenarios with complex changes and noise.

In an era of frequent extreme weather and global warming, obtaining precise, fine-grained near-surface weather forecasts is increasingly essential for human activities. Downscaling (DS), a crucial task in meteorological forecasting, enables the reconstruction of high-resolution meteorological states for target regions from global-scale forecast results. Previous downscaling methods, inspired by CNN and Transformer-based super-resolution models, lacked tailored designs for meteorology and encountered structural limitations. Notably, they failed to efficiently integrate topography, a crucial prior in the downscaling process. In this paper, we address these limitations by pioneering the selective state space model into the meteorological field downscaling and propose a novel model called MambaDS. This model enhances the utilization of multivariable correlations and topography information, unique challenges in the downscaling process while retaining the advantages of Mamba in long-range dependency modeling and linear computational complexity. Through extensive experiments in both China mainland and the continental United States (CONUS), we validated that our proposed MambaDS achieves state-of-the-art results in three different types of meteorological field downscaling settings. We will release the code subsequently.

The escalating prevalence of encryption protocols has led to a concomitant surge in the number of malicious attacks that hide in encrypted traffic. Power grid systems, as fundamental infrastructure, are becoming prime targets for such attacks. Conventional methods for detecting malicious encrypted packets typically use a static pre-trained model. We observe that these methods are not well-suited for blockchain-based power grid systems. More critically, they fall short in dynamic environments where new types of encrypted attacks continuously emerge. Motivated by this, in this paper we try to tackle these challenges from two aspects: (1) We present a novel framework that is able to automatically detect malicious encrypted traffic in blockchain-based power grid systems and incrementally learn from new malicious traffic. (2) We mathematically derive incremental learning losses to resist the forgetting of old attack patterns while ensuring the model is capable of handling new encrypted attack patterns. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three different benchmark datasets. We also constructed the first malicious encrypted traffic dataset for blockchain-based power grid scenario. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/PPPmzt/ETGuard, hoping to inspire future research.

Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) is the intersection of quantum computing and AI, a technological synergy with expected significant benefits for both. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of what has been achieved in QAI so far and point to some open questions for future research. In particular, we summarize some major key findings on the feasability and the potential of using quantum computing for solving computationally hard problems in various subfields of AI, and vice versa, the leveraging of AI methods for building and operating quantum computing devices.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. will start a demonstration project as early as Thursday to remove a small amount of radioactive debris from its wrecked nuclear power plant in Fukushima. The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which suffered a meltdown after a massive earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the facility in 2011, will start the experimental removal process at reactor No. 2 on Thursday, so long as necessary inspections are completed on time, an official from the company said in a news conference Monday. It's a step forward for the utility and the government, which estimates the complete decommissioning of the facility will take three to four decades. Removal of the deadly debris has proved challenging, requiring the development of a robotic arm that can fish out radioactive fuel, metal cladding and other structures in the reactor that melted, cooled and solidified together. Tepco has delayed the start of procedure in the past.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the first time stated the aim of Ukraine's August 6 incursion into Russia's Kursk region, saying the operation was necessary to create a buffer zone. Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said the air force destroyed a second strategically important bridge over the Seym River in the Kursk region. He posted an aerial video of a blast tearing through the bridge, which appeared to be near the village of Zvannoye, about 15km (nine miles) north of the Ukrainian border. Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia's southern Rostov region, said falling debris from a Ukrainian drone attack triggered a large fire at an oil storage facility in the town of Proletarsk. There were no reports of injuries.

The self-attention mechanism in Transformer architecture, invariant to sequence order, necessitates positional embeddings to encode temporal order in time series prediction. We argue that this reliance on positional embeddings restricts the Transformer's ability to effectively represent temporal sequences, particularly when employing longer lookback windows. To address this, we introduce an innovative approach that combines Pyramid RNN embeddings(PRE) for univariate time series with the Transformer's capability to model multivariate dependencies. PRE, utilizing pyramidal one-dimensional convolutional layers, constructs multiscale convolutional features that preserve temporal order. Additionally, RNNs, layered atop these features, learn multiscale time series representations sensitive to sequence order. This integration into Transformer models with attention mechanisms results in significant performance enhancements. We present the PRformer, a model integrating PRE with a standard Transformer encoder, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on various real-world datasets. This performance highlights the effectiveness of our approach in leveraging longer lookback windows and underscores the critical role of robust temporal representations in maximizing Transformer's potential for prediction tasks. Code is available at this repository: \url{https://github.com/usualheart/PRformer}.

The intermittent nature of photovoltaic (PV) solar energy, driven by variable weather, leads to power losses of 10-70% and an average energy production decrease of 25%. Accurate loss characterization and fault detection are crucial for reliable PV system performance and efficiency, integrating this data into control signal monitoring systems. Computational modeling of PV systems supports technological, economic, and performance analyses, but current models are often rigid, limiting advanced performance optimization and innovation. Conventional fault detection strategies are costly and often yield unreliable results due to complex data signal profiles. Artificial intelligence (AI), especially machine learning algorithms, offers improved fault detection by analyzing relationships between input parameters (e.g., meteorological and electrical) and output metrics (e.g., production). Once trained, these models can effectively identify faults by detecting deviations from expected performance. This research presents a computational model using the PVlib library in Python, incorporating a dynamic loss quantification algorithm that processes meteorological, operational, and technical data. An artificial neural network (ANN) trained on synthetic datasets with a five-minute resolution simulates real-world PV system faults. A dynamic threshold definition for fault detection is based on historical data from a PV system at Universidad de los Andes. Key contributions include: (i) a PV system model with a mean absolute error of 6.0% in daily energy estimation; (ii) dynamic loss quantification without specialized equipment; (iii) an AI-based algorithm for technical parameter estimation, avoiding special monitoring devices; and (iv) a fault detection model achieving 82.2% mean accuracy and 92.6% maximum accuracy.