Solar energy is used for many mission-critical applications including space exploration, sensor systems to monitor wildfires, etc. Their operation can be limited or even terminated if solar panels are covered with dust or hit by space debris. To address this issue, we designed panel cleaning mechanisms and tested protective materials. For cleaning mechanisms, we designed and compared a wiper system and a rail system. For protective materials, we found through collision tests that polycarbonate was very promising, though the most important factor was layering a soft material between the panel's surface and a hard material. In the cleaning system comparisons, the wiper-based system was more efficient than the rail-based system in terms of cost, cleaning speed, and total power consumption.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. Janice Anta Zebaze is using AI to address energy supply challenges and she told us more about the research she's carried our so far, her plans for further investigations, and what inspired her to pursue a PhD in the field. Tell us a bit about your PhD - where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am currently pursuing my PhD in Physics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon, with a focus on renewable energy systems, tribology, and artificial intelligence. The aim of my research is to address energy supply challenges in developing countries by leveraging AI to evaluate resource availability and optimize energy systems.

This work has been published in the IEEE Access with DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3586594. Abstract --Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication enables high data rates for cellular-connected Uncrewed Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs). However, a robust beam management remains challenging due to significant path loss and the dynamic mobility of UA Vs, which can destabilize the UA V-base station (BS) link. This research presents a GPS-aided deep learning (DL) model that simultaneously predicts current and future optimal beams for UA V mmWave communications, maintaining a T op-1 prediction accuracy exceeding 70% and an average power loss below 0.6 dB across all prediction steps. These outcomes stem from a proposed data set splitting method ensuring balanced label distribution, paired with a GPS preprocessing technique that extracts key positional features, and a DL architecture that maps sequential position data to beam index predictions. The model reduces overhead by approximately 93% (requiring the training of 2 3 beams instead of 32 beams) with 95% beam prediction accuracy guarantees, and ensures 94% to 96% of predictions exhibit mean power loss not exceeding 1 dB. Uncrewed Aerial V ehicles (UA V) are expected to serve two roles in wireless networks both as user equipment (UE) that accesses cellular network (cellular-connected UA V) and as UA V -assisted communication platforms providing aerial base stations (BS) and relays for terrestrial users [1] As the high path loss characteristic of mmWave, deploying large antenna arrays on the BS side helps mitigate it by generating narrow beams with strong beamforming gains [4]. As a result, mmWave communications rely heavily on efficient beam management--including beam training and tracking--to quickly select the appropriate beams during intra-and inter-cell mobility, minimizing the risk of beam misalignment [5].

-- Digital twins for power electronics require accurate power losses whose direct measurements are often impractical or impossible in real-world applications. This paper presents a novel hybrid framework that combines physics-based thermal modeling with data-driven techniques to identify and correct power losses accurately using only temperature measurements. Our approach leverages a cascaded architecture where a neural network learns to correct the outputs of a nominal power loss model by backpropagating through a reduced-order thermal model. We explore two neural architectures, a bootstrapped feedforward network, and a recurrent neural network, demonstrating that the bootstrapped feedforward approach achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency for real-time applications. Between the interconnection, we included normalization strategies and physics-guided training loss functions to preserve stability and ensure physical consistency. Experimental results show that our hybrid model reduces both temperature estimation errors (from 7.2 6.8 C to 0.3 0.3 C) and power loss prediction errors (from 5.4 6.6W to 0.2 0.3W) compared to traditional physics-based approaches, even in the presence of thermal model uncertainties. This methodology allows us to accurately estimate power losses without direct measurements, making it particularly helpful for real-time industrial applications where sensor placement is hindered by cost and physical limitations. This paper has been accepted for presentation at the 23rd IEEE European Control Conference 2025 IEEE. Thermal management and sensing play a critical role in many industrial applications that rely on power electronics.

Inverter-based volt-var control is studied in this paper. One key issue in DRL-based approaches is the limited measurement deployment in active distribution networks, which leads to problems of a partially observable state and unknown reward. To address those problems, this paper proposes a robust DRL approach with a conservative critic and a surrogate reward. The conservative critic utilizes the quantile regression technology to estimate conservative state-action value function based on the partially observable state, which helps to train a robust policy; the surrogate rewards of power loss and voltage violation are designed that can be calculated from the limited measurements. The proposed approach optimizes the power loss of the whole network and the voltage profile of buses with measurable voltages while indirectly improving the voltage profile of other buses. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness of the robust DRL approach in different limited measurement conditions, even when only the active power injection of the root bus and less than 10% of bus voltages are measurable.

Active voltage control presents a promising avenue for relieving power congestion and enhancing voltage quality, taking advantage of the distributed controllable generators in the power network, such as roof-top photovoltaics. While Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has emerged as a compelling approach to address this challenge, existing MARL approaches tend to overlook the constrained optimization nature of this problem, failing in guaranteeing safety constraints. In this paper, we formalize the active voltage control problem as a constrained Markov game and propose a safety-constrained MARL algorithm. We expand the primal-dual optimization RL method to multi-agent settings, and augment it with a novel approach of double safety estimation to learn the policy and to update the Lagrange-multiplier. In addition, we proposed different cost functions and investigated their influences on the behavior of our constrained MARL method. We evaluate our approach in the power distribution network simulation environment with real-world scale scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art MARL methods.

Abstract-- This work aims to develop an integrated control strategy for Brushless Direct Current Motors for a wide range of applications in robotics systems. The controller is suited for both high torque - low speed and high-speed control of the motors. Hardware validation is done by developing a custom BLDC drive system, and the circuit elements are optimised for power efficiency. Brushless DC Motors, popularly known as BLDCs, are popular in many robotics' applications for their high density of power and high-speed capabilities. These motors have been found to be used in advanced robots, which require precision position and torque control, and in drones and crawlers, which require high speed and smooth transient response.

We propose a cluster-based method to detect and locate eavesdropping events in optical line systems characterized by small power losses. Our findings indicate that detecting such subtle losses from eavesdropping can be accomplished solely through optical performance monitoring (OPM) data collected at the receiver. On the other hand, the localization of such events can be effectively achieved by leveraging in-line OPM data.