This article discusses a 12-bit 2-GS/s pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC). A self-calibration technique is employed to correct linear errors due to capacitor mismatches and interstage gain errors (IGEs). To counteract the effects of power supply and temperature variations, the first three stages of the ADC are equipped with least-mean-squares (LMS) IGE background calibrations, enhanced by the injection of a 1-bit dither into these stages. The computational engines designed for background calibration were reused for self-calibration, simplifying the overall design. An improved integrated input buffer drives the ADC, achieving a bandwidth of approximately 6.3 GHz, which is essential for high-speed data acquisition and processing. Moreover, a low-power operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and reference buffer, both operating on a 1.0-V supply, are implemented to minimize the chip’s power consumption. The 12-bit pipeline prototype ADC, fabricated using a 28-nm CMOS process, operates at 2-GS/s with a 1.0-Vpp input signal. It delivers a signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 58.92 dB and a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 82.23 dB. The ADC core consumes only 180 mW, resulting in a Schreier figure of merits (FoMs) of 156.4 dB.

In complex unstructured environments, accurate terrain traversability analysis is a fundamental requirement for the successful execution of any movements of ground robots, especially given that terrain traversability often exhibits anisotropy. However, the difficulty in obtaining multi-directional terrain labels hinders the emergence of end-to-end multi-directional traversability network. This paper introduces a framework for real-time multi-directional traversability maps (MTraMap) generation tailored for unstructured environments. It involves pre-training a uni-directional traversability classifier, termed UniTraT, through self-supervised learning using ground robot travel simulation. Furthermore, it employs Uni-directional to Multi-directional Traversability Distillation (UMTraDistill) to distill a multi-directional traversability network, termed MultiTCNN, which is capable of directly generating MTraMap. We evaluated both networks on our traversability dataset, achieving an 89% accuracy in terrain traversability classification with the UniTraT. Compared to UniTraT, the accuracy of the MultiTCNN distilled via UMTraDistill only decreases by 1.8%, and it can process 10 m × 10 m elevation map at a speed of 74 fps. Field robotics experiments were also conducted and showed that MultiTCNN can generate MTraMap of the surrounding 20 m × 20 m environment at a rate of 9.39 fps, with a slight reduction of 0.61 fps compared to the lidar data publishing rate, and the generated MTraMap can clearly delineate the multi-directional traversability of the surrounding environments.

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction can provide a foundation for the operation and maintenance of industrial equipment. In order to improve the predictive ability for the complex degradation trajectory, a new dual-thread gated recurrent unit (DTGRU) is explored. It uses a dual-thread learning strategy to mine the stationary and nonstationary information from the input data and the difference of hidden states at two adjacent time steps. Then the state transition updating formulas of DTGRU are derived. Using the collected gear vibration signals and degradation-trend-constrained variational autoencoder, the gear health indicator (HI) is constructed. Based on the constructed HI and DTGRU, a novel RUL prediction method is developed. Via multiple gear life-cycle datasets, the effectiveness of the DTGRU-based RUL prediction approach is verified. Furthermore, compared with the existing typical prediction methods, the experimental results show that DTGRU has higher predictive ability in terms of HI fitting precision and RUL prediction performance.

Facing the gap in the unsupervised construction of health indicator (HI) with a uniform failure threshold, a new unsupervised HI construction approach is developed. First, the distribution of the raw vibration signal is estimated by the Gaussian mixture model, then a distribution contact ratio metric (DCRM) is designed to compute the distance between two arbitrary distributions. With DCRM, a distribution contact ratio metric health indicator (DCRHI) is innovatively constructed for well representing the degradation process and obtaining a uniform failure threshold. Next, aiming at the challenge of prediction under limited samples, a novel consolidated memory gated recurrent unit (CMGRU) is proposed by making full use of the historical state information, and it can effectively slow down the forgetting speed of important trend information. Combing the proposed DCRHI and CMGRU, a novel remaining useful life (RUL) prediction methodology is put forward for enhancing the predictive performance. Via two public bearing datasets, several contrast experiments are implemented, and the comparative results show that DCRHI can better describe the degradation process of bearing than other typical unsupervised HIs, and CMGRU has a stronger prediction ability than other classical time series processing networks. Thus, the proposed methodology has great application value in the RUL prediction.

Accurate traffic prediction is a critical yet challenging task in Intelligent Transportation Systems, benefiting a variety of smart services, e.g., route planning and traffic management. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to this problem, it is still not well solved due to the flexible dependency within traffic data along both spatial and temporal dimensions. In this paper, we explore the flexibility from three aspects, namely the time-varying local spatial dependency, the dynamic temporal dependency, and the global spatial dependency. Then we propose a novel Dual Graph Gated Recurrent Neural Network (DG2RNN) to effectively model all these dependencies and offer flexible (multi-step) predictions for future traffic flow. Specifically, we design a Dual Graph Convolution Module to capture the local spatial dependency from two perspectives, namely road distance and adaptive correlation. To model the dynamic temporal dependency, we firstly develop a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Layer to capture the forward and backward sequential contexts of historical traffic flow, then combine the derived hidden states with their various contributions learned by a temporal attention mechanism. Besides, we further design a spatial attention mechanism to learn the latent global spatial dependency among all locations to facilitate the prediction. Extensive experiments on three types of real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts. Results also show our model has more stable performance for the flexible prediction with varying prediction horizons.