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Xinwei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Xinwei Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Chance-Constrained Collision Avoidance in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are incorporated into the planning problem to provide probabilistic safety guarantees by imposing an upper bound on the collision probability of the planned trajectory. Yet, this results in overly conservative behavior on the grounds that the gap between the obtained risk and the specified upper limit is not explicitly restricted. To address this issue, we propose a real-time capable approach to quantify the risk associated with planned trajectories obtained from multiple probabilistic planners, running in parallel, with different upper bounds of the acceptable risk level. Based on the evaluated risk, the least conservative plan is selected provided that its associated risk is below a specified threshold. In such a way, the proposed approach provides probabilistic safety guarantees by attaining a closer bound to the specified risk, while being applicable to generic uncertainties of moving obstacles. We demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach, by improving the performance of a state-of-the-art probabilistic planner, in simulations and experiments using a mobile robot in an environment shared with humans.

cs.RO↗

Four-electron Negative-U Vacancy Defects in Antimony Selenide

The phenomenon of negative-U behavior, where a defect traps a second charge carrier more strongly than the first, has been established in many host crystals. Here we report the case of four-carrier transitions for both vacancy defects in Sb2Se3. A global structure searching strategy is employed to explore the defect energy landscape from first-principles, revealing previously-unrealized configurations which facilitate a major charge redistribution. Thermodynamic analysis of the accessible charge states reveals a four-electron negative-U transition (delta q = 4) for both V_Se and V_Sb and, by consequence, amphoteric behavior for all intrinsic defects in Sb2Se3, with impact on its usage in solar cells. To the best of our knowledge, four-electron negative-U behavior has not been previously explored in this or other compounds. The unusual behavior is facilitated by valence alternation, a reconfiguration of the local bonding environments, characteristic of both Se and Sb.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Imaging Anisotropic Waveguide Exciton Polaritons in Tin Sulfide

In recent years, novel materials supporting in-plane anisotropic polaritons have attracted a lot of research interest due to their capability of shaping nanoscale field distributions and controlling nanophotonic energy flows. Here we report a nano-optical imaging study of waveguide exciton polaritons (EPs) in tin sulfide (SnS) in the near-infrared (IR) region using the scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM). With s-SNOM, we mapped in real space the propagative EPs in SnS, which show sensitive dependence on the excitation energy and sample thickness. Moreover, we found that both the polariton wavelength and propagation length are anisotropic in the sample plane. In particular, in a narrow spectral range from 1.32 to 1.44 eV, the EPs demonstrate quasi-one-dimensional propagation, which is rarely seen in natural polaritonic materials. Further analysis indicates that the observed polariton anisotropy is originated from the different optical bandgaps and exciton binding energies along the two principal crystal axes of SnS.

physics.optics↗

Continual Interactive Behavior Learning With Traffic Divergence Measurement: A Dynamic Gradient Scenario Memory Approach

Developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) helps improve the road safety and traffic efficiency of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Accurately predicting the trajectories of traffic participants is essential to the decision-making and motion planning of AVs in interactive scenarios. Recently, learning-based trajectory predictors have shown state-of-the-art performance in highway or urban areas. However, most existing learning-based models trained with fixed datasets may perform poorly in continuously changing scenarios. Specifically, they may not perform well in learned scenarios after learning the new one. This phenomenon is called "catastrophic forgetting". Few studies investigate trajectory predictions in continuous scenarios, where catastrophic forgetting may happen. To handle this problem, first, a novel continual learning (CL) approach for vehicle trajectory prediction is proposed in this paper. Then, inspired by brain science, a dynamic memory mechanism is developed by utilizing the measurement of traffic divergence between scenarios, which balances the performance and training efficiency of the proposed CL approach. Finally, datasets collected from different locations are used to design continual training and testing methods in experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves consistently high prediction accuracy in continuous scenarios without re-training, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting compared to non-CL approaches. The implementation of the proposed approach is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-Jack/D-GSM

cs.RO↗

Ballistic Transport Enhanced Heat Convection at Nanoscale Hotspots

Along with device miniaturization, severe heat accumulation at unexpected nanoscale hotspots attracts wide attentions and urges efficient thermal management. Heat convection is one of the important heat dissipating paths but its mechanism at nanoscale hotspots is still unclear. Here shows the first experimental investigation of the convective heat transfer coefficient at size-controllable nanoscale hotspots. A specially designed structure of a single layer graphene supported by gold nanorods (AuNRs) is proposed, in which the AuNRs generate plasmonic heating sources of the order of hundreds of nanometers under laser irradiation and the graphene layer works as a temperature probe in Raman thermometry. The determined convective heat transfer coefficient is found to be about three orders of magnitude higher than that of nature convection, when the simultaneous interfacial heat conduction and radiation are carefully evaluated. Heat convection thus accounts to more than half of the total energy transferred across the graphene/AuNRs interface. Both the plasmonic heating induced nanoscale hotspots and ballistic convection of gas molecules contribute to the enhanced heat convection. This work reveals the importance of heat convection at nanoscale hotspots to the accurate thermal design of miniaturized electronics, and further offers a new way to evaluate the convective heat transfer coefficient at nanoscale hotspots.

physics.app-ph↗

Band Versus Polaron: Charge Transport in Antimony Chalcogenides

Antimony sulfide (Sb2S3) and selenide (Sb2Se3) are emerging earth-abundant absorbers for photovoltaic applications. Solar cell performance depends strongly on charge carrier transport properties but these remain poorly understood in Sb2X3. Here we report band-like transport in Sb2X3 by investigating the electron-lattice interaction and theoretical limits of carrier mobility using first-principles density functional theory and Boltzmann transport calculations. We demonstrate that transport in Sb2X3 is governed by large polarons with moderate Fröhlich coupling constants (~ 2), large polaron radii (extending over several unit cells) and high carrier mobility (an isotropic average of > 10 for both electrons and holes). The room temperature mobility is intrinsically limited by scattering from polar phonon modes and is further reduced in highly defective samples. Our study confirms that the performance of the Sb2X3 solar cells is not limited by intrinsic self-trapping.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

A Radiation Tolerant Proton Detector Based on MAPbBr3 single crystal

The performance and radiation tolerance of the proton detector based on MAPbBr3 perovskite single crystal are investigated here with 3MeV protons. The detector can monitor fluence rate and dose quantificationally at a low applied bias electric field(0.01$V/μm$) within a dose range of 45 kGy. The detector can also be worked at zero bias due to the Dember effect. The dark current of the detector reduced to 20% of the initial value after being irradiated with protons to a total fluence of $7.3\times 10^{13} p/cm^2$ (1 MGy), however, it can be recovered at room temperature within hours. These results suggest that this kind of detector has a promising application in proton therapy and proton imaging etc.

physics.ins-det↗

Large region targets observation scheduling by multiple satellites using resampling particle swarm optimization

The last decades have witnessed a rapid increase of Earth observation satellites (EOSs), leading to the increasing complexity of EOSs scheduling. On account of the widespread applications of large region observation, this paper aims to address the EOSs observation scheduling problem for large region targets. A rapid coverage calculation method employing a projection reference plane and a polygon clipping technique is first developed. We then formulate a nonlinear integer programming model for the scheduling problem, where the objective function is calculated based on the developed coverage calculation method. A greedy initialization-based resampling particle swarm optimization (GI-RPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the model. The adopted greedy initialization strategy and particle resampling method contribute to generating efficient and effective solutions during the evolution process. In the end, extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. Compared to the traditional particle swarm optimization and the widely used greedy algorithm, the proposed GI-RPSO can improve the scheduling result by 5.42% and 15.86%, respectively.

astro-ph.IM↗

Prediction-Based Reachability Analysis for Collision Risk Assessment on Highways

Real-time safety systems are crucial components of intelligent vehicles. This paper introduces a prediction-based collision risk assessment approach on highways. Given a point mass vehicle dynamics system, a stochastic forward reachable set considering two-dimensional motion with vehicle state probability distributions is firstly established. We then develop an acceleration prediction model, which provides multi-modal probabilistic acceleration distributions to propagate vehicle states. The collision probability is calculated by summing up the probabilities of the states where two vehicles spatially overlap. Simulation results show that the prediction model has superior performance in terms of vehicle motion position errors, and the proposed collision detection approach is agile and effective to identify the collision in cut-in crash events.

eess.SY↗

An Ensemble Learning Framework for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Interactive Scenarios

Precisely modeling interactions and accurately predicting trajectories of surrounding vehicles are essential to the decision-making and path-planning of intelligent vehicles. This paper proposes a novel framework based on ensemble learning to improve the performance of trajectory predictions in interactive scenarios. The framework is termed Interactive Ensemble Trajectory Predictor (IETP). IETP assembles interaction-aware trajectory predictors as base learners to build an ensemble learner. Firstly, each base learner in IETP observes historical trajectories of vehicles in the scene. Then each base learner handles interactions between vehicles to predict trajectories. Finally, an ensemble learner is built to predict trajectories by applying two ensemble strategies on the predictions from all base learners. Predictions generated by the ensemble learner are final outputs of IETP. In this study, three experiments using different data are conducted based on the NGSIM dataset. Experimental results show that IETP improves the predicting accuracy and decreases the variance of errors compared to base learners. In addition, IETP exceeds baseline models with 50% of the training data, indicating that IETP is data-efficient. Moreover, the implementation of IETP is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-Jack/IETP.

cs.RO↗

Lone pair driven anisotropy in antimony chalcogenide semiconductors

Antimony sulfide (Sb2S3) and selenide (Sb2Se3) have emerged as promising earth-abundant alternatives among thin-film photovoltaic compounds. A distinguishing feature of these materials is their anisotropic crystal structures, which are composed of quasi-one-dimensional (1D) [Sb4X6]n ribbons. The interaction between ribbons has been reported to be van der Waals (vdW) in nature and Sb2X3 are thus commonly classified in the literature as 1D semiconductors. However, based on first-principles calculations, here we show that inter-ribbon interactions are present in Sb2X3 beyond the vdW regime. The origin of the anisotropic structures is related to the stereochemical activity of the Sb 5s lone pair according to electronic structure analysis. The impacts of structural anisotropy on the electronic and optical properties are further examined, including the presence of higher dimensional Fermi surfaces for charge carrier transport. Our study provides guidelines for optimising the performance of Sb2X3-based solar cells via device structuring based on the underlying crystal anisotropy.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Ensemble of meta-heuristic and exact algorithm based on the divide and conquer framework for multi-satellite observation scheduling

Satellite observation scheduling plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of Earth observation systems. To solve the large-scale multi-satellite observation scheduling problem, this paper proposes an ensemble of meta-heuristic and exact algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer framework (EHE-DCF), including a task allocation phase and a task scheduling phase. In the task allocation phase, each task is allocated to a proper orbit based on a meta-heuristic incorporated with a probabilistic selection and a tabu mechanism derived from ant colony optimization and tabu search respectively. In the task scheduling phase, we construct a task scheduling model for every single orbit, and use an exact method (i.e., branch and bound, B&B) to solve this model. The task allocation and task scheduling phases are performed iteratively to obtain a promising solution. To validate the performance of EHE-DCF, we compare it with B&B, three divide-and-conquer based meta-heuristics, and a state-of-the-art meta-heuristic. Experimental results show that EHE-DCF can obtain higher scheduling profits and complete more tasks compared with existing algorithms. EHE-DCF is especially efficient for large-scale satellite observation scheduling problems.

astro-ph.IM↗

Simulated annealing based heuristic for multiple agile satellites scheduling under cloud coverage uncertainty

Agile satellites are the new generation of Earth observation satellites (EOSs) with stronger attitude maneuvering capability. Since optical remote sensing instruments equipped on satellites cannot see through the cloud, the cloud coverage has a significant influence on the satellite observation missions. We are the first to address multiple agile EOSs scheduling problem under cloud coverage uncertainty where the objective aims to maximize the entire observation profit. The chance constraint programming model is adopted to describe the uncertainty initially, and the observation profit under cloud coverage uncertainty is then calculated via sample approximation method. Subsequently, an improved simulated annealing based heuristic combining a fast insertion strategy is proposed for large-scale observation missions. The experimental results show that the improved simulated annealing heuristic outperforms other algorithms for the multiple AEOSs scheduling problem under cloud coverage uncertainty, which verifies the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

eess.SP↗

Nonvolatile ferroelectric control of topological states in 2D heterostructures

Quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulator materials feature topologically protected edge states that can drastically reduce dissipation and are useful for the next-generation electronics. However, the nonvolatile control of topological edge state is still a challenge. In this paper, based on first-principles calculations, the switchable topological states are found in the van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures consisting of two dimensional (2D) Bi(111) bilayer (BL) and α-In2Se3 by reversing the electric polarization of the ferroelectric α-In2Se3. The topological switching results from the different charge transfer associated with the two opposite polarization states of α-In2Se3. This new topological switching mechanism has the unique advantages of being fully electrical as well as nonvolatile. Our finding provides an unprecedented approach to realize ferroelectric control of topological states in 2D materials, which will have great potential for applications in topological nanoscale electronics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Agile Earth observation satellite scheduling over 20 years: formulations, methods and future directions

Agile satellites with advanced attitude maneuvering capability are the new generation of Earth observation satellites (EOSs). The continuous improvement in satellite technology and decrease in launch cost have boosted the development of agile EOSs (AEOSs). To efficiently employ the increasing orbiting AEOSs, the AEOS scheduling problem (AEOSSP) aiming to maximize the entire observation profit while satisfying all complex operational constraints, has received much attention over the past 20 years. The objectives of this paper are thus to summarize current research on AEOSSP, identify main accomplishments and highlight potential future research directions. To this end, general definitions of AEOSSP with operational constraints are described initially, followed by its three typical variations including different definitions of observation profit, multi-objective function and autonomous model. A detailed literature review from 1997 up to 2019 is then presented in line with four different solution methods, i.e., exact method, heuristic, metaheuristic and machine learning. Finally, we discuss a number of topics worth pursuing in the future.

astro-ph.IM↗

Magnetic order induced polarization anomaly of Raman scattering in 2D magnet CrI$_3$

The recent discovery of 2D magnets has revealed various intriguing phenomena due to the coupling between spin and other degree of freedoms (such as helical photoluminescence, nonreciprocal SHG). Previous research on the spin-phonon coupling effect mainly focuses on the renormalization of phonon frequency. Here we demonstrate that the Raman polarization selection rules of optical phonons can be greatly modified by the magnetic ordering in 2D magnet CrI$_3$. For monolayer samples, the dominant A$\rm_{1g}$ peak shows abnormally high intensity in the cross polarization channel at low temperature, which is forbidden by the selection rule based on the lattice symmetry. While for bilayer, this peak is absent in the cross polarization channel for the layered antiferromagnetic (AFM) state and reappears when it is tuned to the ferromagnetic (FM) state by an external magnetic field. Our findings shed light on exploring the emergent magneto-optical effects in 2D magnets.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Multiple agile Earth observation satellites, oversubscribed targets scheduling using complex networks theory

The Earth observation satellites (EOSs) scheduling is of great importance to achieve efficient observation missions. The agile EOSs (AEOS) with stronger attitude maneuvering capacity can greatly improve observation efficiency while increasing scheduling complexity. The multiple AEOSs, oversubscribed targets scheduling problem with multiple observations are addressed, and the potential observation missions are modeled as nodes in the complex networks. To solve the problem, an improved feedback structured heuristic is designed by defining the node and target importance factors. On the basis of a real world Chinese AEOS constellation, simulation experiments are conducted to validate the heuristic efficiency in comparison with a constructive algorithm and a structured genetic algorithm.

astro-ph.IM↗

Strongly Anisotropic Thermal and Electrical Conductivities of Self-assembled Silver Nanowire Network

Heat dissipation issues are the emerging challenges in the field of flexible electronics. Thermal management of flexible electronics creates a demand for flexible materials with highly anisotropic thermal conductivity, which work as heat spreaders to remove excess heat in the in-plane direction and as heat shields to protect human skin or device components under them from heating. This study proposes a self-assembled silver nanowire network with high thermal and electrical anisotropy with the potential to solve these challenges. The in-plane thermal conductivity of the network along the axial direction of silver nanowires is measured as 37 W/m-K while the cross-plane thermal conductivity is only 0.36 W/m-K. The results of measurements of electrical and thermal conductivities suggest that abundant wire-wire contacts strongly impede thermal transport. The excellent alignment of nanowires results in the same anisotropy ratio of 3 for both thermal and electrical conduction in the two in-plane directions. The ratio remains unchanged as the temperature decrease to 50 K, which indicates that wire-wire contacts lower the thermal and electrical conduction in the two directions to the same extent and their effect is independent of temperature. In addition, phonon softening markedly reduces the Debye temperatures of the network, which are fitted from the electrical resistivity data. As a result of phonon thermal conduction, the Lorenz numbers of the film in the two directions, which are approximately the same, are larger than the Sommerfeld value at room temperature and decrease as temperature decreases because of small angle scattering and the reduced phonon contribution. This nanowire network provides a solution to the emerging challenges of thermal management of flexible electronics.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗