Author name cluster

Yulong Ding

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4 papers

2 author rows

ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Sensor-based Multi-Robot Coverage Control with Spatial Separation in Unstructured Environments

Xinyi Wang 0007
Jiwen Xu
Chuanxiang Gao
Yizhou Chen
Jihan Zhang
Chenggang Wang
Yulong Ding
Ben M. Chen

Multi-robot systems have increasingly become instrumental in tackling coverage problems. However, the challenge of optimizing task efficiency without compromising task success still persists, particularly in expansive, unstructured scenarios with dense obstacles. This paper presents an innovative, decentralized Voronoi-based coverage control approach to reactively navigate these complexities while guaranteeing safety. This approach leverages the active sensing capabilities of multi-robot systems to supplement GIS (Geographic Information System), offering a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of environments like post-disaster. Based on point cloud data, which is inherently non-convex and unstructured, this method efficiently generates collision-free Voronoi regions using only local sensing information through spatial decomposition and spherical mirroring techniques. Then, deadlock-aware guided map integrated with a gradient-optimized, centroid Voronoi-based coverage control policy, is constructed to improve efficiency by avoiding exhaustive searches and local sensing pitfalls. The effectiveness of our algorithm has been validated through extensive numerical simulations in high-fidelity environments, demonstrating significant improvements in task success rate, coverage ratio, and task execution time compared with others.

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ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Ultrafast capturing in-flight objects with reprogrammable working speed ranges

Yongkang Jiang
Xin Tong
Zhongqing Sun
Yaimiin Zhou
Zhipeng Wang
Shuo Jiang
Zhen Yin
Yulong Ding

In-flight high-speed object capturing is crucial in nature to improve survival and adaptation to the environment, such as the predation of frogs, leopards, and eagles. Despite its ubiquitousness in nature, capturing fast-moving objects is extremely challenging in engineering implementations. In this paper, we report an ultrafast gripper based on tunable bistable structures. Different from current designs which are only suitable for objects with certain speed ranges once the grippers are fabricated, the working range of object speed of the proposed gripper could be reprogrammed by controlling the sensitivity of the structures. We present the design and fabrication of the proposed gripper in detail. A theoretical model is introduced to construct the energy landscape of the structures and the force response of the gripper when programmed to different states. The results show that in the original state, the gripper is capable of capturing a flying table tennis ball with a high speed of 15 m/s in only 6 ms. When the proposed gripper is controlled to the ultra-sensitive state, a flying ball with only 1 m/s could also be captured. This work broadens the frontiers of in-flight capturing design, and we envision broader promising applications.

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YNIMG Journal 2015 Journal Article

Predicting N2pc from anticipatory HbO activity during sustained visuospatial attention: A concurrent fNIRS–ERP study

Jing Huang
Fang Wang
Yulong Ding
Haijing Niu
Fenghua Tian
Hanli Liu
Yan Song

Understanding the properties of attentional control, along with the neural mechanisms subserving them, has long invited intense scrutiny in research groups. However, it has not been demonstrated how the top-down anticipatory hemodynamic activation influences the subsequent attentional processing of targets and distractors. Here, with concurrent fNIRS–ERP recording, we explored the potential contribution of anticipatory oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) based brain activity to attentional control by examining how HbO influences the subsequent ERP N2pc components assumed to reflect attentional selection. We found that expecting a target led to a larger increase of preparatory HbO response over the visual cortex contralateral to the upcoming target, which was positively correlated with the subsequent target-evoked N2pc amplitude. Further, anticipation concerning the presence of a competing distractor resulted in large and prolonged preparatory HbO signals in the visual cortex contralateral to the distractor, indicating that the salient distractor might be actively suppressed by preparatory top-down attentional control. However, the pre-suppressed distractor still captured part of the attention in the subsequent visual search as revealed by a decrease in the N2pc amplitude, and such a distraction effect on N2pc was negatively correlated with preparatory HbO enhancement contralateral to the anticipated distractor. Overall, each individuals attentional shift to the target and resistance to the distractor measured by ERP is predictable in advance via anticipatory hemodynamic activity in the visual cortex measured by fNIRS.

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YNIMG Journal 2008 Journal Article

A regulation role of the prefrontal cortex in the fist-edge-palm task: Evidence from functional connectivity analysis

Hengyi Rao
Xin Di
Raymond C.K. Chan
Yulong Ding
Binbin Ye
Dingguo Gao

The Fist-Edge-Palm (FEP) task is a motor sequencing task that is widely used in neurological examination. Deficits in this task are believed to reflect impairment in the frontal lobe regions. However, two recent functional brain imaging studies of the FEP task using conventional subtraction analysis failed to demonstrate FEP-induced activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which contradicts existing neuropsychological literature. In this study, psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis was used to reanalyze our previous neuroimaging dataset from 10 healthy subjects in order to evaluate the changes of functional connectivity between the sensorimotor cortex and the prefrontal regions during the performances of the FEP task relative to simple motor control tasks. The PPI analysis revealed significantly increased functional connectivity between bilateral sensorimotor cortex and the right inferior and middle frontal cortex during the performance of the FEP task compared with the control tasks. However, regional signal changes showed no significant activation differences in these prefrontal regions. These results provide evidence supporting the involvement of the frontal lobe in the performance of the FEP task, and suggest a role of regulation, rather than direct participation, of the prefrontal cortex in the execution of complex motor sequence tasks such as the FEP task.

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