Purpose Nowadays, the global agricultural system is highly dependent on the widespread use of synthetic pesticides to control diseases, weeds and insects. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is deployed as a major part of integrated pest management in a precision agriculture system for accurately and cost-effectively distributing pesticides to resist crop diseases and insect pests. Design/methodology/approach With multimodal sensor fusion applying adaptive cubature Kalman filter, the position and velocity are enhanced for the correction and accuracy. A dynamic movement primitive is combined with the Gaussian mixture model to obtain numerous trajectories through the teaching of a demonstration. Further, to enhance the trajectory tracking accuracy under an uncertain environment of the spraying, a novel model reference adaptive sliding mode control approach is proposed for motion control. Findings Experimental studies have been carried out to test the ability of the proposed interface for the pesticides in the crop fields. The effectiveness of the proposed interface has been demonstrated by the experimental results. Originality/value To solve the path planning problem of a complex unstructured environment, a human-robot skills transfer interface is introduced for the UAV that is instructed to follow a trajectory demonstrated by a human teacher.

The approach that achieves the teleoperation between human muscle signals and the mobile robot is increasingly applied to transfer human muscle stiffness to enhance robotic performance. In this paper, we develop a mobile rollator control system applying a muscle teleoperation interface and a shared control method to enhance the obstacle avoidance in an effective way. In order to control intuitively, haptic feedback is utilized in the teleoperation interface and is integrated with EMG stiffness to provide a large composition force. Then the composition force is implemented with an artificial potential field method to keep the robotic rollator away from the obstacle in advance. This algorithm is superior to the traditional APF algorithm regardless of the required time and trajectory length. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed muscle teleoperation system.

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Background Ship auxiliary machinery is one of the core courses for marine engineering students to participate in the crew qualification examination. It is also a subject that students generally feel difficult. At present, the passing rate of maritime group ability certificate is low. How to improve the passing rate of students' courses is a problem that every front-line teacher must face. In particular, we should pay attention to the application of comparative teaching method in teaching. Subjects and Methods The reasons for the above phenomena include the difficulty of crew certificate examination, insufficient time for relevant professional courses, weak cultural foundation of students, lack of learning perseverance, etc. With the help of the research platform of the cultural quality education committee and school level projects, the ship auxiliary machinery teaching team of our university has carried out a special research on ship auxiliary machinery teaching according to the cognitive characteristics of higher vocational students. The three course team members are respectively responsible for the three teaching links of raising problems, analyzing problems and solving problems in the sub topic research. Through the arrangement of knowledge structure, Case Supplement and table making, the comparative teaching method is applied to the curriculum reform of ship auxiliary machinery. The effect of the curriculum reform is tested by the examination results of four-wheel engineers who participated in the crew qualification examination organized by the State Maritime Administration. At the same time, the study investigated the role of this teaching method in emotional behavior regulation. This study uses Watson and friend's fear of negation scale (1969) for measurement. The study defines “fear of negation evaluation” (fne) as taking advantage of others' evaluation, being distressed by others' negative evaluation, and expecting to be negatively evaluated by others. The items of this scale are completely consistent with the above concepts. The prototype of fne scale (Watson and friend, 1969) contains 30 “yes and no” items, of which the positive and negative scores are roughly the same. The revised concise scale (Leary, 1983) contains 12 items in the original scale and is rated at level 5 (1 = completely inconsistent with me: 5 = very consistent with me). The score range of the original fne scale is from. (minimum fne) to 30 (maximum fne). The concise scale ranged from 12 to 60. The opposite of high fne is that there is no guarantee of excellence in the evaluation of others, but not necessarily the expectation or need for positive evaluation. The mean value of the original table score of 205 groups was 15.5 (SD = 8.6), and the score was rectangular distribution. The average score of another sample composed of 128 subjects was 13.6 (SD = 7.6) A. The average score of the sample (n = 150) used to compile the 12 item concise scale was 35.7 (SD = 8.1) Results According to the examination results of four wheeled vehicle qualification certificate of Marine Engineering Specialty in recent two years, the average score of the experimental class is 30% higher than that of the ordinary class. We believe that the comparative teaching method can better match the ship auxiliary machinery curriculum and students' cognitive characteristics, create a relaxed and active learning environment for students, and is an effective way to improve the efficiency of ship auxiliary machinery teaching. The results showed that fne score was moderately correlated with other scales related to social occasion anxiety, such as social avoidance (SAD) scale (r = 0.51) and Interaction Anxiety Scale (r = 0.32). Compared with those with low scores, those with high fne scores are more uneasy when evaluated, are more likely to agree with the “unreasonable belief” that it is important to be liked, and are more concerned about making a good impression (friend and Gilbert, 1973; Smith and Sarason, 1975). Similarly, people with high fne scores experienced higher anxiety when evaluated and were more annoyed by possible negative evaluations. The original fne scale was low correlated with Marlowe crown social expectation scale (r = - 0.25). Conclusions From the results of students' feedback, this study has achieved the expected goal. However, it should be noted that since the research has not been carried out for a long time and the selected student objectives have not been popularized, it is necessary for students majoring in marine engineering in sister colleges to test the results in practice. At the same time, strengthen the deep integration of comparative teaching method and ship auxiliary equipment course, enrich the teaching content with richer cases, clearer forms and more exquisite courseware, and create excellent professional courses to stimulate students' thinking and cultivate professional ability. Improving the comprehensive quality is the next work direction of the research group. Acknowledgements Supported by The Research Project of Cultural Quality Education in Vocational Colleges in 2019 “Research on the Way to Promote Cultural Quality Education in Maritime Vocational Colleges” as a phased achievement. (Project No. WHSZJZW [2020] No. 8 2019YB40); also supported by The Research Project of Hubei Communications Technical College “Research on the course of Marine Auxiliary Machinery certificate examination”. (Project No.Y2021022)