Via the Nth Darboux transformation, a chain of nonsingular localized-wave solutions is derived for a nonlocal nonlinear Schrödinger equation with the self-induced parity-time (PT) -symmetric potential. It is found that the Nth iterated solution in general exhibits a variety of elastic interactions among 2N solitons on a continuous-wave background and each interacting soliton could be the dark or antidark type. The interactions with an arbitrary odd number of solitons can also be obtained under different degenerate conditions. With N=1 and 2, the two-soliton and four-soliton interactions and their various degenerate cases are discussed in the asymptotic analysis. Numerical simulations are performed to support the analytical results, and the stability analysis indicates that the PT-symmetry breaking can also destroy the stability of the soliton interactions.

This paper introduces a pose sensing system for soft robot arms integrating a set of macrobend stretch sensors. The macrobend sensory design in this study consists of optical fibres and is based on the notion that bending an optical fibre modulates the intensity of the light transmitted through the fibre.This sensing method is capable of measuring bending, elongation and compression in soft continuum robots and is also applicable to wearable sensing technologies, e.g. pose sensing in the wrist joint of a human hand. In our arrangement, applied to a cylindrical soft robot arm, the optical fibres for macrobend sensing originate from the base, extend to the tip of the arm, and then loop back to the base. The connectors that link the fibres to the necessary opto-electronics are all placed at the base of the arm, resulting in a simplified overall design.The ability of this custom macrobend stretch sensor to flexibly adapt its configuration allows preserving the inherent softness and compliance of the robot which it is installed on. The macrobend sensing system is immune to electrical noise and magnetic fields, is safe (because no electricity is needed at the sensing site), and is suitable for modular implementation in multi-link soft continuum robotic arms.The measurable light outputs of the proposed stretch sensor vary due to bend-induced light attenuation (macrobend loss), which is a function of the fibre bend radius as well as the number of repeated turns. The experimental study conducted as part of this research revealed that the chosen bend radius has a far greater impact on the measured light intensity values than the number of turns (if greater than five). Taking into account that the bend radius is the only significantly influencing design parameter, the macrobend stretch sensors were developed to create a practical solution to the pose sensing in soft continuum robot arms. Henceforward, the proposed sensing design was benchmarked against an electromagnetic tracking system (NDI Aurora) for validation.

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) based paradigm is a conventional BCI method with the advantages of high information transfer rate, high tolerance to artifacts and the robust performance across users. But the occurrence of mental load and fatigue when users stare at flickering stimuli is a critical problem in implementation of SSVEP-based BCIs. Based on electroencephalography (EEG) power indices α, θ, θ + α, ratio index θ/α and response properties of amplitude and SNR, this study quantitatively evaluated the mental load and fatigue in both of conventional flickering and the novel motion-reversal visual attention tasks. Results over nine subjects revealed significant mental load alleviation in motion-reversal task rather than flickering task. The interaction between factors of “stimulation type” and “fatigue level” also illustrated the motion-reversal stimulation as a superior anti-fatigue solution for long-term BCI operation. Taken together, our work provided an objective method favorable for the design of more practically applicable steady-state evoked potential based BCIs.

In this paper, via the generalized Darboux transformation, rational soliton solutions are derived for the parity-time-symmetric nonlocal nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) model with the defocusing-type nonlinearity. We find that the first-order solution can exhibit the elastic interactions of rational antidarkantidark, dark-antidark, and antidark-dark soliton pairs on a continuous wave background, but there is no phase shift for the interacting solitons. Also, we discuss the degenerate case in which only one rational dark or antidark soliton survives. Moreover, we reveal that the second-order rational solution displays the interactions between two solitons with combined-peak-valley structures in the near-field regions, but each interacting soliton vanishes or evolves into a rational dark or antidark soliton as |z| → ∞. In addition, we numerically examine the stability of the first-and second-order rational soliton solutions. *

This study is an important extension to the existing SSMVEP-based BCI literature, and provides new insight to enable future design of the BCI paradigms.