Table tennis competition is voted as one of the most popular competitive sports. The referee umpires the competition mainly based on visual observation and experience, which may make misjudgments on competition results due to the referee’s subjective uncertainty or imprecision. In this work, a novel intelligent umpiring system based on arrayed self-powered acceleration sensor nodes was presented to enhance the competition accuracy. A sensor node array model was established to detect ball collision point on the table tennis table. This model clearly illuminated the working mechanism of the proposed umpiring system. And an improved particle swarm optimization (level-based competitive swarm optimization) was applied to optimize the arrayed sensor nodes distribution by redefining the representations and update rules of position and velocity. The optimized results showed that the number of sensors decreased from 58 to 51. Also, the reliability of the optimized nodes distribution of the table tennis umpiring system has been verified theoretically. The results revealed that our system achieved a precise detection of the ball collision point with uniform error distances below 3.5 mm. Besides, this research offered an in-depth study on intelligent umpiring system based on arrayed self-powered sensor nodes, which will improve the accuracy of the umpiring of table tennis competition.

This paper aims to develop a sliding mode control (SMC) approach with elementary compensation for input matrix uncertainty in affine systems. As a multiplicative uncertainty regarding the control inputs, input matrix uncertainty adversely modifies the control effort and even further causes the instability of systems. To solve this issue, a sliding mode control algorithm is developed based on a two-step design strategy. The first step is to design a general sliding mode controller for the system without input matrix uncertainty. In the second step, a control term is specially designed to compensate for input matrix uncertainty. In order to realize the elementary compensation for input matrix uncertainty, this term is obtained by solving a nonlinear vector equation which is derived from the Lyapunov function inequality. Theorems and lemmas based on the convex cone theory are proposed to guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the vector equation. Additionally, an algorithmic process is proposed to solve the vector equation efficiently. In the simulation part, the proposed controller is applied to two systems with different structures and compared with two state-of-the-art SMC algorithms. The comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to provide the closed-loop system with a competitive performance in terms of convergence level, overshoot reduction and chattering suppression.

No abstract

No abstract