A Decapod Robot with Rotary Bellows-Enclosed Soft Transmissions

Soft crawling robots exhibit efficient locomotion across various terrains and demonstrate robustness to diverse environmental conditions. Here, we propose a valveless soft-legged robot that integrates a pair of rotary bellows-enclosed soft transmission systems (R-BESTS). The proposed R-BESTS can directly transmit the servo rotation into leg swing motion. A timing belt controls the pair of R-BESTS to maintain synchronous rotation in opposite phases, realizing alternating tripod gaits of walking and turning. We explored several designs to understand the role of a reinforcement skeleton in twisting the R-BESTS' input bellows units. The bending sequences of the robot legs are controlled through structural design for the output bellows units. Finally, we demonstrate untethered locomotion with the soft robotic decapod. Experimental results show that our robot can walk at 1.75 centimeters per second (0.07 body length per second) for 90 min, turn with a 15-centimeter (0.6 BL) radius, carry a payload of 200 g, and adapt to different terrains.

A Tensor-Based Sub-Mode Coordinate Algorithm for Stock Prediction

The investment on the stock market is prone to be affected by the Internet. For the purpose of improving the prediction accuracy, we propose a multi-task stock prediction model that not only considers the stock correlations but also supports multi-source data fusion. Our proposed model first utilizes tensor to integrate the multi-sourced data, including financial Web news, investors' sentiments extracted from the social network and some quantitative data on stocks. In this way, the intrinsic relationships among different information sources can be captured, and meanwhile, multi-sourced information can be complemented to solve the data sparsity problem. Secondly, we propose an improved sub-mode coordinate algorithm (SMC). SMC is based on the stock similarity, aiming to reduce the variance of their subspace in each dimension produced by the tensor decomposition. The algorithm is able to improve the quality of the input features, and thus improves the prediction accuracy. And the paper utilizes the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model to predict the stock fluctuation trends. Finally, the experiments on 78 A-share stocks in CSI 100 and thirteen popular HK stocks in the year 2015 and 2016 are conducted. The results demonstrate the improvement on the prediction accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed model.