Evaluation of Topological Properties of Parallel Manipulators Based on the Topological Characteristic Indexes

SUMMARYThe topological structure of a parallel manipulator (PM) determines its intrinsic topological properties (TPs). The TPs further determine essential kinematic and dynamic properties of the mechanism. TPs can be expressed through topological characteristics indexes (TCI). Therefore, defining a set of TCIs is an important issue to evaluate the TPs of PMs. This article addresses the evaluation of topological properties (ETP) of PMs based on TCI. A general and effective ETP method for PMs is proposed. Firstly, 12 TCIs are proposed, including 8 quantitative TCIs, that is, position and orientation characteristics sets (POC), dimension of the POC set, degrees of freedom (DOF), number of independent displacement equations, types and number of an Assur kinematic chain (AKC), coupling degrees of the AKCs, degrees of redundancy and the number of overs; as well as 4 qualitative TCIs, that is, selection of actuated joints, identification of inactive joints, DOF type and Input–Output motion decoupling. Secondly, the ETP method is illustrated by evaluating some well-known PMs including the Delta, Tricept, Exechon, Z3, H4 and the Gough–Stewart platform manipulators, as well as 28 other typical PMs. Via the ETP analysis of these mechanisms also some valuable design knowledge is derived and guidelines for the design of PMs are established. Finally, a 5-DOF decoupled hybrid spraying robot is developed by applying the design knowledge and the design guidelines derived from the ETP analysis.

Analyzing the topological characteristic and key nodes of Chinese air sector network

In this paper, an air sector network (ASN) model is established based on the airspace of Chinese mainland. Meanwhile, the ASN is a weighted graph whose nodes are sectors, and its edge weight is the flights between sectors. In addition, a node ranking algorithm is proposed according to the variation coefficient method (VCM). Then, the topological structure of the ASN is analyzed by the complex network theory, simultaneously, the key sectors are ranked through the proposed VCM. The results indicate that the ASN has heterogeneous and assortativity structure characteristics to a certain extent. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed VCM centrality measure is verified by the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model and Kendall’s tau coefficient. Results show that the VCM centrality method is applicable and effective.

Photonic implementation of Majorana-based Berry phases

Geometric phases, generated by cyclic evolutions of quantum systems, offer an inspiring playground for advancing fundamental physics and technologies alike. The exotic statistics of anyons realized in physical systems can be interpreted as a topological version of geometric phases. However, non-Abelian statistics has not yet been demonstrated in the laboratory. Here, we use an all-optical quantum system that simulates the statistical evolution of Majorana fermions. As a result, we experimentally realize non-Abelian Berry phases with the topological characteristic that they are invariant under continuous deformations of their control parameters. We implement a universal set of Majorana-inspired gates by performing topological and nontopological evolutions and investigate their resilience against perturbative errors. Our photonic experiment, though not scalable, suggests the intriguing possibility of experimentally simulating Majorana statistics with scalable technologies.