The free piston linear generator is a new range extender concept for the application in a full electric vehicle. The free piston engine driven linear generators can achieve high efficiency at part and full load which is suitable for the range extender application. This paper presents requirements for designing a linear generator deduced from a basic analysis of a free piston linear generator.

Currently, the “Lamarckian dimension” and “Lamarckian mechanisms” are vividly discussed, indicating that they are compatible with Darwinism. However, they require an extension of Modern Synthesis to Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Both the terms, unfortunately connected to Lamarck, really indicate a group of phenomena which can be symbolized by Jablonka’s wording: “some evolutionary changes are non-random in origin, or even result from instruction.” The Lamarckian mechanisms leading to these evolutionary changes arose, however, in the Darwinian way much earlier. This earlier stage is said too rarely, and the typical understanding of Lamarckism strongly suggests its lack. The term “Lamarckism” was and is understood very differently both at different times and in different national and ideological traditions but usually fraught with a simplified understanding of Lamarck. Most of the controversies in these issues arise from the insufficient precision of the utterance, and this from undervaluation of definition, specification of assumptions and abstract reasoning.

The philosophical tradition defines the subject as a reflective being, in principle aware of its agency which makes it capable of making free decisions and taking responsibility for them. Agency, understood in this way, is clearly attributed only to people. However, the technological development of artificial cognitive enhancements and of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence, that has been taken place in last few decades, casts doubts whether such an approach is not too anthropocentric. This doubt is indicated by some proponents of extending cognitive processes beyond the human brain; they argue for the need of appropriate extension of the subject as well. Moreover, there is an increasing number of proposals attributing agency to artifacts. In the first part of the article, I refer to the two most commonly used philosophical criteria distinguishing the subject of cognition from all information processing systems: being a reflective system, and being the subject of intentional stance. Next, I assess, from such a perspective, the attempts to attribute agency to both one-person extended cognitive systems and artificial systems, such as relatively autonomous computer programs. I argue that the gap between conceptions of the extended subject and the artificial subject, and the standard approach incline toward the usage of the term “agent” designating this phenomenon. The term is already widely used in cognitive science to designate any relatively autonomous information processing system performing a cognitive task. The need of the clear distinction between “the subject” (“subjectivity”) and “the agent” (“agency”) is especially noticeable in Polish, where the difference in meanings of these concepts is not so evident as in English. The awareness of the applying in cognitive science these two different notions of agency prevents against a conceptual misuse which could lead to erroneous explanations and predictions.

Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo) is becoming to be popular in psychology, and by certain is even seen as a new biology for psychology (Hofer 2014). In particular, it is about the concept of extended inheritance This concept claims to be (neo-) Lamarckian. According to it inherited is everything that contributes to resemblance across generations and that strongly affects the fitness of the offspring—starting by nuclear genes, by genes expression, maternal care, ecological niche, cultural niche, language, etc. In this paper I analyse the potential of the concept of extended inheritance on the example of transgenerational transmission of attachment style and mentalizing capacity. I present the neuroendocrine mechanism of transmission. Then I show that a) DNA methylation is complementary to neuroendocrine mechanism, but it does not revolutionize the latter as it is claimed; b) the concept of extended inheritance confounds the three questions rightly separated by Neo-Darwinism: origin of variation, fate of variation and inheritance, c) although the motivation of Evo-Devo goes against the alleged genetic determinism of neodarwinism, the concept of transgeneration inheritance is determinist (although it is an epigeneetic determinism).

A new type of non-inflatable metal tire is designed to prevent the flat tire caused by puncture and shrapnel penetration, and it can be used on star rovers and military or civilian wheeled vehicles. In order to study vibration damping characteristics of the new wheel, a specimen with the same size as the pneumatic tire (235/70 R16) is made for contrast tests. A filtering method is proposed to reduce impulse and random interference noise in collected vibration signal. Comparative analysis of ride comfort performance is conducted by solving weighted acceleration root mean square (RMS) values. The results show that the filtering method has a good effect, and ride comfort of the metal tire is slightly worse, while it has a better grasping ability. Therefore, some extended structures have been recommended to improve the vibration damping performance.

This paper presents a concept of humanoid robot motion generation using the dedicated simplified dynamic model of the robot (Extended Cart-Table model). Humanoid robot gait with equal steps length is considered. Motion pattern is obtained here with use of Preview Control method. Motion trajectories are first obtained in simulations (off-line) and then they are verified on a test-bed. Tests performed using the real robot confirmed the correctness of the method. Robot completed a set of steps without losing its balance.

This paper presents a robust control technique for small-scale unmanned helicopters to track predefined trajectories (velocities and heading) in the presence of bounded external disturbances. The controller design is based on the linearized state-space model of the helicopter. The multivariable dynamics of the helicopter is divided into two subsystems, longitudinallateral and heading-heave dynamics respectively. There is no strong coupling between these two subsystems and independent controllers are designed for each subsystem. The external disturbances and model mismatch in the longitudinal-lateral subsystem are present in all (matched and mismatched) channels. This model mismatch and external disturbances are estimated as lumped disturbances using extended disturbance observer and an extended disturbance observer based sliding mode controller is designed for it to counter the effect of these disturbances. In the case of heading-heave subsystem, external disturbances and model mismatch only occur in matched channels so a second order sliding mode controller is designed for it as it is insensitive to matched uncertainties. The control performance is successfully tested in Simulink.

In this paper an application of extended Kalman filter (EKF) for estimation and attenuation of periodic disturbance in permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive is investigated. Most types of disturbances present into PMSM drive were discussed and described. The mathematical model of the plant is presented. Detailed information about the design process of the disturbance estimator was introduced. A state feedback controller (SFC) with feedforward realizes the regulation and disturbance compensation. The theoretical analysis was supported by experimental tests on the laboratory stand. Both time- and frequency-domain analysis of the estimation results and angular velocity were performed. A significant reduction of velocity ripple has been achieved.