Evaluation of hyperspectral indices for retrieval of canopy equivalent water thickness and gravimetric water content

There are two main parameters describing the amount of water in vegetation: the gravimetric water content (GWC) and the equivalent water thickness (EWT). In this study, we investigated the applicability of hyperspectral water-sensitive indices from canopy spectra for estimating canopy EWT (CEWT) and GWC. First, the spectral reflectance’s response to different levels of canopy water content was analysed and a noticeable increase in the slope of the near-infrared (NIR) shoulder of the canopy spectrum was observed. Next, the correlation between the CEWT and various hyperspectral water-sensitive indices was investigated. It was found that all of the indices could retrieve the CEWT of winter wheat well, with the coefficients of determination (R²) all being higher than 0.80. Finally, the retrieval performance of these indices for canopy GWC was evaluated and no significant correlation was observed between canopy GWC and the water-sensitive indices except for the spectral ratio index in the NIR shoulder region (NSRI). These results showed that the traditional water-sensitive vegetation indices are more sensitive to CEWT than to GWC, especially when the LAI is not highly correlated with the GWC, and that the NSRI is a potential vegetation index for use in the retrieval of GWC.     

Human factors of industrial robots and robot safety management in Japan

Japan has the largest world market share of industrial robots and also two fatal accidents due to robots. Ergonomics points of view should be applied to robotics to prevent new types of accidents. The concern of this paper is to explain Japan's situation concerning the installation of robotics and current safety regulations. Three experiments about the possibility of unsafe behaviour are described, and the man-robot system failure is analysed based on Fault Tree Analysis and the actual data. The appropriate safety measures are compared in terms of their cost-effectiveness. Finally, ergonomics points of view are provided to prevent accidents due to industrial robots.     

A manufacturing-oriented model for evaluating the satisfaction of workers – Evidence from Turkey

Job satisfaction, in terms of worker's satisfaction, is one of the intensively studied areas in human resource and management. However, there is little information available on how ergonomics and the manufacturing environment affect job satisfaction. This study analyzes the extent of the relationship between job satisfaction and work and workplace related conditions. A conceptual model is proposed to evaluate job satisfaction that considers 34 elements in four categories: manufacturing systems, facility design, safety and ergonomics, and human resources and management. A survey of 169 blue-collar workers working in the automotive industry was conducted to investigate the applicability of the model. A comprehensive exploratory factor analysis was used to determine inter-related elements, their underlying factors and their effects on job satisfaction. The analysis revealed 6 factors with 18 related elements. From a multi linear regression analysis, we develop a job satisfaction model built on factors of human resource policies, safety, ergonomics, air quality, thermal comfort and disturbing equipment. The results reveal that ergonomics plays the most important role in workers' satisfaction for the respondent Turkish automotive workers. In contrast, human resource policies seem not play a critical role in job satisfaction because of higher standards in automotive industry compared to other industries in Turkey.     

Present and future robot control development—An industrial perspective

Robot control is a key competence for robot manufacturers and a lot of development is made to increase robot performance, reduce robot cost and introduce new functionalities. Examples of development areas that get big attention today are multi robot control, safe control, force control, 3D vision, remote robot supervision and wireless communication. The application benefits from these developments are discussed as well as the technical challenges that the robot manufacturers meet. Model-based control is now a key technology for the control of industrial robots and models and control schemes are continuously refined to meet the requirements on higher performance even when the cost pressure leads to the design of robot mechanics that is more difficult to control. Driving forces for the future development of robots can be found in, for example, new robot applications in the automotive industry, especially for the final assembly, in small and medium size enterprises, in foundries, in food industry and in the processing and assembly of large structures. Some scenarios on future robot control development are proposed. One scenario is that light-weight robot concepts could have an impact on future car manufacturing and on future automation of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). Such a development could result in modular robots and in control schemes using sensors in the robot arm structure, sensors that could also be used for the implementation of redundant safe control. Introducing highly modular robots will increase the need of robot installation support, making Plug and Play functionality even more important. One possibility to obtain a highly modular robot program could be to use a recently developed new type of parallel kinematic robot structure with large work space in relation to the robot foot print. For further efficient use of robots, the scenario of adaptive robot performance is introduced. This means that the robot control is optimised with respect to the thermal and fatigue load on the robot for the specific program that the robot performs. The main conclusion of the presentation is that industrial robot development is far away from its limits and that a lot of research and development is needed to obtain a more widely use of robot automation in industry.     

Safe Collaborative Assembly on a Continuously Moving Line with Large Industrial Robots

Robot safety standards defines Collaborative Operation as a state in which purposely designed robots work in direct cooperation with a human within a defined workspace. That is, an operator and an industrial robot complete assembly tasks at the collaborative workspace. A prerequisite to ensuring safety during all phases of operation is an understanding of the nature of hazards pertinent to collaborative systems. An automotive assembly station, where plastic panels are assembled on a continuously moving line, formed the basis for research operations meant to understand safety issues when a large industrial robot aids an operator in assembly tasks. This led to the development of a laboratory demonstrator whose design and functioning will be presented in this article. Additionally, the hazards identified during risk assessment along with measures to mitigate the associated risks will be presented in order to highlight the nature of hazards pertinent to collaborative systems.     

Automatic model generation and PLC-code implementation for interlocking policies in industrial robot cells

In industrial production lines, for example in the automotive industry, cells with multiple industrial robots are common. In such cells, each robot has to avoid running into static obstacles and when the robots work together in a shared space they must also avoid colliding with each other. Typically, the latter is enforced by manually implementing interlocks in programmable logic controllers (PLCs). This is a tedious, error-prone task that is a bottleneck in the development of production lines. The PLC-code being man-made also greatly complicates the maintenance and reconfiguration of such production lines. However, in industry today, a lot of development of robot cells is made offline in 3D simulation environments which enables the use of computers also for deciding and implementing the necessary coordination. This paper presents a method that makes use of information in a robot simulation environment in order to automatically extract finite state models. These models can be used to generate supervisors for ensuring that the deadlock situations that may arise as a consequence of the introduced interlocks are avoided. It is also possible to optimize the work cycle time for the cell. Finally, PLC-code to supervise the production cell can be automatically generated from the deadlock-free and possibly optimized system model. This approach results in a high flexibility in that the coordination function can be quickly reimplemented whenever necessary. A prototype implementation has been developed making use of a commercial 3D robot simulation tool, and a software tool for supervisor synthesis and code generation. The approach is general and should be possible to implement in most offline robot simulation tools.     

Rules for expanding robot applications

A discrepancy exists in the number of installed robot systems as compared to the number of potential applications. The restrictions of potential users in the seventies can be partially explained by the imperfect technology of the equipment and the minimal knowledge of first users with regard to robot integration into installed systems. Almost half of all installed robots are applied in the areas of spot and arc welding operations in the automotive industry. Due to the expected market saturation, robot manufacturers have to develop new applications for their products. These applications can be discovered through an analysis of the interdependencies between the requirements of respective tasks and the potential of new technologies. A systematic planning process is indispensable for a successful implementation.     

Evaluation of head-collision safety of a 7-DOF manipulator according to posture variation

As the need for the improvement of the productivity in the manufacturing process grows, industrial robots are brought out of the safety fences and used in the direct collaborative operation with human workers. Consequently, the intended and/or unintended contact between the human and the robot in the collaborative operation is no longer an extraordinary event and is a mundane possibility. The level of the risk of the collision depends on various quantities associated with the collision, for example, inertia, velocity, stiffness, and so on. MSI (manipulator safety index) which is based on HIC (head injury criteria) conventionally used in the automotive industry is one of the practically available measures to estimate the risk of the collision between the human and the manipulator. In this paper MSI is applied to evaluate the collision safety of a 7-DOF articulated human-arm-like manipulator. The risk of the collision could be reduced by choosing different postures without deviating from the given end-effector trajectory using the redundant degree of freedom in the 7-DOF manipulator. The paper shows how the redundant degree of the freedom is utilized to design safer trajectories and/or safer manipulator configurations among many available. A parametric analysis and simulation results for a given trajectory illustrate the usefulness of the concept of the trajectory design for alleviating the risk of the manipulator operation in the human–robot coexisting workspace.     

Fire severity assessment by using NBR (Normalized Burn Ratio) and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) derived from LANDSAT TM/ETM images

In this work, the capacity of NBR and NDVI indices derived from LANDSAT TM/ETM images has been analysed for fire severity assessment. For this purpose, three fires occurring in southern Spain were studied. Firstly, the displacements of burned and unburned pixels in the pre‐/post‐fire NIR‐MIR and NIR‐R bi‐spectral spaces were analysed with the aim of establishing which of the two indices was the most sensitive for discriminating severity levels. Then, the capacity of the two indices, both from a uni‐temporal (post‐fire) and bi‐temporal perspective (pre and post‐fire), to discriminate three severity levels was studied. Based on the results, it was decided that the most suitable way to assess wildfire severity by index segmentation was to discriminate between unburned and burned pixels according to their NBR pre‐/post‐fire difference values (dNBR), and, subsequently, to distinguish between pixels with an extreme and moderate severity based on the NBR post‐fire values. The thresholds calculated for these indices permitted fire severity mapping with an accuracy of 86.42% (±4.31%). These thresholds could be extrapolated to other fires with similar characteristics although a calculation of their own specific thresholds could improve the accuracy of the fire severity map obtained.     

Application of robotics in onshore oil and gas industry—A review Part I

With ever increasing global demand and depleting resources for fossil fuels, oil and gas industry is now positively looking for advanced robotic solutions to increase their productivity and safety. With time easy resources of the fossil fuels are shrinking and newly searched reservoirs, to feed supply demands of global consumption, are mostly located in extreme environmental conditions such as hot deserts, deep water and arctic zone etc. Production of the fossil fuels, in such inhospitable environmental conditions, poses difficult challenges to health, safety and environment (HSE). Tragic incidents like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills are examples of such challenges. Therefore, oil and gas industry has lot to learn from successful implementation of robotics and automation for dull, dirty and dangerous (3D) tasks of manufacturing industry. Most of the robotics technologies, currently used in the oil and gas industry, are mainly focused on inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) of plant facilities with higher frequency and accuracy. Fundamental idea, involved in the automatization of these processes, is based on the principle of teleoperation with skilled operator. Automation of 3D tasks not only improves HSE standards but also lead to much needed economic efficiency by reducing production cycle, floor space and number of staff members required for continuous inspection and manipulation of plant facilities. Considering the risks involved in this industry usage of completely autonomous robots, first without achieving very high reliability, is still a far fetch choice. Therefore, semi-autonomous robots, where actions are performed by robots but cognitive decisions are still taken by skilled operator, is an excellent choice for this industry as a near future solution. In the onshore oil and gas industry robotic solutions are used both in upstream and downstream processes, such as site survey, drilling, production and transportation, mainly focused in the form of in-pipe inspection robots (IPIRs), tank inspection robots (TIRs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) etc. This paper presents the state of art robotic solutions currently used in onshore oil and gas facilities.     

Performance Evaluation of Human Detection Systems for Robot Safety

Detecting and tracking people is becoming more important in robotic applications because of the increasing demand for collaborative work in which people interact closely with and in the same workspace as robots. New safety standards allow people to work next to robots, but require that they be protected from harm while they do so. Sensors that detect and track people are a natural way of implementing the necessary safety monitoring, and have the added advantage that the information about where the people are and where they are going can be fed back into the application and used to give the robot greater situational awareness for performing tasks. The results should help users determine if such a system will provide sufficient protection for people to be able to work safely in collaborative applications with industrial robots.     

铝合金材料在轿车车身轻量化中的应用研究

减轻汽车质量、降低燃油消耗和减少排放污染成为汽车工业发展的核心问题，车身的轻量化对于整车轻量化起着举足轻重的作用，采用轻质材料是车身减重的重要途径。该文以某轿车为对象，采用铝合金材料对车身11个主要覆盖件进行轻量化研究，该方案可以使车身减重53．1Kg，减重效果达到64．5％。采用显式有限元理论建立整车有限元模型，从满足整车耐撞安全性能的角度，在整车变形、整车与刚性墙的碰撞力、运动的速度和加速度、主要零部件的吸能等方面进行分析、评价，数值仿真验证了轻量化方案的可行性。     

Introduction to the special issue on Advances in intelligent nonlinear control for robotic systems

In the last two decades, robotic systems have achieved wide applications in every aspect of human society, including industrial manufacturing, automotive production, medical devices, and social lives. With the     

A tour of secure software engineering solutions for connected vehicles

The growing number of vehicles daily moving on roads increases the need of protecting the safety and security of passengers, pedestrians, and vehicles themselves. This need is intensified when considering the pervasive introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) systems into modern vehicles, because this makes such vehicles potentially vulnerable from the point of view of security. The convergence of safety and security requirements is one of the main outstanding research challenges in software-intensive systems. This work reviews existing methodologies and solutions addressing security issues in the automotive domain with a focus on the integration between safety and security aspects. In particular, we identify the main security issues with vehicular communication technologies and existing gaps between state-of-the-art methodologies and their implementation in the real world. Starting from a literature survey and referring to widely accepted standards of the domain, such as AUTOSAR and ISO 26262, we discuss research challenges and set baselines for a holistic secure-by-design approach targeting safety and security aspects all along the different phases of the development process of automotive software.     

Feed-forward multilayer neural network model for vehicle lateral guidance control

An advanced vehicle lateral guidance control technology is necessary in order to develop intelligent transportation and manufacturing systems with flexibility and immediate adaptability. PID control, optimal control, and fuzzy control have often been used for designing a vehicle lateral guidance controller; in addition automatic guidance methods by spline curve and inverse dynamics are also used in mobile robots (e.g. differential drive), but they are not sufficient to develop a highly intelligent vehicle lateral guidance controller which can adapt to varying environments, because they lack some behavior like learning ability and adaptability. In this paper, the possibility to apply neural networks for developing a vehicle lateral guidance controller is exposed. A new neuron activation function suitable for vehicle lateral guidance control is suggested, a feed-forward multilayer neural network (FMNN) with the suggested neuron activation function is proposed and a vehicle lateral guidance controller (VLGC) is developed by use of the FMNN. The VLGC can be applied to automobiles of different parameters and roads of various widths. It can be also applied to mobile robots. Its input variables are proposed to be defined as kind of relative quantities by using the road width, automotive parameter, automotive position, and orientation on the corner course as 90°. Its output variable is the automotive steering angle. Its teaching data are collected by automobile driving simulation, and its connection weights and threshold values are tuned through the error back-propagation algorithm. The training process and the result of neural network by different learning rate coefficients and momentum parameters are compared. Four VLGCs are generated through training by using different learning rate coefficients, momentum parameters, and repeat training times. Automated guided automobile simulations and mobile robot experiments for each VLGC are carried out. Good training result as well as automated guided simulation and experimental results are obtained.     

Identification of types of obstacles for mobile robots

For service robots coexisting with humans, both safety and working efficiency are very important. In order for robots to avoid collisions with surrounding obstacles, the robots must recognize obstacles around them. In dynamic environments, not only currently moving obstacles but also movable obstacles should be recognized. In this paper, three types of obstacles, such as stationary, movable and moving, are defined, and a method to identify the type of obstacles is proposed. The experiments using a mobile robot were conducted to evaluate the usefulness of the method.     

Real-time collaboration in design engineering: an expensive fantasy or affordable reality?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the main issues that are both driving and impeding the implementation and use of CSCW systems within the automotive industry. The paper begins by describing the current competitive pressures within the European Automotive industry and then moves on to highlight the main requirements for real-time collaborative systems, as expressed by various organizations along the automotive supply chain. Finally, the paper presents the results of a recent project in this area and some conclusions on the viability of CSCW technology in the current technical and commercial climate.     

Adaptable compliance or variable stiffness for robotic applications [From the Guest Editors]

Exciting new robots are being developed that will operate in a different environment from traditional industrial factories or research laboratories. Researchers are working worldwide to create robots that are integrated into our daily lives. For the advancement of these new robots, compliant, safe, and new actuators are one of the important issues turning energy into safe motion. The biological counterpart is the muscle tendon structure that has functional performance characteristics and a neuromechanical control systemthat has far more superior capabilities. The superior power to weight ratio, force to weight ratio, and sensing characteristics limit the development of machines that can match motion, safety, and energy efficiency of a human or other animal. One of the key differences of biological systems is their adaptable compliance or variable stiffness compared with the traditional stiff electrical drives used for the standard industrial robotic applications, which require accurate, reference-trajectory tracking.More and more applications such as robots in close human or robot proximity, legged autonomous robots, and rehabilitation devices and prostheses demand a different set of design specifications, for which the use of compliant actuators can be beneficial as compared with the traditional stiff actuation schemes.     

Reliability based structural optimization: A simplified safety index approach

A probabilistic optimal design methodology for complex structures modelled with finite element methods is presented. The main emphasis is on developing probabilistic analysis tools suitable for optimization. An advanced second-moment method is employed to evaluate the failure probability of the performance function. The safety indices are interpolated using the information at the mean and most probable failure point. The minimum weight design with an improved safety index limit is achieved by using the extended interior penalty method of optimization. Numerical examples covering beam and plate structures are presented to illustrate the design approach. The results obtained by using the proposed approach are compared with those obtained by using the existing probabilistic optimization techniques.     

RFID driven robotic assembly for random mix manufacturing

This paper discusses an integration driven framework for enabling the RFID based identification of parts to perform robotic assembly operations in a random mix. The RFID infrastructure senses the newly arriving parts to be assembled and via an integration framework, the robots are able to recognize them and perform cooperative welding operations. The parts to be welded have different characteristics, in particular, variable in both dimensions and materials. The integration framework is demonstrated in a case study coming from the automotive industry.