A review on the prospects of mobile manipulators for smart maintenance of railway track

Inspection and repair interventions play vital roles in the asset management of railways. Autonomous mobile manipulators possess considerable potential to replace humans in many hazardous railway track maintenance tasks with high efficiency. This paper investigates the prospects of the use of mobile manipulators in track maintenance tasks. The current state of railway track inspection and repair technologies is initially reviewed, revealing that very few mobile manipulators are in the railways. Of note, the technologies are analytically scrutinized to ascertain advantages, unique capabilities, and potential use in the deployment of mobile manipulators for inspection and repair tasks across various industries. Most mobile manipulators in maintenance use ground robots, while other applications use aerial, underwater, or space robots. Power transmission lines, the nuclear industry, and space are the most extensive application areas. Clearly, the railways infrastructure managers can benefit from the adaptation of best practices from these diversified designs and their broad deployment, leading to enhanced human safety and optimized asset digitalization. A case study is presented to show the potential use of mobile manipulators in railway track maintenance tasks. Moreover, the benefits of the mobile manipulator are discussed based on previous research. Finally, challenges and requirements are reviewed to provide insights into future research

Terraforming

Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth—geoengineering— is receiving serious consideration as a way to address climate change. Contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and others a motif for thinking in complex ways about our impact on planetary environments. This book asks how science fiction has imagined how we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009), in stories by such writers as Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Pamela Sargent, Frederick Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson. It argues for terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and the politics of colonisation and habitation. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world

Hydraulic Structures: a Challenge to Engineers and Researchers. Proceedings of the International Junior Researcher and Engineer Workshop on Hydraulic Structures

The IAHR Hydraulic Structures Section, jointly with the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and the Portuguese Water Resources Association (APRH), organised the International Junior Researcher and Engineer Workshop on Hydraulic Structures (IJREWHS'06). The international workshop addressed conventional and innovative aspects of hydraulic structures design, operation, rehabilitation, and interaction with the environment. The main themes of the workshop embraced the hydraulics of dams and hydropower schemes, river structures, hydraulic structures in urban drainage and sewer systems, as well as coastal protection systems. A total of 8 countries were represented during the event, namely Australia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States of America. The topics included : Research Quality, Publications and Impact in Hydraulic Engineering, Dynamic Behaviour of Jets Issued from Howell-Bunger Valves, Experimental Investigation of Air Circulation Patterns in Classical Hydraulic Jumps, Labyrinth Spillways Design Methods and Consideration of Non-Standard Approach Conditions and Geometries, Discharge Capacity and Residual Energy of Labyrinth Weirs, Energy Dissipation in Vertical and Stepped Sewer Drops in a Circular Channel, Hydrodynamic Pressure Field on Steeply Sloping Stepped Spillways, Experimental Investigations on the Stability of Riprap Slope Protection Layers on Overtoppable Earth Dams, Non-Aerated Skimming Flow Properties on Stepped Chutes over Embankment Dams, Determination of Design Parameters for Coastal Dikes on the German North Sea, Contribution to the Design of Artificial Surfing Reef Breakwaters for Coastal Protection, Waves caused by Landslides into Reservoirs and their Impacts on Dams, Advanced Post-Processing and Correlation Analyses in High-Velocity Air-Water Flows, PIV Limitations in Water-Pump Intake Measurements, Technologic Innovation in Data Acquisition Systems applied to Environmental Monitoring, and Photographs of Hydraulic Structures

The impact of migration on urban security and the quality of urban life

The paper analyzes the impact of migration on urbanization, that is, on urban security in major cities and the quality of urban life. Urbanization itself has its own positive and negative challenges. The positive challenges are most often associated with accelerated modernization of cities and their industrialization, economic development, democratization, im�proved quality of services, cultural development, education, etc. According to some unwritten rule, the quality of services in urban areas increases in proportion to the increase in the popula�tion. On the other hand, the large concentration of population in a small area highlights the dis�advantages that are a side segment of the urbanization and are most often related to security, i.e. to the so-called “urban security”. The shortfalls are associated with the increased occurrence of negative social deviations, poverty, increased crime rate, lack of drinking water, enormous soil, water and air pollution, concentration of large populations in a small area, vulnerability to terrorism, increased noise, scarce green areas, appearance of a specific microclimate, climate change, etc. This also leads to a division of the population living in neighborhoods, which are most often formed based on the economic power of the population and security. There are also poor neighborhoods that may be hotbeds of negative social deviations and are characterized by a lack of security of the population. This, in turn, requires the city authorities and the state to invest additional resources in finding mechanisms that will remove such shortfalls and allow the population greater equity and security. Urbanization is widely accepted by a large proportion of the population, but there is also strong resistance in part of the population that opposes modernization and urbanization and is attached to the traditional way of life in the rural areas. The paper aims to emphasize some of the benefits, but also some of the challenges that are a segment of the urbanization, that is, the migration of the population and urban security and the quality of life of the population

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed