RoCKIn@Work: Industrial Robot Challenge

RoCKIn@Work was focused on benchmarks in the domain of industrial robots. Both task and functionality benchmarks were derived from real world applications. All of them were part of a bigger user story painting the picture of a scaled down real world factory scenario. Elements used to build the testbed were chosen from common materials in modern manufacturing environments. Networked devices, machines controllable through a central software component, were also part of the testbed and introduced a dynamic component to the task benchmarks. Strict guidelines on data logging were imposed on participating teams to ensure gathered data could be automatically evaluated. This also had the positive effect that teams were made aware of the importance of data logging, not only during a competition but also during research as useful utility in their own laboratory. Tasks and functionality benchmarks are explained in detail, starting with their use case in industry, further detailing their execution and providing information on scoring and ranking mechanisms for the specific benchmark

DESIGNING DISTRIBUTED CONTROLLING TESTBED SYSTEM FOR SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTICS IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

The arrival of the era of autonomous robots is indisputable. In this paper, innovations in the distributed control systems realized by autonomous guided vehicles in the automotive industry are provided as proof of concept. The main goal of the considered distributed control system design is to bring all-in-one dependent and independent VDA 5050 compliant robots that are easily configurable and manageable with the web-based high-quality user interface responsive business-critical application. Special attention is paid to applying a platform to manage all autonomous IoT based robots in one seamless system. In addition, a "single point of truth" as one of the main issues of modern distributed controlled systems has been considered.

Optimization of Italian CMS Computing Centers via MIUR funded Research Projects

In 2012, 14 Italian Institutions participating LHC Experiments (10 in CMS) have won a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR), to optimize Analysis activities and in general the Tier2/Tier3 infrastructure. A large range of activities is actively carried on: they cover data distribution over WAN, dynamic provisioning for both scheduled and interactive processing, design and development of tools for distributed data analysis, and tests on the porting of CMS software stack to new highly performing / low power architectures

Benefits of Implementing Lean Practices and the Impact of the Lean Aerospace Initiative in the Defense Aerospace Industry and Government Agencies

In the 1980’s, many United States industrial organizations started developing new production processes to improve quality, reduce cost, and better respond to customer needs and the pressures of global competition. This new paradigm was coined Lean Production (or simply “Lean”) in the book The Machine That Changed The World published in 1990 by researchers from MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program. In 1993, a consortium of US defense aerospace firms and the USAF Aeronautical Systems Center, together with the AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, started the Lean Aircraft Initiative (LAI) at MIT. With expansion in 1998 to include government space products, the program was renamed the Lean Aerospace Initiative. LAI’s vision is to “Significantly reduce the cost and cycle time for military aerospace products throughout the entire value chain while continuing to improve product performance.” By late 1998, 23 industry and 13 government organizations with paying memberships, along with MIT and the UAW were participating in the LAI

RoCKIn Benchmarking and Scoring System

The main innovation brought forth by the European Project RoCKIn is the definition, implementation and application to an actual robot competition of the novel paradigm of benchmarking through competitions. By doing so, RoCKIn set in motion an evolutionary process to transform robot competitions from successful showcases with limited scientific impact into benchmarking tools for the consistent and objective evaluation of the performance of autonomous robot systems. Our work began by revisiting, in the light of the features and limitations of a competition setting, the very foundations of the scientific method; then we built on these by designing a novel type of competitions where the concepts of benchmark and objective performance metrics are the key points; finally, we arrived to the implementation of such concepts in the form of a real-world robot competition. This chapter describes the above process, explaining how each of its several aspects (theoretical, technical, procedural) has been tackled by RoCKIn. Special attention will be devoted to the problems of defining performance metrics and of capturing the ground truth needed to reliably assess robot perceptions and actions