Real-time spatial modeling to detect and track resources on construction sites

For more than 10 years the U.S. construction industry has experienced over 1,000 fatalities annually. Many fatalities may have been prevented had the individuals and equipment involved been more aware of and alert to the physical state of the environment around them. Awareness may be improved by automatic 3D (three-dimensional) sensing and modeling of the job site environment in real-time. Existing 3D modeling approaches based on range scanning techniques are capable of modeling static objects only, and thus cannot model in real-time dynamic objects in an environment comprised of moving humans, equipment, and materials. Emerging prototype 3D video range cameras offer another alternative by facilitating affordable, wide field of view, automated static and dynamic object detection and tracking at frame rates better than 1Hz (real-time). This dissertation presents an imperical work and methodology to rapidly create a spatial model of construction sites and in particular to detect, model, and track the position, dimension, direction, and velocity of static and moving project resources in real-time, based on range data obtained from a three-dimensional video range camera in a static or moving position. Existing construction site 3D modeling approaches based on optical range sensing technologies (laser scanners, rangefinders, etc.) and 3D modeling approaches (dense, sparse, etc.) that offered potential solutions for this research are reviewed. The choice of an emerging sensing tool and preliminary experiments with this prototype sensing technology are discussed. These findings led to the development of a range data processing algorithm based on three-dimensional occupancy grids which is demonstrated in detail. Testing and validation of the proposed algorithms have been conducted to quantify the performance of sensor and algorithm through extensive experimentation involving static and moving objects. Experiments in indoor laboratory and outdoor construction environments have been conducted with construction resources such as humans, equipment, materials, or structures to verify the accuracy of the occupancy grid modeling approach. Results show that modeling objects and measuring their position, dimension, direction, and speed had an accuracy level compatible to the requirements of active safety features for construction. Results demonstrate that video rate 3D data acquisition and analysis of construction environments can support effective detection, tracking, and convex hull modeling of objects. Exploiting rapidly generated three-dimensional models for improved visualization, communications, and process control has inherent value, broad application, and potential impact, e.g. as-built vs. as-planned comparison, condition assessment, maintenance, operations, and construction activities control. In combination with effective management practices, this sensing approach has the potential to assist equipment operators to avoid incidents that result in reduce human injury, death, or collateral damage on construction sites.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Removal Period Cherokee Households in Southwestern North Carolina: Material Perspectives on Ethnicity and Cultural Differentiation

Nineteenth century accounts of Cherokee Indian society consistently refer to the existence of two classes among the Cherokees: the acculturated mixed blood[s], who speak English and are considered the intelligent and wealthy class and the culturally conservative fullbloods, whom white observers denigrated as backward, indolent, and ignorant pagans. This perceived dichotomy reflected the poles of a socioeconomic and cultural continuum that developed as a result of the differential Westernization of Cherokee individuals and households during the post-Revolutionary War era. As these socioeconomic classes diverged, they developed as the primary axis of competition and conflict within Cherokee society. Because these groups were progressively distinguished by ancestry, language use, lifestyle, and ideology, they may be characterized as emergent ethnic groups subsumed within the Cherokee national polity. As identity-conscious groups in competition for economic resources and political power, the Cherokee-speaking fullblood majority and the English-speaking metis minority used various media, including material goods and property, to construct and maintain ethnic boundaries. This study examines documentary and archaeological evidence for the use of such material media by Cherokee families in southwestern North Carolina during the Removal period. (1835-1838) and seeks to define material patterning that distinguished the English-speaking metis minority from the Cherokee-speaking fullblood majority. Four independent primary datasets are successively analyzed and discussed to accomplish a synthetic overview of Cherokee wealthholding and material culture. Bioracial, linguistic, and certain aspects of economic variation within the study population are defined through examination of the 1835 War Department census of the Cherokee Nation east of the Mississippi. General trends of bioracial endogamy, community composition, and wealth distribution evident in the 1835 census indicate active ethnic differentiation within the Cherokee population of southwestern North Carolina. The population of the study area was ethnically and socioeconomically homogeneous, with a dominant component of monolingual Cherokee fullblood subsistence farmers who formed a distinctly conservative and materially impoverished aboriginal stratum of Cherokee society. Contrasted with this majority was a small group of Anglo-Cherokee households who exhibited high rates of English literacy and slaveholding, and who managed extensive market farms in the larger river and creek valleys in the southern portion of the study area A relatively small number of fullblood and AngloCherokee families were arrayed between these extremes, forming a heavily skewed socioeconomic continuum largely reflective of household ethnicity. The improved real properties of Cherokee households in southwestern North Carolina are documented by U.S. government property appraisals conducted in the winter of 1836-1837. These appraisals include narrative descriptions and dimensions of dwellings and other buildings, cultivated fields and other cleared or fenced land, fruit trees, ditches, wells, mills, and other facilities present on 684 properties. Hierarchical agglomerative (Ward\u27s method) cluster analysis is used to define types of properties based upon similarities in the values assigned to dwellings, nonresidential structures, and agricultural improvements by the federal appraisers. The resultant cluster solution is interpreted as a series of farmstead models that can be ranked from those more traditional in composition to those more closely resembling Western agrarian modes. These analyses indicate that Cherokee properties in the study area were remarkably homogeneous in composition; more than 85% of the Cherokee farmsteads in southwestern North Carolina consisted of twelve or fewer acres of cropland, small, cribbed log dwellings valued less than $32.00, and few outbuildings other than corn cribs and an occasional asi. Properties owned by a small number of Anglo-Cherokees families contrast sharply with this traditional farmstead mode, and reflect thorough incorporation and integration of Western agrarian material modes of life. The largest and most highly valued Cherokee properties included substantial, hewn log dwellings valued in excess of$70.00, 35 or more acres of cropland, and a wide array of ancillary domestic structures (e.g. kitchens, springhouses, smokehouses), farm buildings (e.g. stables, cribs, barns), and specialized facilities (e.g. stores, mills, blacksmith shops). These farms substantially resembled the typical holdings of Anglo-American middling farmers and small planters in the southern highlands, and the Cherokee owners of such properties occupied a socioeconomic status parallel to the upper middle class of the Anglo-American rural South. A relatively small sector of Anglo-Cherokee and fullblood Cherokee families maintained homes and farms that formed a continuum between these extremes. Contrastive modes of farmstead composition are interpreted as evidence for the operation of distinct Western and traditional systems of household economy and material lifeways. These distinct systems are largely, but not exclusively, correlated with the bioracial and linguistic affinities of Cherokee households, and contrastive farmstead composition is interpreted as evidence for ethnic differentiation among Cherokee households in southwestern North Carolina. Spoliation claims which Cherokees from the study area filed against the United States government following forced removal of 1838 document losses of clothing, furniture, household goods, cookware and tableware, agricultural equipment and other tools, livestock, and other material possessions by more than 400 Cherokee households from the study area. These data are initially explored through univariate comparisons of the distributions of major functional groups of chattel property among bioracial/linguistic subsets of the study population to determine differential patterns of ownership. Hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis is applied to classify individual household cases by inventory composition. The membership of these groups of households is then evaluated with respect to racial/ethnic affinity to determine whether ethnicity played a significant role in the formation of household assemblages. Analyses of the chattel properties data. reveal patterning similar to that of the real properties data, with a large, homogeneous group of relatively poor, predominantly fullblood families forming the basal economic stratum of Cherokee society contrasted with a small, predominantly English-speaking, group of wealthy Cherokees. A relatively small group of both fullblood and Anglo-Cherokee households span these extremes. These patterns are interpreted as evidence for a traditional-Western continuum in material lifestyles and economic modes; the poles of this continuum appear to represent the contrastive content of an ethnic dichotomy. Archaeological data present a collateral, yet independent gauge of variation in the material lifeways of Removal Period Cherokee households in the study area. To illustrate the differences in material culture that distinguish more Westernized from more traditionally oriented Cherokee households, artifact assemblages representing one Anglo-Cherokee metis occupation, and six fullblood Cherokee household occupations are compared and contrasted in terms of diversity, content, and relative composition. Archaeological assemblages recovered from surface and excavated contexts at these farmstead sites evince a high degree of interhousehold variation in scale and content; this variability is interpreted as evidence of differential acculturation and contrastive cultural orientations. Most of these assemblages are dominated by Qualla series ceramics and other goods reflective of indigenous traditions; these configurations suggest that many of the Cherokee inhabitants of southwestern North Carolina retained strong native identities expressed through continuity of traditional technologies. However, high frequencies of commercially manufactured goods associated with the metis household (the Christies) occupation also indicate substantially higher levels of material wealth and construction of a Westernized material lifestyle informed by AngloAmerican models. which commercial consumption was particularly prominent. These analyses illustrate the broad themes of variation in Cherokee material culture on the eve of the removal of 1838. The extremes of variation evident in these datasets are interpreted as evidence for differential Westernization of Cherokee households, and illustrate the material modes that conservative Cherokees and Westernized Anglo-Cherokees used to define and distinguish their communities of association as nascent ethnic groups struggling over the cultural identity and political fate of the Cherokee Nation

Mobile Robots Navigation

Mobile robots navigation includes different interrelated activities: (i) perception, as obtaining and interpreting sensory information; (ii) exploration, as the strategy that guides the robot to select the next direction to go; (iii) mapping, involving the construction of a spatial representation by using the sensory information perceived; (iv) localization, as the strategy to estimate the robot position within the spatial map; (v) path planning, as the strategy to find a path towards a goal location being optimal or not; and (vi) path execution, where motor actions are determined and adapted to environmental changes. The book addresses those activities by integrating results from the research work of several authors all over the world. Research cases are documented in 32 chapters organized within 7 categories next described

Intelligent Transportation Related Complex Systems and Sensors

Building around innovative services related to different modes of transport and traffic management, intelligent transport systems (ITS) are being widely adopted worldwide to improve the efficiency and safety of the transportation system. They enable users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, and smarter decisions on the use of transport networks. Current ITSs are complex systems, made up of several components/sub-systems characterized by time-dependent interactions among themselves. Some examples of these transportation-related complex systems include: road traffic sensors, autonomous/automated cars, smart cities, smart sensors, virtual sensors, traffic control systems, smart roads, logistics systems, smart mobility systems, and many others that are emerging from niche areas. The efficient operation of these complex systems requires: i) efficient solutions to the issues of sensors/actuators used to capture and control the physical parameters of these systems, as well as the quality of data collected from these systems; ii) tackling complexities using simulations and analytical modelling techniques; and iii) applying optimization techniques to improve the performance of these systems. It includes twenty-four papers, which cover scientific concepts, frameworks, architectures and various other ideas on analytics, trends and applications of transportation-related data

Rethinking the risk matrix

So far risk has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL (being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the adverse event). The so called risk matrix follows from such definition. This definition of risk is justified in a long term “managerial” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen’s perspective to the definition of risk

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen