Virtual evacuation simulation with autonomous avatars

This paper describes the use of virtual reality technology for virtual simulation of crowded evacuation from sites. The approach adopted is the reuse of a game engine, thus taking advantage of all its features for virtual environment design. This work upgrades a previously developed one, in which users played simultaneously in a networked environment, each one controlling his or her own avatar. But for crowded evacuation situations, it would require many users playing simultaneously in networked computers. The more crowded the simulation, the more users needed, what could be difficult a task, depending upon the number of avatars needed. Autonomous avatars can surpass this difficulty, so few users can participate, together with as many autonomous avatars as needed, to simulate the desired crowded scenarios. First results show the viability of such an approach

Nuclear Plants and Emergency Virtual Simulations Based on a Low-Cost Engine Reuse

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Nuclear Plants and Emergency Virtual Simulations based on a Low-cost Engine Reuse

Our industrialised society comprises many industrial processes that are very important for everyone, in a wide range of fields. Activities related to these industrial processes, though, involve, in higher or lower degrees, some risk for personnel,  besides risk for the general public in some cases. Therefore, efficient training programs and simulations are highly required, to improve the processes involved, increasing safety for people. To cite an example, nuclear plants pose high safety requirements in operational and maintenance routines, to keep plants in safe operation conditions and reduce personnel exposure to radiation dose. Besides operational and maintenance in nuclear plants, there are also other situations where efficient training is required, as in evacuation planning from buildings in emergency situations. Also, rescue tasks play similar role. These apply specially for nuclear sites. Another situation that requires efficient training is security, what has special meaning for plants that involve dangerous materials, such as nuclear plants. Nuclear materials must be kept under high security level, to avoid any misuse

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

Interactive Simulation of the NIST USAR Arenas

We are developing interactive simulations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reference Test Facility for Autonomous Mobile Robots (Urban Search and Rescue). The NIST USAR Test Facility is a standardized disaster environment consisting of three scenarios of progressive difficulty: Yellow, Orange, and Red arenas. The USAR task focuses on robot behaviors, and physical interaction with standardized but disorderly rubble filled environments. The simulation will be used to test and evaluate designs for teleoperation interfaces and robot sensing and cooperation that will subsequently be incorporated into experimental robots. This paper describes our novel simulation approach using an inexpensive game engine to rapidly construct a visually and dynamically accurate simulation for both individual robots and robot teams

Nuclear Power

The world of the twenty first century is an energy consuming society. Due to increasing population and living standards, each year the world requires more energy and new efficient systems for delivering it. Furthermore, the new systems must be inherently safe and environmentally benign. These realities of today's world are among the reasons that lead to serious interest in deploying nuclear power as a sustainable energy source. Today's nuclear reactors are safe and highly efficient energy systems that offer electricity and a multitude of co-generation energy products ranging from potable water to heat for industrial applications. The goal of the book is to show the current state-of-the-art in the covered technical areas as well as to demonstrate how general engineering principles and methods can be applied to nuclear power systems

Nuclear Power

The world of the twenty first century is an energy consuming society. Due to increasing population and living standards, each year the world requires more energy and new efficient systems for delivering it. Furthermore, the new systems must be inherently safe and environmentally benign. These realities of today's world are among the reasons that lead to serious interest in deploying nuclear power as a sustainable energy source. Today's nuclear reactors are safe and highly efficient energy systems that offer electricity and a multitude of co-generation energy products ranging from potable water to heat for industrial applications. The goal of the book is to show the current state-of-the-art in the covered technical areas as well as to demonstrate how general engineering principles and methods can be applied to nuclear power systems