Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

Advanced flight control system study

A fly by wire flight control system architecture designed for high reliability includes spare sensor and computer elements to permit safe dispatch with failed elements, thereby reducing unscheduled maintenance. A methodology capable of demonstrating that the architecture does achieve the predicted performance characteristics consists of a hierarchy of activities ranging from analytical calculations of system reliability and formal methods of software verification to iron bird testing followed by flight evaluation. Interfacing this architecture to the Lockheed S-3A aircraft for flight test is discussed. This testbed vehicle can be expanded to support flight experiments in advanced aerodynamics, electromechanical actuators, secondary power systems, flight management, new displays, and air traffic control concepts

Design and Development of a Vision System Interface for Three Degree of Freedom Agricultural Robot

In this study, a vision system interfaced 3DOF agricultural harvester robot was designed, developed and tested. The robot was actuated by hydraulic power for heavy tasks such as picking and harvesting oil palm FFB. The design was based on the task of that robot, the type of actuators and on the overall size. Attention was given to the stability, portability and kinematic simplicity in relation to the hydraulic actuators. The derivation of the kinematic model was based on the Matrix Algebra for the forward kinematics, and the inverse kinematics problem was based on analytical formulation. The D-H representation was used to carry out the coordinates of the end-effector as the function of the joint angles. The joint angles of the robot were computed as the function of the end-effector coordinates to achieve the inverse kinematic model. A mathematical model that related the joint angles and the actuators length was derived using geometric and trigonometric formulations. A differential system was derived for the manipulator. This differential system represents the dynamic model, which describes relationships between robot motion and forces causing that motion. The Lagrange-Euler formulation with the D-H representation was applied to formulate the differential system. The importance of the derivation of the kinematic model arises in the development of the control strategy. While the derivation of the dynamic model helps in real time simulation. The robot was enhanced by a CCD camera as a vision sensor to recognise red object as a target. Red object was to exemplify the matured oil palm FFB . The recognition process was achieved by using C++ programming language enhanced by MIL functions. An algorithm based on empirical results was developed in order to convert the target coordinates from the image plane (pixel) into the robot plane (cm). The image plane is two-dimensional while the robot plane is three-dimensional. Thus at least one coordinate of the target in the robot plane should be known. An Interface program has been developed using Visual Basics to control and simulate 2D motion of the manipulator