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

Evaluation of the potential for automation and robot technology, with focus on condition monitoring on static systems for topside offshore facilities.

Master's thesis in Offshore technologyDigitalization has become one of the most important development areas across industries and work processes. We know that this also has high focus in the oil industry today. Therefore, my contribution would be to try to see where the oil and gas industry is today, the trends and what are the potential moving forward. Automation and use of robot technology has developed very rapidly the last years. Technology trends indicates large potential for automated systems in maintenance and condition monitoring. We see that this technology is implemented to a large extent in other industries. The drivers for the oil and gas industry has historically been based on improved safety. We see now a potential for both cost avoidance, reduced downtime and less impact on the environment Maintenance and inspection is a large cost for the oil industry. In addition, these processes often cause shut down of the facilities. Condition monitoring and maintenance is based on the actual status of equipment and systems. Today’s technology makes it possible. In addition, robot technology has a potential for improving safety and reduce cost and downtime by avoiding human interactions. The oil and gas industry has not been a front runner compared to other industries. The conservatism driven by safety and reliability requirements might be one reason to this. At the same time, we see a growing interest and a lot of initiatives and developments. I have chosen to study topside static systems on offshore platforms. This to be able to narrow down the study. But in general, the descriptions, analysis and discussions may also be relevant for other systems

How might we provide mental health support for international students at UNIST with the usage of digital technologies

Department of Creative Design EngineeringWith the current increase of interest in mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, there has been investments and researches around the globe. However, there is very little focus towards a minority of international students and even less work on the design field for them. This thesis aims to provide mental health support solutions with the students on the role of decision-makers and put the designer on the role of facilitator at the South Korean university environment. Thus, we were able to provide empowerment to users with the user-centered design methodologies and design thinking. Combining these methods with a design sprint to further tailor down and bring meaningful solutions we were able to discover guidelines towards designing for international students mental health based on the following needs: trust, staff limitations, information, awareness, and perception. Based on our empirical studies we were able to conduct a design sprint with six students from UNIST and found out that the solutions provided by them mostly fall into four different categories: social fabric, advising and supporting, information and guidance with digital solutions, and improvement of wellbeing or quality of life. With the aim to tackle those needs we decided to continue the research with a temporary solution based on a chatbot. On this digital application, users would be able to do screenings and check on their mental health status and, provided with their scores, be able to see other students result in the form of an average score and their own progress on that screening score, creating a reliable resource for future encounters with health care professionals. In the end, we are able to provide a different point of view on a rising field of interest for technology and data use with guidelines that can help design and how we believe tackling them can be done with a digital solution.ope

Marine Vessel Inspection as a Novel Field for Service Robotics: A Contribution to Systems, Control Methods and Semantic Perception Algorithms.

This cumulative thesis introduces a novel field for service robotics: the inspection of marine vessels using mobile inspection robots. In this thesis, three scientific contributions are provided and experimentally verified in the field of marine inspection, but are not limited to this type of application. The inspection scenario is merely a golden thread to combine the cumulative scientific results presented in this thesis. The first contribution is an adaptive, proprioceptive control approach for hybrid leg-wheel robots, such as the robot ASGUARD described in this thesis. The robot is able to deal with rough terrain and stairs, due to the control concept introduced in this thesis. The proposed system is a suitable platform to move inside the cargo holds of bulk carriers and to deliver visual data from inside the hold. Additionally, the proposed system also has stair climbing abilities, allowing the system to move between different decks. The robot adapts its gait pattern dynamically based on proprioceptive data received from the joint motors and based on the pitch and tilt angle of the robot's body during locomotion. The second major contribution of the thesis is an independent ship inspection system, consisting of a magnetic wall climbing robot for bulkhead inspection, a particle filter based localization method, and a spatial content management system (SCMS) for spatial inspection data representation and organization. The system described in this work was evaluated in several laboratory experiments and field trials on two different marine vessels in close collaboration with ship surveyors. The third scientific contribution of the thesis is a novel approach to structural classification using semantic perception approaches. By these methods, a structured environment can be semantically annotated, based on the spatial relationships between spatial entities and spatial features. This method was verified in the domain of indoor perception (logistics and household environment), for soil sample classification, and for the classification of the structural parts of a marine vessel. The proposed method allows the description of the structural parts of a cargo hold in order to localize the inspection robot or any detected damage. The algorithms proposed in this thesis are based on unorganized 3D point clouds, generated by a LIDAR within a ship's cargo hold. Two different semantic perception methods are proposed in this thesis. One approach is based on probabilistic constraint networks; the second approach is based on Fuzzy Description Logic and spatial reasoning using a spatial ontology about the environment

Generations and Game Localization

An interview with Alexander O. Smith, Steve Anderson and Matthew Alt