Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

Simulation of a car-sharing transport system for urban mobility

An innovative car-sharing systems for urban areas is proposed. The proposed system is based on a fleet of Personal Intelligent City Accessible Vehicles (PICAVs). The following specific services are provided: instant access, open ended reservation and one way trips. All these features provide users with high flexibility, but create a problem of uneven distribution of vehicles among stations. Therefore, relocations must be performed. Different relocation procedures are proposed: in the first relocation scheme relocations are performed by users while in the other two vehicles relocate automatically thanks to their automation. In the first two management strategies vehicles can be accessed and returned only at stations while in the last one they can be accessed also along the roads. In order to provide transport managers with a useful tool to test the proposed systems in different realities, an object-oriented micro simulator has been developed. The simulation gives in output the transport system performance, in terms of distribution of user waiting times, and the transport system efficiency, which is inversely proportional to the fleet dimension and the number of relocation trips. A meta heuristic optimization algorithm has been developed to optimize the transport system’s characteristics. The optimization algorithm recalls the micro simulator to calculate the optimization’s input data. The micro simulator has been calibrated and validated, and afterwards applied to study two scenarios: Genoa historical city centre, Italy, and Barreiro old town, Portugal. Finally, a sensitivity analysis has been performed in order to study the performances of the system according to modifications of the demand, or of the fleet dimension or of the transport system characteristics

CITIES: Energetic Efficiency, Sustainability; Infrastructures, Energy and the Environment; Mobility and IoT; Governance and Citizenship

This book collects important contributions on smart cities. This book was created in collaboration with the ICSC-CITIES2020, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 2020. This book collects articles on: energetic efficiency and sustainability; infrastructures, energy and the environment; mobility and IoT; governance and citizenship

Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration