An overview on the obsolescence of physical assets for the defence facing the challenges of industry 4.0 and the new operating environments

Libro en Open AccessThis contribution is intended to observe special features presented in physical assets for defence. Particularly, the management of defence assets has to consider not only the reliability, availability, maintainability and other factors frequently used in asset management. On the contrary, such systems should also take into account their adaptation to changing operating environments as well as their capability to changes on the technological context. This study approaches to the current real situation where, due to the diversity of conflicts in our international context, the same type of defence systems must be able to provide services under different boundary conditions in different areas of the globe. At the same time, new concepts from the Industry 4.0 provide quick changes that should be considered along the life cycle of a defence asset. As a finding or consequence, these variations in operating conditions and in technology may accelerate asset degradation by modifying its reliability, its up-to-date status and, in general terms, its end-of-life estimation, depending of course on a diversity of factors. This accelerated deterioration of the asset is often known as “obsolescence” and its implications are often evaluated (when possible), in terms of costs from different natures. The originality of this contribution is the introduction of a discussion on how a proper analysis may help to reduce errors and mistakes in the decision-making process regarding the suitability or not of repairing, replacing, or modernizing the asset or system under study. In other words, the obsolescence analysis, from a reliability and technological point of view, could be used to determine the conservation or not of a specific asset fleet, in order to understand the effects of operational and technology factors variation over the functionality and life cycle cost of physical assets for defence

A Safe, Efficient and Integrated Indoor Robotic Fleet for Logistic Applications in Healthcare and Commercial Spaces: The ENDORSE Concept

International audienceHospitals are rightfully considered a field of indoor logistic robotics of high commercial potential. However, today, only a handful of mobile robotic solutions for hospital logistics exist that have failed to trigger widespread acceptance by the market. This is because existing systems require costly infrastructure installation, they do not easily integrate to corporate IT solutions, are not adequately shielded from cybersecurity threats, and as a result, they do not fully automate procedures and traceability of the items they carry. Moreover, existing systems are limited on scope, focusing only on delivery services, and hence do not provide any other type of support to the medical and nursing staff. ENDORSE system will address the aforementioned technical challenges and functional limitations by pursuing four innovation pillars: (i) infrastructure-less multi-robot indoor navigation; (ii) advanced Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) for resolving deadlocks and achieving efficient sharing of space resources in crowded environments; (iii) deployment of the ENDORSE software as a cloud-based service facilitating its integration with corporate software solutions, complying with GDPR data security requirements; (iv) reconfigurable and modular hardware architectures so that diverse modules can be easily swapped. ENDORSE functionality will be demonstrated via the integration of an e-diagnostic support module for vital signs monitoring on a fleet of mobile robots, facilitating connectivity to cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR), and validated in an operational hospital environment for realistic assessment

Voice-driven fleet management system for agricultural operations

Food consumption is constantly increasing at global scale. In this light, agricultural production also needs to increase in order to satisfy the relevant demand for agricultural products. However, due to by environmental and biological factors (e.g. soil compaction) the weight and size of the machinery cannot be further physically optimized. Thus, only marginal improvements are possible to increase equipment effectiveness. On the contrary, late technological advances in ICT provide the ground for significant improvements in agri-production efficiency. In this work, the V-Agrifleet tool is presented and demonstrated. V-Agrifleet is developed to provide a “hands-free” interface for information exchange and an “Olympic view” to all coordinated users, giving them the ability for decentralized decision-making. The proposed tool can be used by the end-users (e.g. farmers, contractors, farm associations, agri-products storage and processing facilities, etc.) order to optimize task and time management. The visualized documentation of the fleet performance provides valuable information for the evaluation management level giving the opportunity for improvements in the planning of next operations. Its vendor-independent architecture, voice-driven interaction, context awareness functionalities and operation planning support constitute V-Agrifleet application a highly innovative agricultural machinery operational aiding system

Digitisation of agriculture: technological developments and perspectives. TAB-Fokus

Several innovative agricultural technologies that are based essentially on digital data processing are already ready for practical application or at an advanced stage of development. These technologies include satellite-controlled agricultural machinery, sensor technologies and application techniques with variable dosing of fertilisers and plant protection products, or robots for milking, feeding and manure removal processes. Digital stand-alone applications of this kind collect large amounts of process data, thus forming the basis for a far-reaching digitisation of agricultural production. Further progress made in digital agricultural technologies might involve fundamental changes in agricultural processes, as can be expected, for example, in the field of arable farming with certain robotic concepts. By means of digitisation, the complex agricultural business processes, which are influenced by many imponderable factors, are to be made both more efficient and more sustainable. As a consequence, environmental impacts are to be mitigated. At the same time, digital agricultural technologies alone appear to be not sufficient, or in some cases not suitable, to address some major environmental and animal welfare issues in agricultural production

Analyzing the Current Market of Hull Cleaning Robots

This project is intended to provide a market assessment of the emerging industry of hull cleaning robots to help the United States Coast Guard with their mission of reducing the spread of non-indigenous marine species. We researched the feasibility of these technologies that stakeholders need to be aware of, including the regulations and state of the market. The project resulted in a comprehensive list of every hull cleaner that we were able to identify and their functionality along with design parameters

Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US Space Program

The United States' civil space program was rather hurriedly formulated some three decades ago on the heels of the successful launch of the Soviet Sputnik. A dozen humans have been placed on the Moon and safely returned to Earth, seven of the other eight planets have been viewed at close range, including the soft landing of two robot spacecraft on Mars, and a variety of significant astronomical and other scientific observations have been accomplished. Closer to Earth, a network of communications satellites has been established, weather and ocean conditions are now monitored and reported as they occur, and the Earth's surface is observed from space to study natural resources and detect sources of pollution. Problems and perspectives of the program are given as seen by the committee. The committee finds that there are nine concerns about the space program which are deserving of attention. The responsibilities of the agency are given. The space agenda becomes one of what can and should the U.S. afford for its space program. Also given is a concept of what the committee believes is a balanced space program. The programs international role is defined and some final observations and recommendations are made

An architecture for adaptive task planning in support of IoT-based machine learning applications for disaster scenarios

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) in conjunction with edge computing has recently opened up several possibilities for several new applications. Typical examples are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) that are deployed for rapid disaster response, photogrammetry, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. To support the flourishing development of Machine Learning assisted applications across all these networked applications, a common challenge is the provision of a persistent service, i.e., a service capable of consistently maintaining a high level of performance, facing possible failures. To address these service resilient challenges, we propose APRON, an edge solution for distributed and adaptive task planning management in a network of IoT devices, e.g., drones. Exploiting Jackson's network model, our architecture applies a novel planning strategy to better support control and monitoring operations while the states of the network evolve. To demonstrate the functionalities of our architecture, we also implemented a deep-learning based audio-recognition application using the APRON NorthBound interface, to detect human voices in challenged networks. The application's logic uses Transfer Learning to improve the audio classification accuracy and the runtime of the UAV-based rescue operations

Perception is Everything: Repairing the Image of American Drone Warfare

This thesis will trace the United States’ development of unmanned warfare from its initial use in the World Wars through the Cold War to its final maturation in the War on Terror. The examination will provide a summary of unmanned warfare’s history, its gradual adoption, and concerns regarding the proliferation of drones use to understand the emphasis on unmanned weapons in the American Military. In each phase of development, a single program will be focused on to highlight special areas of interest in the modern day. Finally, the modern era of unmanned systems will focus on the growing integration of new weapon systems which no longer fulfill niche roles in the armory but act as fully vetted frontline combatants. Brought together, this examination will show drones have earned their place as integral tools in the American military inventory as faithful defenders of democracy

PVCROV : an experimental platform for multi-robot control systems

As the field of multi-robot control systems grows, the demand for flexible, robust and precise multi-robot testbeds increases. Up to this point, the testbeds that do exist for testing multi-robot controllers are often expensive, hard to deploy, and typically constrained to a single plane of motion. These constraints limit the capacity to conduct research which is why team Autonomously Controlled Electromechanical Systems (ACES) has created the PVCROV system. PVCROV is a low cost, underwater platform for testing multi-robot control systems. By utilizing an underwater environment, ACES created a testbed that is not constrained to a single plane of motion. Additionally, the advantage of an underwater testbed is the ability to simulate weightlessness, as if in a space environment. Both of these features make this testbed extremely valuable to multi-robot research as they open the door for conducting experiments that previously could not be performed. ACES final product consisted of four PVCROV\u27s tethered to a surface buoy with wireless command and control via an \u27onshore\u27 control computer. Each system was designed, simulated, manufactured and tested based on requirements developed from a customer needs survey performed with the targeted research team. Although complete functionality was not achieved, a new team of students has started a new iteration of the development process which will bring the system up to full functionality. With graduate student experimenters already involved, ACES has created a testbed that will provide great value to the robotics research program at SCU