Indoor wireless communications and applications

Chapter 3 addresses challenges in radio link and system design in indoor scenarios. Given the fact that most human activities take place in indoor environments, the need for supporting ubiquitous indoor data connectivity and location/tracking service becomes even more important than in the previous decades. Specific technical challenges addressed in this section are(i), modelling complex indoor radio channels for effective antenna deployment, (ii), potential of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radios for supporting higher data rates, and (iii), feasible indoor localisation and tracking techniques, which are summarised in three dedicated sections of this chapter

Pick and Place Without Geometric Object Models

We propose a novel formulation of robotic pick and place as a deep reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Whereas most deep RL approaches to robotic manipulation frame the problem in terms of low level states and actions, we propose a more abstract formulation. In this formulation, actions are target reach poses for the hand and states are a history of such reaches. We show this approach can solve a challenging class of pick-place and regrasping problems where the exact geometry of the objects to be handled is unknown. The only information our method requires is: 1) the sensor perception available to the robot at test time; 2) prior knowledge of the general class of objects for which the system was trained. We evaluate our method using objects belonging to two different categories, mugs and bottles, both in simulation and on real hardware. Results show a major improvement relative to a shape primitives baseline

Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio