Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

UNMANNED GROUND VEHICLE (UGV) DOCKING, CONNECTION, AND CABLING FOR ELECTRICAL POWER TRANSMISSION IN AUTONOMOUS MOBILE MICROGRIDS

Autonomous Mobile Microgrids provide electrical power to loads in environments where humans either can not, or would prefer not to, perform the task of positioning and connecting the power grid equipment. The contributions of this work compose an architecture for electrical power transmission by Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). Purpose-specific UGV docking and cable deployment software algorithms, and hardware for electrical connection and cable management, has been deployed on Clearpath Husky robots. Software development leverages Robot Operating System (ROS) tools for navigation and rendezvous of the autonomous UGV robots, with task-specific visual feedback controllers for docking validated in Monte-Carlo outdoor trials with a 73% docking rate, and application to wireless power transmission demonstrated in an outdoor environment. An “Adjustable Cable Management Mechanism” (ACMM) was designed to meet low cost, compact-platform constraints for powered deployment and retraction by a UGV of electrical cable subject to disturbance, with feed rates up to 1 m/s. A probe-and-funnel AC/DC electrical connector system was de- veloped for deployment on UGVs, which does not substantially increase the cost or complexity of the UGV, while providing a repeatable and secure method of coupling electrical contacts subject to a docking miss-alignment of up to +/-2 cm laterally and +/-15 degrees axially. Cabled power transmission is accomplished by a feed-forward/feedback control method, which utilizes visual estimation of the cable state to deploy electrical cable without tension, in the obstacle-free track of the UGV as it transverses to connect power grid nodes. Cabling control response to step-input UGV chassis velocities in the forward, reverse, and zero-point-turn maneuvers are presented, as well as outdoor cable deployment. This power transmission capability is relevant to diverse domains including military Forward-Operating-Bases, disaster response, robotic persistent operation, underwater mining, or planetary exploration

Autonomous robot systems and competitions: proceedings of the 12th International Conference

This is the 2012’s edition of the scientific meeting of the Portuguese Robotics Open (ROBOTICA’ 2012). It aims to disseminate scientific contributions and to promote discussion of theories, methods and experiences in areas of relevance to Autonomous Robotics and Robotic Competitions. All accepted contributions are included in this proceedings book. The conference program has also included an invited talk by Dr.ir. Raymond H. Cuijpers, from the Department of Human Technology Interaction of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.The conference is kindly sponsored by the IEEE Portugal Section / IEEE RAS ChapterSPR-Sociedade Portuguesa de Robótic

Mitigating Electoral Discontents in Nigeria: A Case for SMS Enabled Vote-Casting System

Two decades into the 4th Republic has witnessed 6 elections fraught with varying kinds of anomalies that all 3 electoral reforms within the period have been unable to subdue. Electoral violence has summarily led to countless loss of lives and continued low voter turnout. Borrowing however from the resounding success of e-banking the country can rewardingly procure an e-resuscitation of the electoral sector that is not only guilty of consistent fraud but also liable for continued loss of lives. Nigeria ranked atop as the most improved country in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Mobile Connectivity Index as at 2019 and the seventh most improved globally. This progress was driven by a range of improvements like enabling regulatory framework espoused by the country in this direction and as a result the country now has one of the most affordable handset costs in the world besides a mobile penetration of 187 million active cell phone users of the country’s 212 million population as of 2021. In addition, up from 31% in 2014 to 52% in 2019, Nigeria’s Online Service Index score for e-government shows glaringly that the country is robustly ready for an SMS enabled vote casting system and would do well to rapidly implement same. SMS voting is premised on familiar technology and the use of a single ballot box (single computer Server) is not only fraud-proof but also guarantees eradication of violence and frequent loss of lives associated conventional vote-casting system while also improving political participation and voter turnout

Sandboxed navigation and deep inspection of suspicious links reported by Humans as a Security Sensor (HaaSS)

This thesis is part of a long-lasting research carried out in the field of Humans as a Security Sensor. In this thesis, I propose a solution to help companies to fight back against phishing, in particular, targeted and highly-contextualized attacks also known as "spare phishing". The thesis aims to develop a deep inspection module of individual emails submitted to the system by human sensors. As soon as a suspicious email has been flagged, it is passed to the deep inspection module that takes care of navigating every URL while collecting evidence and marks of malicious activities. The characteristic of this project is that it mimics the behavior of a real human user while navigating. It does not stop at the initial page, instead, it follows the redirects and collects page links to further inspect them afterward. My work focuses only on the automated navigation and deep inspection part and integrates it with an existing project that provides emails to analyze and manages the human sensor network. The idea is related to the concept of a human honeypot and provides a toolset that can help gather precious information to augment phishing user reports. We design a system that can navigate potentially malicious URLs as a human user would do. It opens links and browses through the webpages while collecting data, with the crucial difference that all the navigation is carried out fully automatically and in a protected environment isolated from the rest, so that any infection remains confined

Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics

A New Approach towards Non-holonomic Path Planning of Car-like Robots using Rapidly Random Tree Fixed Nodes(RRT*FN)

Autonomous car driving is gaining attention in industry and is also an ongoing research in scientific community. Assuming that the cars moving on the road are all autonomous, this thesis introduces an elegant approach to generate non-holonomic collision-free motion of a car connecting any two poses (configurations) set by the user. Particularly this thesis focusses research on "path-planning" of car-like robots in the presence of static obstacles. Path planning of car-like robots can be done using RRT and RRT*. Instead of generating the non-holonomic path between two sampled configurations in RRT, our approach finds a small incremental step towards the next random configuration. Since the incremental step can be in any direction we use RRT to guide the robot from start configuration to end configuration. This "easy-to-implement" mechanism provides flexibility for enabling standard plan- ners to solve for non-holonomic robots without much modifications. Thus, strength of such planners for car path planning can be easily realized. This thesis demon- strates this point by applying this mechanism for an effective variant of RRT called as RRT - Fixed Nodes (RRT*FN). Experiments are conducted by incorporating our mechanism into RRT*FN (termed as RRT*FN-NH) to show the effectiveness and quality of non-holonomic path gener- ated. The experiments are conducted for typical benchmark static environments and the results indicate that RRT*FN-NH is mostly finding the feasible non-holonomic solutions with a fixed number of nodes (satisfying memory requirements) at the cost of increased number of iterations in multiples of 10k. Thus, this thesis proves the applicability of mechanism for a highly constrained planner like RRT*-FN, where the path needs to be found with a fixed number of nodes. Although, comparing the algorithm (RRT*FN-NH) with other existing planners is not the focus of this thesis there are considerable advantages of the mechanism when applied to a planner. They are a) instantaneous non-holonomoic path generation using the strengths of that particular planner, b) ability to modify on-the-fly non-holomic paths, and c) simple to integrate with most of the existing planners. Moreover, applicability of this mechanism using RRT*-FN for non-holonomic path generation of a car is shown for a more realistic urban environments that have typical narrow curved roads. The experiments were done for actual road map obtained from google maps and the feasibility of non-holonomic path generation was shown for such environments. The typical number of iterations needed for finding such feasible solutions were also in multiple of 10k. Increasing speed profiles of the car was tested by limiting max speed and acceleration to see the effect on the number of iterations