Assessing the Impact of Sustainability Reporting on Organizational Processes and Outcomes : An Exploratory Case Study

The number of companies that have started disclosing their performance with respect to environmental, social and governance (ESG) themes has been growing rapidly in the last two decades. Sustainability reporting, considered as a valuable instrument for reducing the business world’s adverse impacts on the environment and society, has been the object of increasing regulation and standards. This thesis is aimed at advancing the present knowledge on the impacts of corporate sustainability reporting on organizational learning, growth and change, on the one hand, and the roles played by the different parts and features of the reporting process, on the other. This research makes use of a qualitative case study, performed on an established firm in the Italian local public transport industry. While experts and regulators emphasize the relevance of sustainability reporting in the transition of the business world toward more sustainable ways of being, consensus on the effects of reporting is lacking. The existing literature does not provide clear agreement for arguing for the potential of the practice. The findings of this study are twofold. Firstly, it finds that reporting can act as a catalyst for organizational learning, growth and change, while strengthening relationships with those stakeholders that demonstrate a high level of engagement. Because each of these processes in turn affects the strategic dimension, improvements in economic performance may well be an indirect, significant consequence. Secondly, this research draws attention to the relevance during the sustainability reporting process of an initial self-assessment of organizational identity, strategic priorities and resource allocation choices, as well as of measuring results and outcomes. Moreover, the significance of the materiality analysis’ insights is highlighted. Overall, this thesis provides novel insights to both academics and managers, highlighting that reporting has the potential to strongly influence organizations. Because of the increasing importance of the role it will play in a world that is quickly changing, it is suggested that future research further explores the impacts of sustainability reporting.nhhma

Al-Robotics team: A cooperative multi-unmanned aerial vehicle approach for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge

The Al-Robotics team was selected as one of the 25 finalist teams out of 143 applications received to participate in the first edition of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC), held in 2017. In particular, one of the competition Challenges offered us the opportunity to develop a cooperative approach with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) searching, picking up, and dropping static and moving objects. This paper presents the approach that our team Al-Robotics followed to address that Challenge 3 of the MBZIRC. First, we overview the overall architecture of the system, with the different modules involved. Second, we describe the procedure that we followed to design the aerial platforms, as well as all their onboard components. Then, we explain the techniques that we used to develop the software functionalities of the system. Finally, we discuss our experimental results and the lessons that we learned before and during the competition. The cooperative approach was validated with fully autonomous missions in experiments previous to the actual competition. We also analyze the results that we obtained during the competition trials.Unión Europea H2020 73166

Mapping beyond what you can see: Predicting the layout of rooms behind closed doors

The availability of maps of indoor environments is often fundamental for autonomous mobile robots to efficiently operate in industrial, office, and domestic applications. When robots build such maps, some areas of interest could be inaccessible, for instance, due to closed doors. As a consequence, these areas are not represented in the maps, possibly causing limitations in robot localization and navigation. In this paper, we provide a method that completes 2D grid maps by adding the predicted layout of the rooms behind closed doors. The main idea of our approach is to exploit the underlying geometrical structure of indoor environments to estimate the shape of unobserved rooms. Results show that our method is accurate in completing maps also when large portions of environments cannot be accessed by the robot during map building. We experimentally validate the quality of the completed maps by using them to perform path planning tasks.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved