Power Tillers and Snails for Demining in Sri Lanka

This paper presents a project the author has been working on since January 2005 in the context of her doctoral research and offers some of the first results. The topic concerns the participatory design and development of a distributed system for humanitarian-demining operations in Sri Lanka. The completed research is expected to encompass the relationship among landmines, humanitarian technologies and development. This article looks at the adaptation of power tillers for demining applications in Sri Lanka using a participatory design methodology called the Snail System

Land Release in Action

As part of the EU-funded TIRAMISU project, the author conducted a comprehensive survey of land release procedures in six countries during 2012. The results show that expectations of technical survey machines should be defined and standardized through tests and evaluations

Billy Goat Radio: MRE in Sahrawi Refugee Camps

Billy Goat Radio, a mine-risk education tool, enables local operators to easily write and produce short educational serial dramas, which can be radio broadcast and performed live for mine-affected communities. A pilot project using Billy Goat Radio was fielded in Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest Algeria in late 2013

Could Local Agricultural Machines Make a Country ‘Impact Free’ by 2010?

Many countries affected by landmines are also facing food crises, underscoring the necessity of cost-effective mine removal. Converting agricultural machines already available in many mine-affected countries for use on mine-action projects saves not only time but also money by speeding up the removal process and turning the land back into an agricultural resource

Toward LOCOSTRA: Blast-resistant Wheels Test

Technical Survey, often an efficient method of achieving land release, can also be prohibitively expensive for certain communities due to the utilization of the same hulking, heavily-armored machines used in clearance operations. If Technical Survey could be achieved through the use of less expensive agricultural equipment that is already present in communities near suspected areas, land release could be achieved at a much lower price. The following study explores this possibility by examining the explosion resilience of four different designs of blast-resistant tractor wheels, each made of commercial off-the-shelf components and designed for easy reproduction in mine-affected communities

Design Issues and in Field Tests of the New Sustainable Tractor LOCOSTRA

first, in Italy, focusing on the agricultural application of the machine, in natural scenarios with different ground and vegetatio

A novel strategy for balancing the workload of industrial lines based on a genetic algorithm

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksOne major problem in industrial automation is the workload balancing problem. It consists of making the robots or, more generally, the machines, involved in the assembly process to work exactly the same, either by picking and placing the same number of pieces or by having the same number of operational cycles. This paper presents a novel strategy for solving such a problem by means of an evolutionary algorithm. The specific application of this strategy is to balance the workload of a pick-and-place process developed in the facilities of the industrial company Fameccanica Spa Data within the framework of an industrial project between the company and our research group. The novelties concerning the state-of-the-art contributions are: (1) instead of using an explicit fitness function, the candidate solutions at each iteration are evaluated by using a simulation of the entire process; (2) the parameters optimized are the velocity and acceleration of the robots involved in the line and (3) the strategy includes an algorithm for distributing the workload between the robots during the process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft