Material ecology

The world of design has been dominated since the Industrial Revolution by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of standard parts framing the imagination of designers and builders who have been taught to think about their design objects and systems in terms of assemblies of parts with distinct functions. The assumption that parts are made of single material and fulfill predetermined specific functions is deeply rooted in design and usually goes unquestioned; it is also enforced by the way that industrial supply chains work. These age-old design paradigms have been reincarnated in Computer-aided Design (CAD) tools as well as Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM) technologies where homogeneous materials are formed into pre-defined shapes at the service of pre-determined functions

Robotic Integral Attachment

Integral joints provide a rapid, simple and mechanically strong connection between parts. Our investigation focuses on the assembly of cross-laminated wood veneer plates, where previous studies have shown that the strength of through-tenons is equivalent or superior to state-of-the-art fasteners such as screws or nails. This mechanical behaviour is highly dependent on a precise fit of the joints, where no gaps are left between the parts. However, the manual assembly of such tight-fitting joints can be complicated. Thanks to its rectangular cross-section, a single through-tenon joint is a sufficient assembly guide for an entire plate, but multiple through-tenons are required to establish a mechanically strong connection

Robotic Assembly Processes as a Driver in Architectural Design

ISSN:1522-4600ISSN:1590-589

SDR Technology Applied to Galileo Receivers

It has been worldwide recognized that under the push of the research activity related to Galileo and to the future GPS (Global Positioning System), the satellite navigation market is growing in importance for different civil applications. In order to deal with future developments and improvements of GNSS, advanced receiver architectures providing the enhanced performances will be needed. For these reasons, it is interesting to devise smart approaches to the design of navigation receivers assuring a certain degree of reconfigurability and portability in order to deal with new GNSS scenarios (e.g., integration between navigation and communication services). In this paper we discuss a receiver architecture based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) technique. The main peculiarity of SDR is to allow for developing of flexible devices in which the receiver functionalities are softwareimplemented in a modular architecture. The present technology does not allow a totally software receiver, but the development of fast and reliable electronics make the SDR approach an interesting perspective. Note that great attention has been devoted to the applicability of SDR techniques in order to design reconfigurable personal communication terminals, leaving unexplored the potentialities of SDR for other terminals as navigation receiver, or integrated hybrid communications/navigation receivers. The main objective of this work is to explore innovative approaches and new technologies in the area of satellite navigation receivers that will allow satisfying the needs and the constraints of future application, presenting the main advantages given by the availability of a SDR navigation terminal. As example, the possibility to design an efficient M-code receiver (based on Binary Offset Carrier modulation - BOC) has been analyzed: on the basis of the Galileo SIS definition (Signal-In-Space), the SDR approach can be used in order to implement a modular structure compliant with an open system architecture concept, based upon high sampling rate Analog to Digital Converters (A/D), reconfigurable hardware (Field Programmable Gate Array - FPGA) and high speed Digital Signal Processors (DSP