The Benefits and Challenges of Automation in the Modular Construction Industry

Modular construction combined with automation technology such as robotics presents benefits and challenges associated with it. Modular construction takes on the traditional building methods and has streamlined the production of modules making it safer, efficient, and productive. Along with innovation and cutting-edge technology such as automation, it offers an alternative building method to the modular construction industry that enhances productivity, worker safety, and efficiency. This research presents an investigation on factors that may be benefited from the adoption of automation but also addresses the challenges in modular construction. Qualitative interviews with designers and consultants in the modular industry were conducted to gain an understanding on how they are utilizing the technology of robotics and automation to combat the construction industry\u27s shortcomings. The main benefits and challenges are grouped and ranked in order of importance: Capital-Investment and maturity, Operational and Work-Culture Requirements, Labor shortage, Safety and Productivity, and Affordable housing. This study will help industry leaders and stakeholders arrive at a general sense of the essence of automation and modular construction, while the research community will get a grasp of the embracement for automation

Leukocyte Ig-Like Receptors – a model for MHC class I disease associations

MHC class I (MHC-I) polymorphisms are associated with the outcome of some viral infections and autoimmune diseases. MHC-I proteins present antigenic peptides and are recognized by receptors on natural killer cells and cytotoxic T lymphocytes, thus enabling the immune system to detect self-antigens and eliminate targets lacking self or expressing foreign antigens. Recognition of MHC-I, however, extends beyond receptors on cytotoxic leukocytes. Members of the leukocyte Ig-like receptor (LILR) family are expressed on monocytic cells and can recognize both classical and non-classical MHC-I alleles. Despite their relatively broad specificity when compared to the T cell receptor or killer Ig-like receptors, variations in the strength of LILR binding between different MHC-I alleles have recently been shown to correlate with control of HIV infection. We suggest that LILR recognition may mediate MHC-I disease association in a manner that does not depend on a binary discrimination of self/non-self by cytotoxic cells. Instead, the effects of LILR activity following engagement by MHC-I may represent a “degrees of self” model, whereby strength of binding to different alleles determines the degree of influence exerted by these receptors on immune cell functions. LILRs are expressed by myelomonocytic cells and lymphocytes, extending their influence across antigen-presenting cell subsets including dendritic cells, macrophages, and B cells. They have been identified as important players in the response to infection, inflammatory diseases, and cancer, with recent literature to indicate that MHC-I recognition by these receptors and consequent allelic effects could extend an influence beyond the immune system

Towards Informing an Intuitive Mission Planning Interface for Autonomous Multi-Asset Teams via Image Descriptions

Establishing a basis for certification of autonomous systems using trust and trustworthiness is the focus of Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability (ATTRACTOR). The Human-Machine Interface (HMI) team is working to capture and utilize the multitude of ways in which humans are already comfortable communicating mission goals and translate that into an intuitive mission planning interface. Several input/output modalities (speech/audio, typing/text, touch, and gesture) are being considered and investigated in the context human-machine teaming for the ATTRACTOR design reference mission (DRM) of Search and Rescue or (more generally) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The first of these investigations, the Human Informed Natural-language GANs Evaluation (HINGE) data collection effort, is aimed at building an image description database to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In addition to building an image description database, the HMI team was interested if, and how, modality (spoken vs. written) affects different aspects of the image description given. The results will be analyzed to better inform the designing of an interface for mission planning

Comparison of two efficient methods for calculating partition functions

In the long-time pursuit of the solution to calculate the partition function (or free energy) of condensed matter, Monte-Carlo-based nested sampling should be the state-of-the-art method, and very recently, we established a direct integral approach that works at least four orders faster. In present work, the above two methods were applied to solid argon at temperatures up to $300$K, and the derived internal energy and pressure were compared with the molecular dynamics simulation as well as experimental measurements, showing that the calculation precision of our approach is about 10 times higher than that of the nested sampling method.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Spontaneous radiative decay of translational levels of an atom near a dielectric surface

We study spontaneous radiative decay of translational levels of an atom in the vicinity of a semi-infinite dielectric. We systematically derive the microscopic dynamical equations for the spontaneous decay process. We calculate analytically and numerically the radiative linewidths and the spontaneous transition rates for the translational levels. The roles of the interference between the emitted and reflected fields and of the transmission into the evanescent modes are clearly identified. Our numerical calculations for the silica--cesium interaction show that the radiative linewidths of the bound excited levels with large enough but not too large vibrational quantum numbers are moderately enhanced by the emission into the evanescent modes and those for the deep bound levels are substantially reduced by the surface-induced red shift of the transition frequency

The SIMPSONS project: An integrated Mars transportation system

In response to the Request for Proposal (RFP) for an integrated transportation system network for an advanced Martian base, Frontier Transportation Systems (FTS) presents the results of the SIMPSONS project (Systems Integration for Mars Planetary Surface Operations Networks). The following topics are included: the project background, vehicle design, future work, conclusions, management status, and cost breakdown. The project focuses solely on the surface-to-surface transportation at an advanced Martian base

Examination of the ocean as a source for atmospheric microplastics

Global plastic litter pollution has been increasing alongside demand since plastic products gained commercial popularity in the 1930’s. Current plastic pollutant research has generally assumed that once plastics enter the ocean they are there to stay, retained permanently within the ocean currents, biota or sediment until eventual deposition on the sea floor or become washed up onto the beach. In contrast to this, we suggest it appears that some plastic particles could be leaving the sea and entering the atmosphere along with sea salt, bacteria, virus’ and algae. This occurs via the process of bubble burst ejection and wave action, for example from strong wind or sea state turbulence. In this manuscript we review evidence from the existing literature which is relevant to this theory and follow this with a pilot study which analyses microplastics (MP) in sea spray. Here we show first evidence of MP particles, analysed by μRaman, in marine boundary layer air samples on the French Atlantic coast during both onshore (average of 2.9MP/m3) and offshore (average of 9.6MP/m3) winds. Notably, during sampling, the convergence of sea breeze meant our samples were dominated by sea spray, increasing our capacity to sample MPs if they were released from the sea. Our results indicate a potential for MPs to be released from the marine environment into the atmosphere by sea-spray giving a globally extrapolated figure of 136000 ton/yr blowing on shore

On the master equation approach to diffusive grain-surface chemistry: the H, O, CO system

We have used the master equation approach to study a moderately complex network of diffusive reactions occurring on the surfaces of interstellar dust particles. This network is meant to apply to dense clouds in which a large portion of the gas-phase carbon has already been converted to carbon monoxide. Hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, and CO molecules are allowed to accrete onto dust particles and their chemistry is followed. The stable molecules produced are oxygen, hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide (CO2), formaldehyde (H2CO), and methanol (CH3OH). The surface abundances calculated via the master equation approach are in good agreement with those obtained via a Monte Carlo method but can differ considerably from those obtained with standard rate equations.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Liveness-Driven Random Program Generation

Randomly generated programs are popular for testing compilers and program analysis tools, with hundreds of bugs in real-world C compilers found by random testing. However, existing random program generators may generate large amounts of dead code (computations whose result is never used). This leaves relatively little code to exercise a target compiler's more complex optimizations. To address this shortcoming, we introduce liveness-driven random program generation. In this approach the random program is constructed bottom-up, guided by a simultaneous structural data-flow analysis to ensure that the generator never generates dead code. The algorithm is implemented as a plugin for the Frama-C framework. We evaluate it in comparison to Csmith, the standard random C program generator. Our tool generates programs that compile to more machine code with a more complex instruction mix.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854