Diseño de un plan comercial para la Empresa Comisariato “Red Market” de la ciudad de Riobamba, provincia de Chimborazo, para el periodo 2016

Este proyecto de trabajo de titulación se desarrolla en el comisariato Red Market de la ciudad de Riobamba, dicha empresa se dedica a la comercialización de productos de primera necesidad para el hogar como: víveres, legumbres, lácteos, productos de aseo personal y de limpieza para el hogar vendiéndolos al por mayor y menor en su establecimiento. Se detectó que el problema principal del comisariato son las bajas ventas que obtiene debido a que no desarrolla actividades de promoción y publicidad para darse a conocer en la ciudad de Riobamba, por lo cual no logra tener una alta participación en el mercado local, añadido a esto a que no planifica actividades para generar mayor captación de clientes. Para dar solución a los problemas antes mencionados se propone un plan comercial para el comisariato Red Market, mismo que se ajuste a sus requerimientos actuales, en este plan se realizó un diagnostico situacional interno y externo, un análisis de las fuerzas de Porter, el direccionamiento estratégico del comisariato, marketing mix y así mismo se plantea los objetivos estratégicos del plan comercial. Con el plan comercial se busca dinamizar las actividades comerciales de Red Market, mejorando el proceso de ventas con una mejor calidad de servicio, se implantara actividades de publicidad y se establece políticas de precios para que todo esté definido y no se improvise ninguna actividad en el comisariato.The present degree work with the topic Design of a Commercial Plan for the commissariat Red Market of the city of Riobamba, province of Chimborazo, for the period 2016, Which is dedicated to the retail and Wholesale businesses for basic needs at home. It has as aim to offer a tool of comercial management that allows generating higher sales to the commissariat. For collecting data, surveys were made to the current and potencial customers, by means of which the likes ande preferences, main characteristics and relevant aspects that are considered important at the moment to decide in which place to go shopping, as well as a SWOT analysis allowed knowing its current situation. To desing the comercial plan, four stages were planned as follows: the first, the situational diagnosis stage; the second stage the estrategic direction; the third stage, commercialization strategies and the fourth stage, implementing and execution. All of these adapted to the requirements of the commissariat. With the implementing of the comercial plan will generate a bigger customer acquisition, counting with planned activities of advertisement, reaching a higher participation in the Market and increasing the sales. An important recommendation to mention is to make a correct implementing of the comercial plan, a tracking and control to evaluate the final outcomes and feedback for the coming periods

Combining a hierarchical task network planner with a constraint satisfaction solver for assembly operations involving routing problems in a multi-robot context

This work addresses the combination of a symbolic hierarchical task network planner and a constraint satisfaction solver for the vehicle routing problem in a multi-robot context for structure assembly operations. Each planner has its own problem domain and search space, and the article describes how both planners interact in a loop sharing information in order to improve the cost of the solutions. The vehicle routing problem solver gives an initial assignment of parts to robots, making the distribution based on the distance among parts and robots, trying also to maximize the parallelism of the future assembly operations evaluating during the process the dependencies among the parts assigned to each robot. Then, the hierarchical task network planner computes a scheduling for the given assignment and estimates the cost in terms of time spent on the structure assembly. This cost value is then given back to the vehicle routing problem solver as feedback to compute a better assignment, closing the loop and repeating again the whole process. This interaction scheme has been tested with different constraint satisfaction solvers for the vehicle routing problem. The article presents simulation results in a scenario with a team of aerial robots assembling a structure, comparing the results obtained with different configurations of the vehicle routing problem solver and showing the suitability of using this approach.Unión Europea ARCAS FP7-ICT-287617Unión Europea H2020-ICT-644271Unión europea H2020-ICT-73166

Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR

This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The resulting system combined well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure a 3D structure. Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios. One of the novelties of our system is that all the algorithms relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation. We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board the UAV in real-time. Our approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing better performance in regards to the amount of explored space. With the proposed approach, the UAV is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstaclesUnión Europea Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea MULTIDRONE (H2020-ICT-731667)Uniión Europea HYFLIERS (H2020-ICT-779411

Applying Frontier Cells Based Exploration and Lazy Theta* Path Planning over Single Grid-Based World Representation for Autonomous Inspection of Large 3D Structures with an UAS

Aerial robots are a promising platform to perform autonomous inspection of infrastructures. For this application, the world is a large and unknown space, requiring light data structures to store its representation while performing autonomous exploration and path planning for obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we combine frontier cells based exploration with the Lazy Theta* path planning algorithm over the same light sparse grid—the octree implementation of octomap. Test-driven development has been adopted for the software implementation and the subsequent automated testing process. These tests provided insight into the amount of iterations needed to generate a path with different voxel configurations. The results for synthetic and real datasets are analyzed having as baseline a regular grid with the same resolution as the maximum resolution of the octree. The number of iterations needed to find frontier cells for exploration was smaller in all cases by, at least, one order of magnitude. For the Lazy Theta* algorithm there was a reduction in the number of iterations needed to find the solution in 75% of the cases. These reductions can be explained both by the existent grouping of regions with the same status and by the ability to confine inspection to the known voxels of the octree.Unión Europea, Horizonte 2020, Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea, MULTIDRONE H2020-ICT-731667Unión Europea, AEROARMS H2020-ICT-64427

Coastal Areas Division and Coverage with Multiple UAVs for Remote Sensing

This paper tackles the problems of exact cell decomposition and partitioning of a coastal region for a team of heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with an approach that takes into account the field of view or sensing radius of the sensors on-board. An initial sensor-based exact celldecompositionoftheareaaidsinthepartitioningprocess,whichisperformedintwosteps. Inthe first step, a growing regions algorithm performs an isotropic partitioning of the area based on the initial locations of the UAVs and their relative capabilities. Then, two novel algorithms are applied to compute an adjustment of this partitioning process, in order to solve deadlock situations that generate non-allocated regions and sub-areas above or below the relative capabilities of the UAVs. Finally, realistic simulations have been conducted for the evaluation of the proposed solution, and the obtained results show that these algorithms can compute valid and sound solutions in complex coastal region scenarios under different setups for the UAVsMinisterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad DPI2014-C2-1-

Integration of a 4D-trajectory Follower to Improve Multi-UAV Conflict Management Within the U-Space Context

A safe integration of UAVs into the airspace is fundamental to unblock all the potential of drone applications. U-space is the drone traffic management solution for Europe, intended to handle a large number of drones into the airspace, especially at Very Low Level (VLL). This paper is focused on conflict management for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles in the context of the U-space under 4D trajectory based operations (4D-TBO). A novel method for multi-UAV conflict management at tactical level for large-scale scenarios is presented. The integration of 4D-TBO in this context has been implemented with a four dimensional trajectory follower based on the carrot chasing algorithm. This method minimizes, through the whole flight, the mean normal distance to the defined trajectory and the mean difference with respect to the defined arrival times. Finally, the integrated system has been implemented in a software in the loop environment with a commercial autopilot. The simulation results show better performance with respect to other classical approaches.Unión Europea, Horizonte 202 GAUSS (H2020-GALILEO-GSA-77629

Distributed approach for coverage and patrolling missions with a team of heterogeneous aerial robots under communication constraints

Using aerial robots in area coverage applications is an emerging topic. These applications need a coverage path planning algorithm and a coordinated patrolling plan. This paper proposes a distributed approach to coordinate a team of heterogeneous UAVs cooperating efficiently in patrolling missions around irregular areas, with low communication ranges and memory storage requirements. Hence it can be used with small‐scale UAVs with limited and different capabilities. The presented system uses a modular architecture and solves the problem by dividing the area between all the robots according to their capabilities. Each aerial robot performs a decomposition based algorithm to create covering paths and a ’one‐to‐one’ coordination strategy to decide the path segment to patrol. The system is decentralized and fault‐tolerant. It ensures a finite time to share information between all the robots and guarantees convergence to the desired steady state, based on the maximal minimum frequency criteria. A set of simulations with a team of quad‐rotors is used to validate the approach

Sinking of light intruders in a shaken granular bed

We present an experimental study of the displacement of a light intruder immersed in a vibrated granular bed. Using high speed video we resolve the motion, during one cycle of oscillation, of a cylindrical object inside a Plexiglas box partially filled with grains. We report experimental evidence that, in the absence of convection, at least two forces are behind the intruder’s motion: an air drag force—due to the airflow through the granular bed—and a buoyancy force produced by an air-mediated granular fluid

Closed-Loop Behavior of an Autonomous Helicopter Equipped with a Robotic Arm for Aerial Manipulation Tasks

This paper is devoted to the control of aerial robots interacting physically with objects in the environment and with other aerial robots. The paper presents a controller for the particular case of a small‐scaled autonomous helicopter equipped with a robotic arm for aerial manipulation. Two types of influences are imposed on the helicopter from a manipulator: coherent and non ‐ coherent influence. In the former case, the forces and torques imposed on the helicopter by the manipulator change with frequencies close to those of the helicopter movement. The paper shows that even small interaction forces imposed on the fuselage periodically in proper phase could yield to low frequency instabilities and oscillations, so called phase circle

An efficient distributed area division method for cooperative monitoring applications with multiple uavs

This article addresses the area division problem in a distributed manner providing a solution for cooperative monitoring missions with multiple UAVs. Starting from a sub-optimal area division, a distributed online algorithm is presented to accelerate the convergence of the system to the optimal solution, following a frequency-based approach. Based on the “coordination variables” concept and on a strict neighborhood relation to share information (left, right, above and below neighbors), this technique defines a distributed division protocol to determine coherently the size and shape of the sub-area assigned to each UAV. Theoretically, the convergence time of the proposed solution depends linearly on the number of UAVs. Validation results, comparing the proposed approach with other distributed techniques, are provided to evaluate and analyze its performance following a convergence time criterion.European Union’s Horizon 2020 AERIAL-CORE Project Grant 871479CDTI (sPAIN) “Red Cervera” Programme iMOV3D Spanish R&D projec