Lessons learned from studying public initiatives to support energy efficiency finance in Thailand from 1992 to 2014

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Despite the huge technical and market potential for cost-effective energy efficiency investments in Southeast Asian markets, only a small fraction of this potential has been realised. Given that the major share of global future energy demand, and associated greenhouse gas emissions, will come from emerging economies, it is important to understand the barriers to mainstreaming energy efficiency into the financial sector. This paper focuses on public initiatives that support one of the main barriers: access to capital. The researchers chose Thailand as a case study because of the range of energy efficiency finance programmes that have been designed and implemented since the early 1990s. Interviews with 21 experts from government, the private sector and academia provided the core data for this research. The analysis employed a multi-level perspective and focused on the historical evolution of public support of energy efficiency finance in the country. We identified three distinct phases of public policy development over the past two decades. Despite an impressive variety of ambitious and creative programmes, the initiatives have not yet succeeded in integrating energy efficiency into the financial sector in a meaningful way. Some of the key lessons found are that (a) it is better to treat energy efficiency and renewable energy in separate financing initiatives, (b) governments find it challenging to design effective mechanisms to de-risk financial investments, and (c) international organisations play an important role in testing and facilitating the introduction of new financing approaches and mechanisms. In emerging economies, cost-effective implementation of energy efficiency measures is a promising alternative that can reduce the need for investment in large-scale power generation capacity. The researchers hope that this paper will contribute to more effective design of programmes to incentivise energy efficiency financing in Thailand and in other economies in Southeast Asia

Factors affecting 3D reconstruction of micro aerial vehicles

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have created a great impact in robotics research particularly in aerial robotics. Different studies have been done incorporating either single or mutliple quadrotors in their work. Typically, studies with single quadrotor uses onboard computing, contains high powered sensors like Laser Range Finders (LRF), and often are big. In the contrary, smaller quadrotors doesn\u27t have the capacity to do those though it can handle low powered sensors and devices. With these limits, the study sought for the possibility of applying collaborative mapping in the 3D reconstruction by analyzing the factors affecting it such as number of quadrotors, varying height, and formations. Here, we have found that the number of points, the Mean Reprojection Error (MRE), and the number of observations changes significantly depending on the type of formation used. © 2019 IEEE

Aerodynamics, sensing and control of insect-scale flapping-wing flight

There are nearly a million known species of flying insects and 13 000 species of flying warm-blooded vertebrates, including mammals, birds and bats. While in flight, their wings not only move forward relative to the air, they also flap up and down, plunge and sweep, so that both lift and thrust can be generated and balanced, accommodate uncertain surrounding environment, with superior flight stability and dynamics with highly varied speeds and missions. As the size of a flyer is reduced, the wing-to-body mass ratio tends to decrease as well. Furthermore, these flyers use integrated system consisting of wings to generate aerodynamic forces, muscles to move the wings, and sensing and control systems to guide and manoeuvre. In this article, recent advances in insect-scale flapping-wing aerodynamics, flexible wing structures, unsteady flight environment, sensing, stability and control are reviewed with perspective offered. In particular, the special features of the low Reynolds number flyers associated with small sizes, thin and light structures, slow flight with comparable wind gust speeds, bioinspired fabrication of wing structures, neuron-based sensing and adaptive control are highlighted

Using a MEMS gyroscope to stabilize the attitude of a fly-sized hovering robot

Creating an autonomous flying vehicle the size of a honeybee presents a number of technical challenges because of its small scale. As vehicle wingspan diminishes, angular acceleration rates increase, necessitating sensing and control systems with high bandwidth. Hovering demonstrations have so far required feedback from highspeed motion capture cameras to estimate the angular velocity, attitude, and position of the vehicle to provide the continuous corrective feedback necessary to avoid tumbling. To achieve autonomous flight, it will be necessary to incorporate a suite of sensors carried onboard. Here we present a step in this direction by integrating a MEMS gyroscope onto an 80 mg flapping-wing micro air vehicle to provide attitude feedback in flight. This enables 2\u965 s hovering flights in which the motion capture system provides only position feedback. Our vehicle, and likely others in the future of similar scale, is propelled by flapping wings that generate vibration. Our results indicate that the resulting accelerations, measured as high as 5 g by the sensor\u92s accelerometer, significantly distort readings from the accelerometer but not the gyroscope

Formation-based 3D mapping of micro aerial vehicles

Micro Aerial Vehicles have brought tremendous interests to the research community, particularly in localization and mapping. While there are many commercially available sensors, such as Laser Range Finders (LRF) and RGBD cameras, that provide accurate 3D maps, they usually have significant power and payload requirements. This means, small flying robots are unable to handle such sensors. This study explores the possibility of collaborative mapping using formations from multiple simple cameras to obtain an accurate map similar to that of the LRF and RGBD cameras. By using multiple small robots and integrating them as one, we have created a platform for 3D reconstruction in which formations can be incorporated. Thus, the proposed method can be used with a low-cost system for surveying, disaster management, and surveillance in the future. © 2019 IEEE