Control-law for Oil Spill Mitigation with a team of Heterogeneous Autonomous Vehicles

Oil spill incidents in the sea or harbours occur with some regularity during exploration, production, and transport of petroleum products. In order to mitigate the impact of the oil spill in the marine life, immediate, safety, effective and eco-friendly actions must be taken. Autonomous vehicles can assume an important contribution by establishing a cooperative and coordinated intervention. This dissertation presents the development of two path planning control-laws, the first one an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) being able to contour the oil spill while s deploying microorganisms and nutrients (bioremediation) capable of mitigate and contain the oil spill spread, and the second one for a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in order to perform the coverage of the entire spillage area with the same microorganisms and nutrients deployment capabilities. In order to validate both methods, a simulation environment was developed in Gazebo with a oil spill scenario, an ASV and an UAV. Field tests have been conducted in the Leixões Harbour in Porto, Portugal.Incidentes relacionados com derrames de petróleo no oceano ou em portos ocorrem com alguma regularidade, durante a exploração, produção e transporte de petróleo e seus derivados. Para mitigar o impacto desses derramamentos na fauna e flora marinha de uma forma imediata, segura, efectiva e amiga do ambiente novas ações são necessárias. Veículos autónomos podem providenciar uma importante contribuição estabelecendo uma intervenção cooperativa e coordenada. Esta dissertação apresenta o desenvolvimento de dois algoritmos de controlo para o planeamento de trajectórias, a primeira para um veículo de superfície autónomo (ASV) ser capaz de contornar o perímetro do derrame enquanto distribui microorganismos e nutrientes (bio-remediação), capazes de mitigar e conter a propagação do derramamento de petróleo e a segunda para um veículo aéreo não-tripulado (UAV) ser capaz de cobrir todo a área de derrame enquanto distribui os mesmos microorganismos e nutrientes. De forma a validar ambos os métodos, um ambiente de simulação foi desenvolvido em Gazebo com cenário do derrame de petróleo, um ASV e um UAV. Testes de campo foram realizados no porto de Leixões, no Porto, Portugal

Man-Machine-Interface

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.The idea behind this project is to design a system that will optimize the existing process of operation for Jungheinrich Company. This will be achieved by developing a software that allows the user to control a forklift, or another kind of Auto-Pallet-Movers using a Human Machine Interface (HMI), and simultaneously, providing real time information for the user. A programming interface will be developed and other new technologies like Myo and Vuzix will be used in order to achieve this goal

Man-Machine-Interface

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.The idea behind this project is to design a system that will optimize the existing process of operation for Jungheinrich Company. This will be achieved by developing a software that allows the user to control a forklift, or another kind of Auto-Pallet-Movers using a Human Machine Interface (HMI), and simultaneously, providing real time information for the user. A programming interface will be developed and other new technologies like Myo and Vuzix will be used in order to achieve this goal

Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone

As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES: a data set on carnivore distribution in the Neotropics

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropical region: Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Otariidae; Phocidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae. Herein, we include published and unpublished data on native terrestrial Neotropical carnivores (Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae). NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES is a publicly available data set that includes 99,605 data entries from 35,511 unique georeferenced coordinates. Detection/non-detection and quantitative data were obtained from 1818 to 2018 by researchers, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private consultants. Data were collected using several methods including camera trapping, museum collections, roadkill, line transect, and opportunistic records. Literature (peer-reviewed and grey literature) from Portuguese, Spanish and English were incorporated in this compilation. Most of the data set consists of detection data entries (n = 79,343; 79.7%) but also includes non-detection data (n = 20,262; 20.3%). Of those, 43.3% also include count data (n = 43,151). The information available in NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES will contribute to macroecological, ecological, and conservation questions in multiple spatio-temporal perspectives. As carnivores play key roles in trophic interactions, a better understanding of their distribution and habitat requirements are essential to establish conservation management plans and safeguard the future ecological health of Neotropical ecosystems. Our data paper, combined with other large-scale data sets, has great potential to clarify species distribution and related ecological processes within the Neotropics. There are no copyright restrictions and no restriction for using data from this data paper, as long as the data paper is cited as the source of the information used. We also request that users inform us of how they intend to use the data

NEOTROPICAL ALIEN MAMMALS: a data set of occurrence and abundance of alien mammals in the Neotropics

Biological invasion is one of the main threats to native biodiversity. For a species to become invasive, it must be voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into a nonnative habitat. Mammals were among first taxa to be introduced worldwide for game, meat, and labor, yet the number of species introduced in the Neotropics remains unknown. In this data set, we make available occurrence and abundance data on mammal species that (1) transposed a geographical barrier and (2) were voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into the Neotropics. Our data set is composed of 73,738 historical and current georeferenced records on alien mammal species of which around 96% correspond to occurrence data on 77 species belonging to eight orders and 26 families. Data cover 26 continental countries in the Neotropics, ranging from Mexico and its frontier regions (southern Florida and coastal-central Florida in the southeast United States) to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay, and the 13 countries of Caribbean islands. Our data set also includes neotropical species (e.g., Callithrix sp., Myocastor coypus, Nasua nasua) considered alien in particular areas of Neotropics. The most numerous species in terms of records are from Bos sp. (n = 37,782), Sus scrofa (n = 6,730), and Canis familiaris (n = 10,084); 17 species were represented by only one record (e.g., Syncerus caffer, Cervus timorensis, Cervus unicolor, Canis latrans). Primates have the highest number of species in the data set (n = 20 species), partly because of uncertainties regarding taxonomic identification of the genera Callithrix, which includes the species Callithrix aurita, Callithrix flaviceps, Callithrix geoffroyi, Callithrix jacchus, Callithrix kuhlii, Callithrix penicillata, and their hybrids. This unique data set will be a valuable source of information on invasion risk assessments, biodiversity redistribution and conservation-related research. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this data paper when using the data in publications. We also request that researchers and teachers inform us on how they are using the data

Deep learning for plasma tomography using the bolometer system at JET

Deep learning is having a profound impact in many fields, especially those that involve some form of image processing. Deep neural networks excel in turning an input image into a set of high-level features. On the other hand, tomography deals with the inverse problem of recreating an image from a number of projections. In plasma diagnostics, tomography aims at reconstructing the cross-section of the plasma from radiation measurements. This reconstruction can be computed with neural networks. However, previous attempts have focused on learning a parametric model of the plasma profile. In this work, we use a deep neural network to produce a full, pixel-by-pixel reconstruction of the plasma profile. For this purpose, we use the overview bolometer system at JET, and we introduce an up-convolutional network that has been trained and tested on a large set of sample tomograms. We show that this network is able to reproduce existing reconstructions with a high level of accuracy, as measured by several metrics