Robot agnostic interface for industrial aplications

The quick evolution of robotic arms has generated many manufacturers of robotic arms, such as Universal Robots, ABB, or Fanuc. Each manufacturer offers a unique interface to program and control their robots. This can limit companies choices when selecting a suitable robot for their industrial operations, as they will choose an interface that doesn’t require new training. For that reason, and based on the experience at UPC CIM, this project will focus on creating a common interface for robotic arms. The main objectives are to produce an interface to simulate robots from different manu- facturers, save and load data, and create a simple scripting language. By using ROS, an open-source software infrastructure to communicate between different robotic elements, and Python, the code will be created in five different modules: the launch application, obtaining information about the robot, editing files, moving the robot, and scripting actions. To test the resulting interface, first a setup sequence is performed to see the limitations of the interaction. Then, three theoretical scenarios are proposed, and a scripting sequence is created for each one: Pick and Place, Sorting, and Bin Picking. While limited in some aspects, the application performs as expected and offers the basic options to solve many robot implementations. New options for the future of robot in- teraction are open with this project, as people could also further develop this program if considered

Robot agnostic interface for industrial aplications

The quick evolution of robotic arms has generated many manufacturers of robotic arms, such as Universal Robots, ABB, or Fanuc. Each manufacturer offers a unique interface to program and control their robots. This can limit companies choices when selecting a suitable robot for their industrial operations, as they will choose an interface that doesn’t require new training. For that reason, and based on the experience at UPC CIM, this project will focus on creating a common interface for robotic arms. The main objectives are to produce an interface to simulate robots from different manufacturers, save and load data, and create a simple scripting language. By using ROS, an open-source software infrastructure to communicate between different robotic elements, and Python, the code will be created in five different modules: the launch application, obtaining information about the robot, editing files, moving the robot, and scripting actions. To test the resulting interface, first a setup sequence is performed to see the limitations of the interaction. Then, three theoretical scenarios are proposed, and a scripting sequence is created for each one: Pick and Place, Sorting, and Bin Picking. While limited in some aspects, the application performs as expected and offers the basic options to solve many robot implementations. New options for the future of robot interaction are open with this project, as people could also further develop this program if considere

Impacts of climate change in tourism in Europe. PESETA-Tourism study

This document contains the results of the physical impact assessment for tourism within the context of the PESETA project. Tourism is a multi-billion euro industry that is highly dependent on climate resources. Climate change may provoke shifts in tourist flows, with large economic implications. The report details the methodology applied and data used for the physical impact assessment for light outdoor activities and for winter sports. For the first category, the focus is on thermal conditions, for the second category on the availability of snow. The assessment shows that climate change is projected to have significant impacts on the physical resources supporting tourism in Europe. In the mountainous regions, snow reliability is very likely to decrease further, putting ski resorts at lower altitudes at risk. In summer, southern Europe will experience climatic conditions that are less favorable to tourism than the current climate. At the same time, countries in the North, which are the countries of origin of many of the current visitors of the Mediterranean, will enjoy better conditions in summer, as well as a longer season with good weather. In particular in southern Europe, the worsening situation resulting from deteriorating thermal conditions is further aggravated by increasing water shortages. Peak demand from tourism coincides with peak demand from agriculture, residential areas, the energy sector and nature. It also coincides with the summer dip in water supply, which will very likely be deepened by climate change.JRC.DG.J.2-The economics of climate change, energy and transpor

Machine learning for the selection of post-merger executive´s compensation

This paper analyzes the use of a neural network to assign the total compensation an executive should have during post-merger integration by considering firm performance, firm size, similarity in major industry groups of the merger firms and executive age. The prediction model found that female executives are being underpaid on average by 24% whereas male executives are being overpaid by 22%. Furthermore, the major industry sector that underpays the most is the petroleum refining sector, whereas the sector that overpays the most is the general merchandise stores sector

Organisational closure in biological organisms

International audienceThe central aim of this paper consists in arguing that biological organisms realize a specific kind of causal regime that we call "organisational closure"; i.e., a distinct level of causation, operating in addition to physical laws, generated by the action of material structures acting as constraints. We argue that organisational closure constitutes a fundamental property of biological systems since even its minimal instances are likely to possess at least some of the typical features of biological organisation as exhibited by more complex organisms. Yet, while being a necessary condition for biological organization, organisational closure underdetermines, as such, the whole set of requirements that a system has to satisfy in order to be taken as a paradigmatic example of organism. As we suggest, additional properties, as modular templates and control mechanisms via dynamical decoupling between constraints, are required to get the complexity typical of full-fledged biological organisms

Deep Attentive Survival Analysis in Limit Order Books: Estimating Fill Probabilities with Convolutional-Transformers

One of the key decisions in execution strategies is the choice between a passive (liquidity providing) or an aggressive (liquidity taking) order to execute a trade in a limit order book (LOB). Essential to this choice is the fill probability of a passive limit order placed in the LOB. This paper proposes a deep learning method to estimate the filltimes of limit orders posted in different levels of the LOB. We develop a novel model for survival analysis that maps time-varying features of the LOB to the distribution of filltimes of limit orders. Our method is based on a convolutional-Transformer encoder and a monotonic neural network decoder. We use proper scoring rules to compare our method with other approaches in survival analysis, and perform an interpretability analysis to understand the informativeness of features used to compute fill probabilities. Our method significantly outperforms those typically used in survival analysis literature. Finally, we carry out a statistical analysis of the fill probability of orders placed in the order book (e.g., within the bid-ask spread) for assets with different queue dynamics and trading activity

Functional Integration and Individuality in Prokaryotic Collective Organisations

Both physiological and evolutionary criteria of biological individuality are underpinned by the idea that an individual is a functionally integrated whole. However, a precise account of functional integration has not been provided so far, and current notions are not developed in the details, especially in the case of composite systems. To address this issue, this paper focuses on the organisational dimension of two representative associations of prokaryotes: biofilms and the endosymbiosis between prokaryotes. Some critical voices have been raised against the thesis that biofilms are biological individuals. Nevertheless, it has not been investigated which structural and functional obstacles may prevent them from being fully integrated physiological or evolutionary units. By contrast, the endosymbiotic association of different species of prokaryotes has the potential for achieving a different type of physiological integration based on a common boundary and interlocked functions. This type of association had made it possible, under specific conditions, to evolve endosymbionts into fully integrated organelles. This paper therefore has three aims: first, to analyse the organisational conditions and the physiological mechanisms that enable integration in prokaryotic associations; second, to discuss the organisational differences between biofilms and prokaryotic endosymbiosis and the types of integration they achieve; finally, to provide a more precise account of functional integration based on these case studies

Biological organization and cross-generation functions

International audienceThe organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this 'ontological problem', a splitting account has been proposed, according to which the two kinds of functions require distinct organizational definitions. In this article, we propose a solution for the ontological problem, by arguing that intra- and cross-generation functions can be said to contribute in the same way to the maintenance of the biological organization, characterized in terms of organizational self-maintenance. As a consequence, we suggest maintaining a unified organizational account of biological functions