Application of a Design for Excellence Methodology for a Wireless Charger Housing in Underwater Environments

A major effort is put into the production of green energy as a countermeasure to climatic changes and sustainability. Thus, the energy industry is currently betting on offshore wind energy, using wind turbines with fixed and floating platforms. This technology can benefit greatly from interventive autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to assist in the maintenance and control of underwater structures. A wireless charger system can extend the time the AUV remains underwater, by allowing it to charge its batteries through a docking station. The present work details the development process of a housing component for a wireless charging system to be implemented in an AUV, addressed as wireless charger housing (WCH), from the concept stage to the final physical verification and operation stage. The wireless charger system prepared in this research aims to improve the longevity of the vehicle mission, without having to return to the surface, by enabling battery charging at a docking station. This product was designed following a design for excellence (DfX) and modular design philosophy, implementing visual scorecards to measure the success of certain design aspects. For an adequate choice of materials, the Ashby method was implemented. The structural performance of the prototypes was validated via a linear static finite element analysis (FEA). These prototypes were further physically verified in a hyperbaric chamber. Results showed that the application of FEA, together with well-defined design goals, enable the WCH optimisation while ensuring up to 75% power efficiency. This methodology produced a system capable of transmitting energy for underwater robotic applications.This work is funded by the European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon 2020—The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014–2020, under grant agreement No. 871571 (ATLANTIS).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Indoor Localization System based on Artificial Landmarks and Monocular Vision

 This paper presents a visual localization approach that is suitable for domestic and industrial environments as it enables accurate, reliable and robust pose estimation. The mobile robot is equipped with a single camera which update sits pose whenever a landmark is available on the field of view. The innovation presented by this research focuses on the artificial landmark system which has the ability to detect the presence of the robot, since both entities communicate with each other using an infrared signal protocol modulated in frequency. Besides this communication capability, each landmark has several high intensity light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that shine only for some instances according to the communication, which makes it possible for the camera shutter and the blinking of the LEDs to synchronize. This synchronization increases the system tolerance concerning changes in brightness in the ambient lights over time, independently of the landmarks location. Therefore, the environment’s ceiling is populated with several landmarks and an Extended Kalman Filter is used to combine the dead-reckoning and landmark information. This increases the flexibility of the system by reducing the number of landmarks required. The experimental evaluation was conducted in a real indoor environment with an autonomous wheelchair prototype

A cable-driven robot for architectural constructions: a visual-guided approach for motion control and path-planning

Cable-driven robots have received some attention by the scientific community and, recently, by the industry because they can transport hazardous materials with a high level of safeness which is often required by construction sites. In this context, this research presents an extension of a cable-driven robot called SPIDERobot, that was developed for automated construction of architectural projects. The proposed robot is formed by a rotating claw and a set of four cables, enabling four degrees of freedom. In addition, this paper proposes a new Vision-Guided Path-Planning System (V-GPP) that provides a visual interpretation of the scene: the position of the robot, the target and obstacles location; and optimizes the trajectory of the robot. Moreover, it determines a collision-free trajectory in 3D that takes into account the obstacles and the interaction of the cables with the scene. A set of experiments make possible to validate the contribution of V-GPP to the SPIDERobot while operating in realistic working conditions, as well as, to evaluate the interaction between the V-GPP and the motion controlling system. The results demonstrated that the proposed robot is able to construct architectural structures and to avoid collisions with obstacles in their working environment. The V-GPP system localizes the robot with a precision of 0.006 m, detects the targets and successfully generates a path that takes into account the displacement of cables. Therefore, the results demonstrate that the SPIDERobot can be scaled up to real working conditions.This work is partly funded by the project PTDC/ ATP-AQI/5124/2012 - Robotic Technologies for Non-Standard Design and Construction in Architecture. This work is also financed by the ERDF European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within project “FCOMP - 01-0124-FEDER-022701”.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An optimization approach for the inverse kinematics of a highly redundant robot

This paper describes a robot with 12 degrees of freedom for pick-and-place operations using bricks. In addition, an optimization approach is proposed, which determines the state of each joint (that establishes the pose for the robot) based on the target position while minimizing the effort of the servomotors avoiding the inverse kinematics problem, which is a hard task for a 12 DOF robot manipulator. Therefore, it is a multi-objective optimization problem that will be solved using two optimization methods: the Stretched Simulated Annealing method and the NSGA II method. The experiments conducted in a simulation environment prove that the proposed approach is able to determine a solution for the inverse kinematics problem. A real robot formed by several servomotors and a gripper is also presented in this research for validating the solutions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Diseño gráfico como herramienta para la recuperación de la lengua kankuama

Debido a la sucesiva y progresiva pérdida de lenguas nativas que se han evidenciado en todo los territorios ancestrales a lo largo y ancho del territorio nacional, se ha generado una preocupación en una comunidad cuyas costumbres e identidad se encuentran en riesgo de desaparecer; la sierra nevada de santa marta es hogar de cuatro comunidades: Arhuacos, Kankuamos, Wiwas y Koguis, quienes cohabitan en armonía y luchan por preservar sus costumbres, con los continuos procesos de colonización, evangelización y la constante discriminación a las que son sometidas estas comunidades; situaciones de riesgo en la preservación de su cultura e identidad, viéndose más afectada la comunidad Kankuama cuya proximidad con la comunidad externa está generando una pérdida de las costumbres ancestrales y la lengua nativa, sucesos que se evidencia a pesar de los esfuerzos que se han realizado para preservar dicha cultura.Because of the successive and progressive loss of native languages that have been evident in all the ancestral territories throughout the national territory, a concern has been generated in a community whose customs and identity are at risk of disappearing; The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta is home to four communities: Arhuacos, Kankuamos, Wiwas and Koguis, who cohabit in harmony and struggle to preserve their customs, with the ongoing processes of colonization, evangelization and the constant discrimination to which these communities are subjected ; situations of risk in the preservation of their culture and identity, the Kankuama community being more affected, whose proximity to the external community is generating a loss of the ancestral customs and the native language, events that are evident despite the efforts that have been made to preserve that culture

Cable robot for non-standard architecture and construction: A dynamic positioning system

In the past few years, cable-driven robots have received some attention by the scientific community and the industry. They have special characteristics that made them very reliable to operate with the level of safeness that is required by different environments, such as, handling of hazardous materials in construction sites. This paper presents a cable-driven robot called SPIDERobot, that was developed for automated construction of architectural projects. This robot has a rotating claw and it is controlled by a set of 4 cables that allow 4 degrees of freedom. In addition to the robot, this paper introduces a Dynamic Control System (DCS) that controls the positioning of the robot and assures that the length of cables is always within a safe value. Results show that traditional force-feasible approaches are more influenced by the pulling forces or the geometric arrangement of all cables and their positioning is significantly less accurate than the DCS. Therefore, the architecture of the SPIDERobot is designed to enable an easily scaling up of the solution to higher dimensions for operating in realistic environments.This work is partly funded by the project PTDC/ATPAQI/ 5124/2012 - Robotic Technologies for Non-Standard Design and Construction in Architecture. This work is also financed by the ERDF European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within project ”FCOMP - 01-0124-FEDER-022701”info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts