The payoff replication of higly regulated companies

2008/2009This thesis aims to identify the determining factors of the RAB premium and to define what part is ascribable to factors relating to the fundamentals of the company and what part to factors of a financial nature. Moreover, it attempts to provide an interpretation of the dynamic nature of Snam Rete Gas and Terna share prices according to the options theory and considers the fact that share performance has fluctuated but always remained above the value of invested capital allowed by the regulator, namely the RAB.XXII Ciclo197

Consumers' attitude towards farmers' markets: an explorative analysis in Tuscany

Farmers Markets (FMs) around the world are often considered as one key response to the less sustainable conventional food production systems. Despite the economic crisis, international studies show that the most important factor leading people to buy fresh products in these points of sale is the quality. In fact, consumers usually cite \better food quality", \locally produced foods", \higher social interaction" and \learning directly about the vendors and their food production practices", as the principal motivations in buying in FM environment. In this paper the results of a survey carried out in several FMs and shops in Tuscany are presented. A sample of consumers were interviewed on-site using a structured questionnaire. The attitude of respondent towards FM was assessed using a test scale composed of 16 items referring to five different features of this form of distribution, supposed to be relevant in the consumer choice: quality of products, direct contact with farmers, convenience, environmental sustainability, and support for rural development processes. The high level of reliability of the attitude scale allowed its use in performing a cluster analysis of observed units. The cluster analysis allowed to identify two groups of consumers with different characteristics both in term of socio-economic descriptive variables and in term of attitudes and motivations towards FMs.food miles,Alternative Food Networks (AFN),sustainability,Italy,Short Food Supply Chain (SFSC)

Costs and Benefits of Compliance for HACCP Regulation in the Italian Meat and Dairy Sector

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

A New Technique for Deep in situ Measurements of the Soil Water Retention Behaviour

In situ measurements of soil suction and water content in deep soil layers still represent an experimental challenge. Mostly developed within agriculture-related disciplines, field techniques for the identification of soil retention behaviour have been so far employed in the geotechnical context to monitor shallow landslides and seasonal volume changes beneath shallow foundations, within the most superficial ground strata. In this paper, a novel installation technique is presented, discussed and assessed, which allows extension of the use of commercially available low-cost and low-maintenance instruments to characterise deep soil layers. Multi-depth installations have been successfully carried out using two different sensor types to measure the soil suction and water content up to 7\u2009m from the soil surface. Preliminary laboratory investigations were also shown to provide a reasonable benchmark to the field data. The results of this study offer a convenient starting point to accommodate important geotechnical works such as river and road embankments in the traditional monitoring of unsaturated soil variables

Desafíos de la educación salesiana: experiencias y reflexiones desde las IUS

Uno de los fines de la red IUS Education Group de las Instituciones Universitarias Salesianas, (IUS EG) es el fortalecimiento de los vínculos académicos institucionales a través de la difusión de resultados de investigación y experiencias en el campo de la educación en diversos ámbitos, contextos y temáticas. En ese contexto, este texto proporciona una lectura de las diferentes realidades, permite vislumbrar el enorme compromiso académico, la capacidad investigativa, de acción y de propuesta creativa de las instituciones frente a los desafíos más contemporáneos para la educación superior. La publicación contempla tres capítulos en función de tres ejes temáticos: formación humana, pastoral y juventud; interculturalidad. Los tres capítulos aglutinan 17 artículos de autoría de 27 profesores de siete IUS de Europa y América, que dan cuenta de distintas sensibilidades en torno a la educación superior salesiana y los desafíos del presente. Esta publicación ha sido coordinada por la Red Académica de Educación de las Instituciones Salesianas de Educación Superior (IUS

Manipulation Framework for Compliant Humanoid COMAN: Application to a Valve Turning Task

With the purpose of achieving a desired interaction performance for our compliant humanoid robot (COMAN), in this paper we propose a semi-autonomous control framework and evaluate it experimentally in a valve turning setup. The control structure consists of various modules and interfaces to identify the valve, locate the robot in front of it and perform the manipulation. The manipulation module implements four motion primitives (Reach, Grasp, Rotate and Disengage) and realizes the corresponding desired impedance profile for each phase to accomplish the task. In this direction, to establish a stable and compliant contact between the valve and the robot hands, while being able to generate the sufficient rotational torques depending on the valve's friction, Rotate incorporates a novel dual-arm impedance control technique to plan and realize a task-appropriate impedance profile. Results of the implementation of the proposed control framework are firstly evaluated in simulation studies using Gazebo. Subsequent experimental results highlight the efficiency of the proposed impedance planning and control in generation of the required interaction forces to accomplish the task

A modular approach for remote operation of humanoid robots in search and rescue scenarios

In the present work we have designed and implemented a modular, robust and user-friendly Pilot Interface meant to control humanoid robots in rescue scenarios during dangerous missions. We follow the common approach where the robot is semi-autonomous and it is remotely controlled by a human operator. In our implementation, YARP is used both as a communication channel for low-level hardware components and as an interconnecting framework between control modules. The interface features the capability to receive the status of these modules continuously and request actions when required. In addition, ROS is used to retrieve data from different types of sensors and to display relevant information of the robot status such as joint positions, velocities and torques, force/torque measurements and inertial data. Furthermore the operator is immersed into a 3D reconstruction of the environment and is enabled to manipulate 3D virtual objects. The Pilot Interface allows the operator to control the robot at three different levels. The high-level control deals with human-like actions which involve the whole robot’s actuation and perception. For instance, we successfully teleoperated IIT’s COmpliant huMANoid (COMAN) platform to execute complex navigation tasks through the composition of elementary walking commands (e.g.[walk_forward, 1m]). The mid-level control generates tasks in cartesian space, based on the position and orientation of objects of interest (i.e. valve, door handle) w.r.t. a reference frame on the robot. The low level control operates in joint space and is meant as a last resort tool to perform fine adjustments (e.g. release a trapped limb). Finally, our Pilot Interface is adaptable to different tasks, strategies and pilot’s needs, thanks to a modular architecture of the system which enables to add/remove single front-end components (e.g. GUI widgets) as well as back-end control modules on the fly

Yarp Based Plugins for Gazebo Simulator

This paper presents a set of plugins for the Gazebo simulator that enables the interoperability between a robot, controlled using the YARP framework, and Gazebo itself. Gazebo is an open-source simulator that can handle different Dynamic Engines (ODE, DART, Bullet, SimBody), backed up by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and supported by a very large community. Since our plugins conform with the YARP layer used on the real robot, applications written for our robots, COMAN and iCub, can be run on the simulator with no changes. Our plugins have two main components: a YARP interface with the same API as the real robot interface, and a Gazebo plugin which handles simulated joints, encoders, IMUs, force/torque sensors and synchronization. The robot model is provided to the simulator by means of an SDF file, which describes all the geometric, dynamic and visual characteristics of a robot. Once the SDF is read from Gazebo, our plugins are loaded and associated with the simulated robot model and the simulated world. Different modules for COMAN and iCub have been developed using Gazebo and our plugins as a testbed: joint impedance control plus gravity compensation, dual arm Cartesian control for manipulation tasks, dynamic walking, etc. This work has been developed as part of a joint effort between three different European Projects “WALKMAN”, “CoDyCo” and “SoftHands” aiming at implementing a common simulation platform to develop and test algorithms for our robotic platforms. This work is available as open-source to all the researchers in the YARP community (https://github.com/robotology/gazebo_yarp_plugins)

Corrigendum: The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

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XBotCore: A Real-Time Cross-Robot Software Platform

Muratore L, Laurenzi A, Hoffman EM, Rocchi A, Caldwell DG, Tsagarakis NG. XBotCore: A Real-Time Cross-Robot Software Platform. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing, IRC17. 2017