1,721,019 research outputs found
Terrain assessment for precision agriculture using vehicle dynamic modelling
No full textAdvances in precision agriculture greatly rely on innovative control and sensing technologies that allow service units to increase their level of driving automation while ensuring at the same time high safety standards. This paper deals with automatic terrain estimation and classification that is performed simultaneously by an agricultural vehicle during normal operations. Vehicle mobility and safety, and the successful implementation of important agricultural tasks including seeding, ploughing, fertilising and controlled traffic depend or can be improved by a correct identification of the terrain that is traversed. The novelty of this research lies in that terrain estimation is performed by using not only traditional appearance-based features, that is colour and geometric properties, but also contact-based features, that is measuring physics-based dynamic effects that govern the vehicle–terrain interaction and that greatly affect its mobility. Experimental results obtained from an all-terrain vehicle operating on different surfaces are presented to validate the system in the field. It was shown that a terrain classifier trained with contact features was able to achieve a correct prediction rate of 85.1%, which is comparable or better than that obtained with approaches using traditional feature sets. To further improve the classification performance, all feature sets were merged in an augmented feature space, reaching, for these tests, 89.1% of correct predictions
Mobile Robotics for Sustainable Development: Two Case Studies
No full textThe use of robotic solutions for sustainability is critical to reduce pollution and waste of materials during the manufacturing processes, and it can significantly reduce the amount of energy employed compared with traditional methods. This paper presents two case studies in the development of mobile robotic solutions used to increase the manufacturing sustainability by avoiding waste of materials and physical stress for the operators. Both mobile robots can improve the manufacturing performance by reducing costs and time with special attention to the environment and to the safety
Considerations on Motion Energy Consumption for Autonomous Robots
No full textThis works provides a comparison about the energy consumption of a tracked vehicle with a passive suspension system by studying the case when it is remotely controlled by a human operator and when it is controlled by an autonomous navigation software. Results from an experimental campaign are presented along with considerations about the energy consumption during each test
AN ECO-FRIENDLY AND SUSTAINABLE ROUTE PLANNING FOR A FLOOR-MARKING OMNIDIRECTIONAL ROBOT
No full textThis paper presents different routing approaches that can be adopted to generate optimized trajectories for an omnidirectional robot used to mark on the floor the perimeter of each booth in exhibition halls. A spiral and S-shaped pattern algorithm along with a routing based on segmentation map are presented by providing results and considerations on their performance tested on real exhibition layouts. The data shows how the S-shaped routing approach is the best one to use in order to optimize the robot’s path by minimizing the transport length, the energy consumption and the time spent to fulfil the marking task
A glance at the behaviour of a tracked mobile robot on different agricultural surfaces
No full textThis research work investigates the behaviour of a tracked mobile robot moving over two different types of agricultural terrain: a rigid surface, such as asphalt or concrete and a deformable clayey soil. A study on the inertial measurements and motor currents data provides an overall analysis of the robot's behaviour during classical agricultural tasks. The analysis includes ground traversability due to terrain roughness and consistency, the stress on the ground due to the vehicle movement and a rapid check of the energy consumption by looking at the motor currents. The authors emphasize that all the information obtained in the manuscript can be retrieved by direct measurements available from relatively inexpensive proprioceptive sensors without onerous calculations or expensive sensors
Design and Development of a Tracked Robot to Increase Bulk Density of Flax Fibers
No full textThis article presents an integrated mechanics study for the design and the development of a service tracked robot able to move inside a truck container and roll over flax raw material by compressing it to increase its overall bulk density. A series of flax material properties have been used to properly characterize the robot's locomotion parameters and to obtain an optimal ground pressure and a correct floating capacity over the material. First, the performance of the proposed robot is evaluated in an emulated container. Then, results acquired during compression tests in a real scenario are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed robot for industrial applications
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
- …
