1,721,235 research outputs found
The Bolognese Silk Mill: One of the Earliest Examples of Factory System
No full textIn this paper, one of the earliest examples of factory system will be presented, namely the silk spinning factory, which thrived in Italy in the XVI-XVII centuries, i.e. a couple of centuries before the Industrial Revolution took place in England. The technology driving the factory was the so-called mulino da seta (silk mill): different types of mulini were developed in different Italian cities, among which the most efficient was the Bolognese silk mill, based on hydraulic driving force. The environmental and economic factors allowing the development of such a technology will be presented in this paper, along with a technical description of the Bolognese silk mill
Recent Advances and Challenges in the IFToMM PC for History of MMS
No full textThe paper presents a brief account of the evolution of the IFToMM Permanent Commission (PC) for History of MMS in terms of activities and people involved in order to illustrate the evolution of the commission with its peculiarities, problems, results, and the possibility of satisfying the constitution purposes of the commission in terms of keeping memory of the history of the IFToMM and of the thematic areas of the MMS (Mechanism and Machine Science) with evaluations and interpretations of historical-technical nature. The examination of these activities is centred on the developments of the last twenty years referring to an activity of the commission with an increasing impact not only within the IFToMM community. The conference, editorial, and social activities are reported with chronicle outlines, including the interaction among the members of the commission, with particular reference to the HMM Symposium on history of mechanisms and machines started in 2000 and the book series of History of MMS started in 2007
Rethinking autonomy: the notion of vulnerability in the thought of Emanuel Levinas
No full textE. Levinas, autonomy, vulnerabilit
Cesare Rossi (1955–2017)
No full textCesare Rossi was very active in several aspects of his life. At his University of Naples “Federico II” he was a committed and popular professor, holding his lectures with great commitment toward the students, and was involved in several committees. At the national level he had been serving for many years as a member of the Executive Council of the “GMA”, the council of the Italian professors and researchers of Mechanics Applied to Machines. Since 2014 he was the Chair of IFToMM Italy, the Italian section of IFToMM. Under his leadership the activity of IFToMM Italy has been reinvigorated with a clear society structure and through several initiatives, among which the start of the biennial national IFToMM conference IFIT. At the international level, he was very active in several communities, as well as a prominent member of IFToMM, promoting many activities and events, within the Technical Committee on Robotics and Mechatronics and especially in the Permanent Commission for the History of Mechanism and Machine Science
Online optimization of minimum-time and minimum-energy trajectories for a 1-DOF belt-driven robotic system
No full textTrajectory optimization is a critical research area in robotics and automation, especially in manufacturing industries where mechanical systems are often required to minimize the execution time or the consumed energy. In this context, the most common mechanical systems are those with a single degree of freedom because of their simplicity and ease of control. In this paper, we present an approach for the online optimization of minimum-time and minimum-energy trajectories for a robotic system with one degree of freedom. Point-to-point motions of the considered linear axis are planned online, without idle times, by leveraging a verified dynamic model of the robotic system, which also includes an accurate identification of friction parameters. Both minimum-time and minimum-energy trajectories are considered, and the performance of the online optimization using a selected open-source optimization tool is verified in different dynamic conditions of the system. The results of extensive experiments on a belt-driven robotic axis demonstrate the feasibility and the energy-saving capabilities of the proposed approach, as well as the flexibility of the online trajectory optimization in different scenarios, while meeting the kinematics and dynamics limits of the system and guaranteeing low computational time
- …
