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Topic Review
Fruit and Smart Packaging
Smart packaging of fresh produce is an emerging technology targeting the reduction of waste and the preservation of consumer health and safety. Smart packaging systems also help to prolong the shelf life of perishable foods during transport and mass storage, which are difficult to regulate. The use of these ever-progressing technologies in the packaging of fruits has the potential to result in many positive consequences, including improved fruit quality, reduced waste, higher consumer confidence and associated improved public health. 
  • 2.1K
  • 28 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Low-Cost 3D Laser Scanning Technology
By moving a commercial 2D LiDAR, 3D maps of the environment can be built, based on the data of a 2D LiDAR and its movements. Compared to a commercial 3D LiDAR, a moving 2D LiDAR is more economical. A series of problems need to be solved in order for a moving 2D LiDAR to perform better, among them, improving accuracy and real-time performance. In order to solve these problems, estimating the movements of a 2D LiDAR, and identifying and removing moving objects in the environment, are issues that should be studied.
  • 2.0K
  • 03 Jun 2021
Topic Review
The Interband Cascade Laser
The interband cascade laser (ICL) has recently become the go-to coherent optical source for applications in the mid-wave infrared spectral band (especially 3–6 μm) that require high efficiency, low drive power, and small system footprint. The ICL combines a relatively long upper-level lifetime, characteristic of semiconductor interband transitions, with the voltage-efficient cascading scheme originally introduced for the quantum cascade laser (which employs intersubband transitions to produce light). Following the first room-temperature (RT) continuous wave (cw) operation in 2008, ICLs have operated in cw mode up to 118 ºC, produced > 500 mW of cw power at RT, displayed wallplug efficiencies up to 18% for RT cw operation, and operated in cw mode at RT to wavelengths as long as 6 µm. The low ICL drive power, which is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than is required for a quantum cascade laser (QCL), is especially important in applications such as portable battery- or solar-powered laser spectroscopy systems that require a small footprint. Distributed-feedback (DFB) ICLs emitting in a single spectral mode have generated up to 55 mW of cw power at RT, and have operated at wavelengths as long as 6.6 µm. Newer device classes include ICL frequency combs, interband cascade vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, interband cascade LEDs, interband cascade detectors, and ICLs incorporated into photonic integrated circuits.
  • 2.0K
  • 22 Sep 2020
Topic Review
Indoor Positioning
The indoor positioning system (IPS) is becoming increasing important in accurately determining the locations of objects by the utilization of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) involving smartphone sensors, embedded sources, mapping localizations, and wireless communication networks. 
  • 1.9K
  • 14 Jan 2021
Topic Review
Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an extensive network of heterogeneous devices that provides an array of innovative applications and services. IoT networks enable the integration of data and services to seamlessly interconnect the cyber and physical systems.
  • 1.5K
  • 18 Feb 2022
Topic Review
Tracked Locomotion Systems for Ground Mobile Robots
Service robotics is presently one of the fastest-growing technological fields. Nevertheless, while Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) moving on flat and compact grounds are already commercially available and widely used to move components and products inside industrial buildings, the extensive application of ground mobile robots in environments that are unstructured or structured for humans is a promising challenge for the next years. The important application fields are agriculture, planetary exploration, reconnaissance in dangerous situations, such as radioactive or chemical contamination, homeland security and military operations, demining, intervention in case of terrorist attacks, and surveillance.
  • 1.5K
  • 26 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Technologies for Railway Track Maintenance
Inspection and repair interventions play vital roles in the asset management of railways. Autonomous mobile manipulators possess considerable potential to replace humans in many hazardous railway track maintenance tasks with high efficiency and increased asset utilization. Railway track maintenance technologies ranges from handheld devices to whole train, from manually pushed trolley to autonomous robots. 
  • 1.5K
  • 02 Jun 2023
Topic Review
Modern Small Farming and Homesteading: Automate and Simplify
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, increasing number of people from the urban environment have moved to rural areas in search for more peaceful and healthier lifestyle. They do keep their city jobs, mostly working online, and aren't interested into agriculture besides limited production for their own needs. However, as they are accustomed to the use of ICT and electronics in everyday life, they would appreciate any device that would robotize, automate or simplify common jobs on property maintenance, which in turn would provide additional time for other activities. Despite the fact that the application of WSN and IoT in agriculture has been researched for 20 years, and although there has been a significant breakthrough in agricultural robotics, the automation of small farming machines is still scarce, which may prove to be the next new big thing for small equipment manufacturers and startups.
  • 1.5K
  • 11 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Robust Outlier-Adaptive Filtering
With the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a major area of interest in the research field of UAVs has been vision-aided inertial navigation systems (V-INS). In the front-end of V-INS, image processing extracts information about the surrounding environment and determines features or points of interest. With the extracted vision data and inertial measurement unit (IMU) dead reckoning, the most widely used algorithm for estimating vehicle and feature states in the back-end of V-INS is an extended Kalman filter (EKF). An important assumption of the EKF is Gaussian white noise. In fact, measurement outliers that arise in various realistic conditions are often non-Gaussian. A lack of compensation for unknown noise parameters often leads to a serious impact on the reliability and robustness of these navigation systems. To compensate for uncertainties of the outliers, we require modified versions of the estimator or the incorporation of other techniques into the filter. The main purpose of this paper is to develop accurate and robust V-INS for UAVs, in particular, those for situations pertaining to such unknown outliers. Feature correspondence in image processing front-end rejects vision outliers, and then a statistic test in filtering back-end detects the remaining outliers of the vision data. For frequent outliers occurrence, variational approximation for Bayesian inference derives a way to compute the optimal noise precision matrices of the measurement outliers. The overall process of outlier removal and adaptation is referred to here as “outlier-adaptive filtering”. Even though almost all approaches of V-INS remove outliers by some method, few researchers have treated outlier adaptation in V-INS in much detail. Here, results from flight datasets validate the improved accuracy of V-INS employing the proposed outlier-adaptive filtering framework.
  • 1.5K
  • 30 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Variable Admittance Control for Human–Robot Interaction
Human–robot interaction (HRI) is a broad research topic, which is defined as understanding, designing, developing, and evaluating the robotic system to be used with or by humans. 
  • 1.5K
  • 26 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Artificial Downwelling
A technology that uses artificial methods to make sea water flow from top to bottom. The upper oxygen-rich water can be sent to the bottom hypoxic zone to alleviate marine environmental problems.
  • 1.4K
  • 30 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Degree of Ambition and Renewable Energy in Shipping
The early strategy outlines various degrees of desire for the international shipping industry, stressing that technical advancement and the international introduction of alternative fuels and/or renewable energies for international shipping will be crucial to achieving the overall aim. Renewable energy can be implemented in shipping in one of two ways: (1) as retrofits for current fleets or (2) as part of new vessel designs. In terms of new ship concepts, most renewable energy technology will deliver electricity for auxiliary and additional uses, regardless of ship size.
  • 1.3K
  • 14 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Field Robots for Intelligent Farms
Field robots for use in intelligent farms can be of two types: mobile robots, capable of moving throughout the working field, and manipulators, normally attached to mobile robots and capable of performing some types of actions on crops. Mobile robots can be unmanned ground robots or unmanned aerial robots, whereas manipulators can follow diverse techniques that provide different characteristics: (1) rigid manipulators; (2) soft manipulators; (3) parallel robots; (4) dual-arm manipulators; (5) redundant, hyperredundant, or continuum manipulators; etc 
  • 1.3K
  • 20 Nov 2020
Topic Review
Haptic Assistive Driving Systems with Human Operators
With the availability of modern assistive techniques, ambient intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT), various innovative assistive environments have been developed, such as driving assistance systems (DAS), where the human driver can be provided with physical and emotional assistance. In this human–machine collaboration system, haptic interaction interfaces are commonly employed because they provide drivers with a more manageable way to interact with other components. From the view of control system theory, this is a typical closed-loop feedback control system with a human in the loop. To make such a system work effectively, both the driving behaviour factors, and the electrical–mechanical components should be considered. However, the main challenge is how to deal with the high degree of uncertainties in human behaviour. 
  • 1.3K
  • 19 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Traditional Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) was first applied in the field of robotics. Its goal is to build a real-time map of the surrounding environment based on sensor data without any prior knowledge, and at the same time predict its own location based on the map. SLAM has attracted extensive attention from many researchers since it was first proposed in 1986 and is now a necessary capability for autonomous mobile robots.
  • 1.3K
  • 04 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Alarming Systems for Hazardous Gases and Volatile Chemicals
The leakage of hazardous gases and chemical vapors is considered one of the dangerous accidents that can occur in laboratories, workshops, warehouses, and industrial sites that use or store these substances. The early detection and alarming of hazardous gases and volatile chemicals are significant to keep the safety conditions for the people and life forms who are work in and live around these places.
  • 1.3K
  • 15 Dec 2021
Topic Review
Software-Defined Protection, Automation, and Control in Power Systems
Power systems’ Protection, Automation, and Control (PAC) functionalities are often deployed in different constrained devices (Intelligent Electronic Devices) following a coupled hardware/software design. With the increase in distributed energy resources, more customized controllers will be required. These devices have high operational and deployment costs with long development, testing, and complex upgrade cycles. Addressing these challenges requires that a ’revolution’ in power system PAC design takes place. Decoupling from hardware-dependent implementations by virtualizing the functionalities facilitates the transition from a traditional power grid into a software-defined smart grid.
  • 1.3K
  • 21 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Latency Compensated Visual-Inertial Odometry
In visual-inertial odometry (VIO), inertial measurement unit (IMU) dead reckoning acts as the dynamic model for flight vehicles while camera vision extracts information about the surrounding environment and determines features or points of interest. With these sensors, the most widely used algorithm for estimating vehicle and feature states for VIO is an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The design of the standard EKF does not inherently allow for time offsets between the timestamps of the IMU and vision data. In fact, sensor-related delays that arise in various realistic conditions are at least partially unknown parameters. A lack of compensation for unknown parameters often leads to a serious impact on the accuracy of VIO systems and systems like them. To compensate for the uncertainties of the unknown time delays, this study incorporates parameter estimation into feature initialization and state estimation. Moreover, computing cross-covariance and estimating delays in online temporal calibration correct residual, Jacobian, and covariance. Results from flight dataset testing validate the improved accuracy of VIO employing latency compensated filtering frameworks. The insights and methods proposed here are ultimately useful in any estimation problem (e.g., multi-sensor fusion scenarios) where compensation for partially unknown time delays can enhance performance.
  • 1.2K
  • 29 Apr 2021
Topic Review
Lower Limb Joint Kinematics
The use of inertial measurement units (IMUs) has gained popularity for the estimation of lower limb kinematics. However, implementations in clinical practice are still lacking. This review shows that methods for lower limb joint kinematics are inherently application dependent. Sensor restrictions are generally compensated with biomechanically inspired assumptions and prior information. Awareness of the possible adaptations in the IMU-based kinematic estimates by incorporating such prior information and assumptions is necessary, before drawing clinical decisions. Future research should focus on alternative validation methods, subject-specific IMU-based biomechanical joint models and disturbed movement patterns in real-world settings.
  • 1.2K
  • 01 Nov 2020
Topic Review
Transformers Health
Due to the large number of distribution transformers in the distribution grid, the status of distribution transformers plays an important role in ensuring the safe and reliable operation of the these grids. To evaluate the distribution transformer health, many assessment techniques have been studied and developed. These tools will support the transformer operators in predicting the status of the distribution transformer and responding effectively. A group of authors from University of Hawaii at Manoa and University of Palermo have reviewed the literature in the area, analyzed the latest techniques as well as highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of current methodologies. This gives the other researchers an overview of the development process of distribution transformer condition assessment technologies, thereby continuing to develop new effective evaluation techniques.
  • 1.2K
  • 24 Nov 2020
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