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Topic Review
Electric Cars in Brazil
Brazil has been successful to reduce its carbon footprint using biofuels, but it is facing a dilemma in vehicle electrification. It cannot shift abruptly to battery electric vehicles, as current consumers are unable to afford them and investment in recharging infrastructure is uncertain. However, it has a significant manufacturing base, and it cannot isolate itself from global industrial trends. The emergence of a dominant design (set of core technologies defining a product category and adopted by the majority of players in the market) in small and affordable segments is essential for the diffusion of electric cars in developing countries. Biofuel hybrid technologies may support the transition. The Brazilian industry can engage in electric vehicle development by designing small cars based on global architectures, targeting consumers in emerging markets. 
  • 655
  • 27 May 2022
Topic Review
Traffic Flow Prediction
The accurate and effective prediction of the traffic flow of vehicles plays a significant role in the construction and planning of signalized road intersections. The application of artificially intelligent predictive models in the prediction of the performance of traffic flow has yielded positive results. However, much uncertainty still exists in the determination of which artificial intelligence methods effectively resolve traffic congestion issues, especially from the perspective of the traffic flow of vehicles at a four-way signalized road intersection.
  • 651
  • 08 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Human Power Production and Energy-harvesting
The maximal mechanical power produced by man, especially by large groups of people practicing sport or intense physical activity, has been proposed to be used for charge small electronic device or to partially sustain the power requirement of a gym. This practice can help to reduce carbon emissions.
  • 651
  • 28 Sep 2021
Topic Review
COVID-19 Effect on Supply Chains
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated disruptions in supply chains, traveling, businesses, and a loss of human lives that is being accounted for at least five million diseased. When the pandemic started, uncertainties, the lockdown of countries, and stay-at-home orders generated that millions of people made runs to grocery stores to buy essential products, the most distinctive being hygiene tissue, antibacterial formulations, and hand sanitizers. Then workers in essential processes in the medical, food, and manufacturing industries had to restart work to keep supply chains running. That generated further repercussions due to the infection of workers in multiple facilities, which created more considerable uncertainties. Universities and schools were mandated to close, and work-from-home orders were enacted in most sectors. In this entry, a summary of the essential factors, current situation, and future perspective regarding the effect generated by COVID-19 on the disruptions of supply chains is presented. The strategic sectors summarized are food and produce, transportation, paper products, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, automobiles, minerals and technology companies. At two years since the WHO declaration, there are still shockwaves that show some unpredictability. Hence, companies and governments should look for strategical plans for preparing for this kind of event, making supply chains resilient or even immune to pandemics, natural disasters and trade wars.
  • 645
  • 22 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Highway-rail grade crossing (HRGC) accidents
Highway-rail grade crossing (HRGC) accidents pose a serious risk of safety to highway users, including pedestrians trying to cross HRGCs. A significant increase in the number of HRGC accidents globally calls for greater research efforts, which are not limited to the analysis of accidents at HRGCs but also understanding user perception, driver behavior, potential conflicting areas at crossings, effectiveness of countermeasures and user perception towards them. HRGC safety is one of the priority areas in the State of Florida, since the state HRGCs experienced a total of 429 injuries and 146 fatalities between 2010 and 2019 with a significant increase in HRGC accidents over the last years.
  • 591
  • 15 Aug 2021
Topic Review
Quadruped Robot
The motion state of quadruped robot in operation changes constantly. Due to the drift caused by the accumulative error, the function of inertial measurement unit (IMU) will be limited.  Even though multi-sensor fusion technology is adopted, the quadruped robot will lose its ability to respond to state changes after a while because the gain tends to be constant. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Strong Tracking Mixed-degree Cubature Kalman Filter (STMCKF) method. According to system characteristics of the quadruped robot, this method makes fusion estimation of forward kinematics and IMU track. The combination mode of Traditional Strong Tracking CKF (TSTCKF) and strong tracking is improved through demonstration. A new method for calculating fading factor matrix is proposed, which reduces sampling times from three to one, saving 66% of calculation time. At the same time, the state estimation accuracy is improved from third-degree accuracy of Taylor series expansion to fifth-degree accuracy. The proposed algorithm can automatically switch the working mode according to real-time supervision of the motion state and greatly improve the state estimation performance of quadruped robot system, exhibiting strong robustness and excellent real-time performance.
  • 531
  • 27 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Energy level on SGV System
Automated industrial vehicles are taking an imposing place by transforming the industrial operations, and contributing to an efficient in-house transportation of goods. They are expected to bring a variety of benefits towards the Industry 4.0 transition. However, Self-Guided Vehicles (SGVs) are battery-powered, unmanned autonomous vehicles. While the operating durability depends on self-path design, planning energy-efficient paths become crucial. Thus, this paper has no concrete contribution but highlights the lack of energy consideration of SGV-system design in literature by presenting a review of energy-constrained global path planning. Then, an experimental investigation explores the long-term effect of battery level on navigation performance of a single vehicle. This experiment was conducted for several hours, a deviation between the global trajectory and the ground-true path executed by the SGV was observed as the battery depleted. The results show that the mean square error (MSE) increases significantly as the battery’s state-of-charge decreases below a certain value.
  • 528
  • 30 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Design of Sustainable Flexible Pavement
The conventional methodologies for the design of flexible pavements are not adequate in providing solutions that meet the diverse sustainability challenges. Therefore, developing new methodologies and frameworks for the design of flexible pavement has become a priority for most highway agencies. On the other hand, there is no sound sustainable flexible pavement framework at the design phase that considers the key engineering performance, environmental impact, and economic benefits of sustainability metrics. Hence, premature failure of flexible pavements has become a common problem leading to a growing demand for sustainable pavement. Pavement engineers need to have access to tools that permit them to design flexible pavements capable of providing sustainable solutions under various complex scenarios and uncertainties.
  • 520
  • 10 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Hybrid Electric Vehicles
According to the Society of Automotive Engineers, a hybrid vehicle can be defined as that vehicle with two or more energy storage systems which must provide power to the propellant system either together or independently. Similarly, the heavy duty hybrid vehicles group indicates that a hybrid vehicle must have at least two energy storage systems and energy converters. In practice, a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) combines the great autonomy of conventional vehicles with spark ignition engines, compression ignition engines, fuel cells and solar panels with the speed, performance and environmental advantages of electric vehicles, obtaining an automobile with lower fossil fuel consumption and lower pollutant emissions to the atmosphere.
  • 488
  • 10 Aug 2021
Topic Review
Automatic Wheelchairs
Automatic wheelchairs refers to devices equipped with wheelchairs, which can move automatically. Automatic wheelchairs have evolved in terms of instrumentation and control, improving the mobility of people with physical disabilities. The different wheelchair control techniques are divided into two categories: sensor technology non-invasively placed on the user and wheelchair instrumentation.
  • 476
  • 26 Nov 2020
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