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. 
  • 1.7K
  • 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.
  • 1.7K
  • 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.
  • 1.6K
  • 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. 
  • 1.5K
  • 14 Jan 2021
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.
  • 1.2K
  • 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. 
  • 1.2K
  • 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.
  • 1.1K
  • 30 Oct 2020
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.
  • 1.1K
  • 26 Aug 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.
  • 1.1K
  • 15 Dec 2021
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 
  • 1.1K
  • 20 Nov 2020
  • Page
  • of
  • 18