Stop Work: Serious Games as Intervention Method to Enhance Safety Behavior

Organizations will go through great lengths to prevent accidents from occurring. This is shown in the implementation of safety management systems in which all procedures are captured describing how work can be done safely. Stopping the work is seen as one of the last barriers in risk management. Our theoretical analyses and conducted interviews...

Multichannel current-mode stimulator with channel-specific regulated power supply

Developing neuroprosthetic bioelectronic devices requires wirelessly-powered implantable stimulator systems with hundreds to thousands of output channels. Power efficiency optimization is crucial for scaling up the number of output channels. Current-mode electrical stimulation is favored for safety but is power-inefficient in conventional...

Barrier Function-based Safe Reinforcement Learning for Formation Control of Mobile Robots

Distributed model predictive control (DMPC) concerns how to online control multiple robotic systems with constraints effectively. However, the nonlinearity, nonconvexity, and strong interconnections of dynamic system models and constraints can make the real-time and real-world DMPC implementations nontrivial. Reinforcement learning (RL)...

Where to Look Next: Learning Viewpoint Recommendations for Informative Trajectory Planning

Search missions require motion planning and navigation methods for information gathering that continuously replan based on new observations of the robot's surroundings. Current methods for information gathering, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search, are capable of reasoning over long horizons, but they are computationally expensive. An alternative...

Human Acceptance As Part of the Soft Robot Design

As machines and robots become a increasingly larger part of society, it is important that they are fully accepted. If the machines are not utilized as intended, it is not only a waste of time and energy, but also of valuable resources. This acceptance by humans of robots is based on how well the interaction with robots is trusted. Trust of...

Assessment Method for Spatial Planning and Infrastructure Development

In Europe, different road authorities have to face the ever increasing pressure to integrate their road network service provision with - often conflicting - different trends and conditions such as congestion, climate change, individualism, urbanization, safety, environmental issues and economic growth. There is also a need to cooperate with...

Emerging Risk Management Versus Traditional Risk: Differences and Challenges in the Context of Occupational Health and Safety

As a result of the important and rapid technological advances in industrial processes, in recent years the scientific interest in the field of occupational health and safety (OH&S) is increasing. This scenario of continuous change generates both new opportunities and new challenges in the workplace. This circumstance allows eliminating or...

Combining Bayesian Networks and Fishbone Diagrams to Distinguish between Intentional Attacks and Accidental Technical Failures

Because of modern societies' dependence on industrial control systems, adequate response to system failures is essential. In order to take appropriate measures, it is crucial for operators to be able to distinguish between intentional attacks and accidental technical failures. However, adequate decision support for this matter is lacking. In...

What is the potential of a bird strike advisory system?

This paper presents a collision avoidance algorithm to prevent bird strikes for aircraft departing from an airport. By using trajectory-information of aircraft and birds, the algorithm predicts potential collisions. Collision avoidance is performed by delaying departing aircraft until they can follow a collision-free trajectory. An...

Metrology for Inductive Charging of Electric Vehicles (MICEV)

The European Union funded project MICEV aims at improving the traceability of electrical and magnetic measurement at charging stations and to better assess the safety of this technology with respect to human exposure. The paper describes some limits of the instrumentation used for electrical measurements in the charging stations, and briefly...

Compositional and contract-based verification for autonomous driving on road networks

Recent advances in autonomous driving have raised the problem of safety<br/>to the forefront and incentivized research into establishing safety guarantees. In this paper, we propose a safety verification framework as a safety standard for driving controllers with full or shared autonomy based on compositional and contract-based principles. Our...

Parallel autonomy in automated vehicles: Safe motion generation with minimal intervention

Current state-of-the-art vehicle safety systems, such as assistive braking or automatic lane following, are still only able to help in relatively simple driving situations. We introduce a Parallel Autonomy shared-control framework that produces safe trajectories based on human inputs even in much more complex driving scenarios, such as those...

Model-based systems engineering to design collaborative robotics applications

Novel robot technologies are becoming available to automate more complex tasks, more flexibly, and collaborating with humans. Methods and tools are needed in the automation and robotics industry to develop and integrate this new breed of robotic systems. In this paper, the ISE&amp;PPOOA methodology for Model-Based Systems Engineering is...

How Do Layered Airspace Design Parameters Affect Airspace Capacity and Safety?

In many ATM studies experiments are performed to determine the capacity. This paper looks at the effect of airspace design on the capacity. Using an algebraic approach a relation is derived between the design parameters of a layered airspace design and the capacity of the airspace. The validity of the assumptions which are used in this...

Effect of ADS-B Characteristics on Airborne Conflict Detection and Resolution

Most Free-Flight concepts rely on self-separation by means of airborne Conflict Detection and Resolution (CD&amp;R) algorithms. A key enabling technology for airborne CD&amp;R is the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system, which is used for direct state information exchange between aircraft. Similar to other communication...

Eye-based driver state monitor of distraction, drowsiness, and cognitive load for transitions of control in automated driving

Automated driving vehicles of the future will most likely include multiple modes and levels of operation and thus include various transitions of control (ToC) between human and machine. Traditional activation devices (e.g., knobs, switches, buttons, and touchscreens) may be confused by operators among other system setting manipulators and...