To Örebro University

The main focus of this paper is to present a case study of a SLAM solution for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) operating in real-world industrial environments. The studied solution, called Gold-fish SLAM, was implemented to provide localization estimates in dynamic industrial environments, where there are static landmarks that are only rarely perceived by the AGVs. The main idea of Gold-fish SLAM is to consider the goods that enter and leave the environment as temporary landmarks that can be used in combination with the rarely seen static landmarks to compute online estimates of AGV poses. The solution is tested and verified in a factory of paper using an eight ton diesel-truck retrofitted with an AGV control system running at speeds up to 3 m/s. The paper includes also a general discussion on how SLAM can be used in industrial applications with AGVs

The main focus of this paper is to present a case study of a SLAM solution for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) operating in real-world industrial environ- ments. The studied solution, called Gold-fish SLAM, was implemented to provide localization estimates in dynamic industrial environments, where there are static landmarks that are only rarely perceived by the AGVs. The main idea of Gold-fish SLAM is to consider the goods that enter and leave the environment as temporary landmarks that can be used in combination with the rarely seen static landmarks to compute online estimates of AGV poses. The solution is tested and verified in a factory of paper using an eight ton diesel-truck retrofitted with an AGV control sys- tem running at speeds up to 3 meters per second. The paper includes also a general discussion on how SLAM can be used in industrial applications with AGVs.

Methods for equipment monitoring are traditionally constructed from specific sensors and/or knowledge collected prior to implementation on the equipment. A different approach is presented here that builds up knowledge over time by exploratory search among the signals available on the internal field bus system and comparing the observed signal relationships among a group of equipment that perform similar tasks. The approach is developed for the purpose of increasing vehicle uptime, and is therefore demonstrated in the case of a city bus and a heavy duty truck. However, it also works fine for smaller mechatronic systems like computer hard-drives. The approach builds on an onboard self-organized search for models that capture relations among signal values on the vehicles' data buses, combined with a limited bandwidth telematics gateway and an off-line server application where the parameters of the self-organized models are compared. The presented approach represents a new look at error detection in commercial mechatronic systems, where the normal behavior of a system is actually found under real operating conditions, rather than the behavior observed in a number of laboratory tests or test-drives prior to production of the system. The approach has potential to be the basis for a self-discovering system for general purpose fault detection and diagnostics. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper presents an overview of an autonomous robotic material handling system. The goal of the system is to extend the functionalities of traditional AGVs to operate in highly dynamic environments. Traditionally, the reliable functioning of AGVs relies on the availability of adequate infrastructure to support navigation. In the target environments of our system, such infrastructure is difficult to setup in an efficient way. Additionally, the location of objects to handle are unknown, which requires that the system be able to detect and track object positions at runtime. Another requirement of the system is to be able to generate trajectories dynamically, which is uncommon in industrial AGV systems.

Background: Proteases of human pathogens are becoming increasingly important drug targets, hence it is necessary to understand their substrate specificity and to interpret this knowledge in practically useful ways. New methods are being developed that produce large amounts of cleavage information for individual proteases and some have been applied to extract cleavage rules from data. However, the hitherto proposed methods for extracting rules have been neither easy to understand nor very accurate. To be practically useful, cleavage rules should be accurate, compact, and expressed in an easily understandable way. Results: A new method is presented for producing cleavage rules for viral proteases with seemingly complex cleavage profiles. The method is based on orthogonal search-based rule extraction (OSRE) combined with spectral clustering. It is demonstrated on substrate data sets for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protease and hepatitis C (HCV) NS3/4A protease, showing excellent prediction performance for both HIV-1 cleavage and HCV NS3/4A cleavage, agreeing with observed HCV genotype differences. New cleavage rules (consensus sequences) are suggested for HIV-1 and HCV NS3/4A cleavages. The practical usability of the method is also demonstrated by using it to predict the location of an internal cleavage site in the HCV NS3 protease and to correct the location of a previously reported internal cleavage site in the HCV NS3 protease. The method is fast to converge and yields accurate rules, on par with previous results for HIV-1 protease and better than previous state-of-the-art for HCV NS3/4A protease. Moreover, the rules are fewer and simpler than previously obtained with rule extraction methods. Conclusion: A rule extraction methodology by searching for multivariate low-order predicates yields results that significantly outperform existing rule bases on out-of-sample data, but are more transparent to expert users. The approach yields rules that are easy to use and useful for interpreting experimental data.

This paper presents an overview of an autonomousrobotic material handling system. The goal of the system is toextend the functionalities of traditional AGVs to operate in highlydynamic environments. Traditionally, the reliable functioning ofAGVs relies on the availability of adequate infrastructure tosupport navigation. In the target environments of our system,such infrastructure is difficult to setup in an efficient way.Additionally, the location of objects to handle are unknown,which requires that the system be able to detect and track objectpositions at runtime. Another requirement of the system is to beable to generate trajectories dynamically, which is uncommon inindustrial AGV systems.

A new approach is proposed for fault detection. It builds on using the relationships between sensor values on vehicles to detect deviating sensor readings and trends in the system performance. However, in contrast to previous approaches based on such sensor relations, our approach uses a fleet of vehicles to define the normal conditions and relations. The relationships between the sensors are also determined automatically in a self-organized way on each vehicle, i.e. no off-line modeling is required. The proposed method is the first step in a remote diagnostics and maintenance service where error detection is done automatically, followed by a download of special purpose diagnostics software for the particular subsystem where the possible fault was detected. © 2009 SAE International.