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Cheryl Pellerin's smart highways feature in Sensor Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, made interesting reading. In Australia, a new system, which monitors heavy vehicles, was recently unveiled. The system monitors the movement of heavy duty vehicles on New South Wales (NSW) roads. The basic need for this system was established by the Road & Traffic Authority (RTA) of NSW and it centres on being able to spot trucks which are speeding, stolen, unregistered or skipping rest periods in all weather conditions, day or night. This resulted in the development of a system called SAFE‐T‐CAM.

Outlines a research project on smart guns: weapons that can only be fired by someone recognized as an authorized user. Technologies under research include electronic tags and implicit enabling, magnetics, radio‐frequency and command disablement and biometrics, using fingerprints, voice recognition and hand geometry. Concludes that smart‐gun technology can help prevent the unauthorized use of law‐enforcement guns. Purely mechanical options could work: the simplest is building a keyed lock into the gun. Other ideas to be studied include barcodes, implants, acoustics and combinations of devices.

Examines the increasing trend in the United States for environmentally friendlier manufacturing processes and ways of making environmental clean‐up more affordable. Looks at the work of the Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing [ECM] programme to identify and solve major environmental problems through collaboration among manufacturers, government agencies and universities. Outlines some of the ECM programme goals and some of the on‐going projects such as finding alternatives to ozone‐depleting chemicals [ODCs].

The eight‐lane Santa Monica freeway winds languidly through southern California's urban megasprawl, carrying 330,000 cars, trucks, buses, vans and motorcycles each day through downtown Los Angeles, then east to the San Bernardino, Golden State and Santa Ana freeways, or west of the Harbor and Pasadena freeways.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have combined computer graphics and vision techniques in a new tool used to interpret scenes. The Model‐based Vision System (MBVS) proposes a vision system that uses CAD packages to take full advantage of advanced synthetic images and graphic workstation systems.

In the early 1980s, mechanical hands were little more than two‐fingered grippers, or quick‐disconnect wrists with different tools for each job. Today, thanks to engineering ingenuity, shrinking components and government funding for space station and other applications, they are becoming much more. One example of such evolving technology is the Salisbury Hand.

For six years UK Government and industry funding has supported two Loughborough University research teams working in areas related to assembly systems. Much of the funding is from the Science and Engineering Research Council's ACME (Application of Computers in Manufacturing Engineering) Directorate. A large part of the effort has focused on producing integrated assembly systems, using two approaches:

What do cleaning toilets and police work have in common? They're dirty work? Someone has to do them? And they are both booming markets for service robots. Consider the following:

Describes experimental work in using machine vision for inspection and grading in the poultry industry. Outlines the main features of human poultry inspection and grading by size, colour and conditions and describes how neural networks can detect various defects in the poultry [such as bruising, cuts and broken bones]. Explains the development of neural nets, the use of processing elements and HSI histograms for image analysis. Describes texture analysis and the use of two dimensional Gabor filters. Concludes that neural nets appear to be a good tool for detecting poultry defects but further work is needed to develop more specific input.

Driven by the Department of Energy's (DOE) expected 30‐year clean‐up of its nuclear weapons complex, a research team, co‐ordinated from Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, has built an automated environmental laboratory.