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The aim of this paper is to introduce a hexapod walking robot specifically designed for applications in humanitarian demining, intended to operate autonomously for several hours. To this end, the paper presents an experimental study for the evaluation of its energy efficiency.

First, the interest of using a walking robot for detection and localization of anti-personnel landmines is described, followed by the description of the mechanical system and the control architecture of the hexapod robot. Second, the energy efficiency of the hexapod robot is assessed to demonstrate its autonomy for performing humanitarian demining tasks. To achieve this, the power consumed by the robot is measured and logged, with a number of different payloads placed on-board (always including the scanning manipulator arm assembled on the robot front end), during the execution of a discontinuous gait on flat terrain.

The hexapod walking robot has demonstrated low energy consumption when it is carrying out several locomotion cycles with different loads on it, which is fundamental to have a desired autonomy. It should be considered that the robot has a mass of about 250 kg and that it has been loaded with additional masses of up to 170 kg during the experiments, with a consumption of mean power of 72 W, approximately.

This work provides insight on the use of a walking robot for humanitarian demining tasks, which has high stability and an autonomy of about 3 hours for a robot with high mass and high payload. In addition, the robot can be supervised and controlled remotely, which is an added value when it is working in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the design of a training tool intended to improve deminers' technique during close‐in detection tasks.

Following an introduction that highlights the impact of mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and the importance of training for enhancing the safety and the efficiency of the deminers, this paper considers the utilization of a sensory tracking system to study the skill of the hand‐held detector expert operators. With the compiled information, some critical performance variables can be extracted, assessed, and quantified, so that they can be used afterwards as reference values for the training task. In a second stage, the sensory tracking system is used for analysing the trainee skills. The experimentation phase aims to test the effectiveness of the elements that compose the sensory system to track the hand‐held detector during the training sessions.

The proposed training tool will be able to evaluate the deminers' efficiency during the scanning tasks and will provide important information for improving their competences.

This paper highlights the need of introducing emerging technologies for enhancing the current training techniques for deminers and proposes a sensory tracking system that can be successfully utilised for evaluating trainees' performance with hand‐held detectors.

Accurate perception of the environment using range sensors such as laser scanner, SONAR, infrared, vision, etc., for the application, such as path planning, localization, autonomous navigation, simultaneously localization and mapping, is a highly challenging area. The reliability of the perception by range sensors relies on the sensor accuracy, precision, sensor model, sensor registration, resolution, etc. Laser scanner is even though accurate and precise but still the efficient and consistent mapping of the environment is yet to be attained because laser scanner gives error as the extrinsic and intrinsic parameters varied which cause specular reflection, refraction, absorption, etc., of the laser beam. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper presents an error analysis in sensory information of laser scanner due to the effect of varying the scanning angle with respect to the optical axis and surface reflectivity or refractive index of the targets. Uncertainties caused by these parameters are reduced by proposing a new technique, tilt mounting system (TMS) with designed filters of tilting the angular position of a laser scanner with the best possible selection of range and scanning angle for the robust occupancy grid mapping. Various experiments are performed in different indoor environments, and the results are validated after the implementation of the TMS approach with designed filters.

After the implementation of the proposed TMS approach with filters, the errors in the laser grid map are reduced by 15.6 percent, which results in 62.5 percent reduction in the collision of a mobile robot during autonomous navigation in the laser grid map.

The TMS approach with designed filter reduces the effect of variation in intrinsic and extrinsic parameters to generate efficient laser occupancy grid map to achieve collision-free autonomous navigation.

Modern service robots are designed to work in a complex indoor environment, in which the robot has to interact with the objects in different ambient light intensities (day light, tube light, halogen light and dark ambiance). The variations in sudden ambient light intensities often cause an error in the sensory information of optical sensors like laser scanner, which reduce the reliability of the sensor in applications such as mapping, path planning and object detection of a mobile robot. Laser scanner is an optical sensor, so sensory information depends upon parameters like surface reflectivity, ambient light condition, texture of the targets, etc. The purposes of this research are to investigate and remove the effect of variation in ambient light conditions on the laser scanner to achieve robust autonomous mobile robot navigation.

The objective of this study is to analyze the effect of ambient light condition (dark ambiance, tube light and halogen bulb) on the accuracy of the laser scanner for the robust autonomous navigation of mobile robot in diverse illumination environments. A proposed AIFA (Adaptive Intensity Filter Algorithm) approach is designed in robot operating system (ROS) and implemented on a mobile robot fitted with laser scanner to reduce the effect of high-intensity ambiance illumination of the environment.

It has been experimentally found that the variation in the measured distance in dark is more consistent and accurate as compared to the sensory information taken in high-intensity tube light/halogen bulbs and in sunlight. The proposed AIFA approach is implement on a laser scanner fitted on a mobile robot which navigates in the high-intensity ambiance-illuminating complex environment. During autonomous navigation of mobile robot, while implementing the AIFA filter, the proportion of cession with the obstacles is reduce to 23 per cent lesser as compared to conventional approaches.

The proposed AIFA approach reduced the effect of the varying ambient light conditions in the sensory information of laser scanner for the applications such as autonomous navigation, path planning, mapping, etc. in diverse ambiance environment.

This is a survey paper of the recent literature on the application of semiparametric–econometric advances to testing for functional form of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). The EKC postulates that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth (typically measured by income) and pollution; that is, as economic growth expands, pollution increases up to a maximum and then starts declining after a threshold level of income. This hypothesized relationship is simple to visualize but has eluded many empirical investigations. A typical application of the EKC uses panel data models, which allows for heterogeneity, serial correlation, heteroskedasticity, data pooling, and smooth coefficients. This vast literature is reviewed in the context of semiparametric model specification tests. Additionally, recent developments in semiparametric econometrics, such as Bayesian methods, generalized time-varying coefficient models, and nonstationary panels are discussed as fruitful areas of future research. The cited literature is fairly complete and should prove useful to applied researchers at large.

There are limited studies addressing how choosing a maintenance strategy can contribute towards maximising outputs from given inputs, thereby minimising costs and improving a company’s competitiveness. The analytic hierarchy constant sum method (AHCSM) is used to access the appropriateness of maintenance strategies for improving the overall efficiency of a structural steel fabrication construction company.

A semi-structured interview was formulated with the stakeholders of the quality department to understand the company’s maintenance portfolio and its current functional capability. The information from this case study was then dissected to represent the factors that the company deemed appropriate for evaluating their maintenance strategy. The AHCSM approach provided a framework, which ranked the importance of factors that are sensitive to the construction industry and rank the suitability of maintenance strategies.

Factors affecting the selection of maintenance strategies to improve business efficiency are productivity, quality, reliability, cost, safety and work environment, morale, inventory and flexibility. Total productive maintenance strategy produces the most desirable outcome; however, the predictive or condition-based maintenance strategy provides an optimum solution for the case study company while considering the equipment usage, frequency of production and the current economic climate.

The approach presented allows practitioners to consider ways to increase the level of production and improve the efficiency of construction businesses without a high increase in investment. The findings can inform gaps in existing maintenance approaches in achieving business objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a robust iterative LIDAR-based pose tracking method assisted by modified visual odometer to resist initial value disturbance and locate a robot in the environments with certain occlusion.

At first, an iterative LIDAR-based pose tracking method is proposed. The LIDAR information is filtered and occupancy grid map is pre-processed. The sample generation and scoring are iterated so that the result is converged to the stable value. To improve the efficiency of sample processing, the integer-valued map indices of rotational samples are preserved and translated. All generated samples are analyzed to determine the maximum error direction. Then, a modified visual odometer is introduced for error compensation. The oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB) features are uniformly sampled in the image. A local map which contains key frames for reference is maintained. These two measures ensure that the modified visual odometer is able to return robust result which compensates the error of LIDAR-based pose tracking method in the maximum error direction.

Three experiments are conducted to prove the advantages of the proposed method. The proposed method can resist initial value disturbance with high computational efficiency, give back credible real-time result in the environment with abundant features and locate a robot in the environment with certain occlusion.

The proposed method is able to give back real-time pose tracking results with robustness. The iterative sample generation enables the robot to resist initial value disturbance. In each iteration, rotational and translational samples are separately generated to enhance computational efficiency. The maximum error direction of LIDAR-based pose tracking method is determined by principle component analysis and compensated by the result of modified visual odometer to give back correct pose in the environment with certain occlusion.

The legalization of gambling is moving this once deviant sector into the mainstream of commercial entertainment, with the global hotel-casino increasingly adopted as a state initiative on economic redevelopment. But corporate capitalist interests do not result in universal trends since local regulatory frameworks are crucial. Although gambling is being normalized as mass consumption, it remains to some extent an exceptional business, subject both to global innovation in the technology of surveillance and variable local controls. The paper argues that the effects of glocalization on the organization of work are equally variable, drawing on fieldwork and case studies from the USA, Australasia and the U.K.

COCO TANG India is an innovation-driven company. It takes inspiration from the humble coconut water that all of us are very familiar with and have drunk right from our childhood. The founders of the company, Dr Neelima, a dentist by profession and her husband Chaitanya who is a pharmacist have hit upon the idea of a coconut-based drink quite by accident.

When Dr Neelima was pregnant with her first child, the doctor advised her to take fresh coconut water. It was then that Dr Neelima discovered that fresh coconut water was a paradox, the water from a tender coconut is supposed to be fresh but in many cases is not as fresh as it should be. Coconuts are harvested from remote farms in Andhra Pradesh and sent to Hyderabad. And to top it all, the nutrition value of the coconut past its ideal window of consumption leaves a lot to desire. The price factor too is a dampener. It costs Rs. 25 to have tender coconut water in a metropolis like Hyderabad.

Dr Neelima and her husband developed the product idea from their search for a nutritious, healthy drink. Fresh, tender coconut pulp-based shakes, packed with nutrition, taste, health and at the same time make an aspirational product for the young, bubbly and restless youth of India.

This case deals with the problems, the trials and tribulations that these young first-time entrepreneurs faced and details the marketing efforts the young company is putting into survive in the dog eat dog world of fruit drink industry.

The case details the specific marketing-related problems the company faces and examines what the promoters are doing to overcome these problems, specifically related to the four Ps, that is, product, price, place and promotion. It looks in depth at the innovative marketing practices that COCO TANG India is deploying, including the use of the social media that enabled the COCO TANG India’s founder to win Junior Chamber International – Business Excellence Award for the year 2017–2018.

COCO TANG India is also the recipient of the Telugu book of records ‘certificate of national record’ as being the first brand to introduce Tender Coconut-based Mocktails and Milkshakes (A1).

The study aims to identify the perceived authenticity of cheeses by consumers of different sociological generations in Mexico.

An online questionnaire was applied to 1,204 consumers. A Free Word Association (FWA) tool was used to determine the perceived authenticity of cheeses creating categories and dimensions. The sample was segmented into sociological generations. A chi-square test and a correspondence analysis were used to identify differences in the perception between generations. The information was complemented with word clouds of the cheeses mentioned and consumer testimonials about cheese consumption.

A total of 29 categories and ten dimensions revealed consumers' perception of cheese authenticity, most important of which were hedonic, rurality and new consumption. Authenticity is a mix of the pleasure of consuming the product, the link to rural life and new consumer values. Perceived authenticity is different in each sociological generation according to the dimensions of raw material, identity, market, new consumption and distrust, since it is related to the experiences of each generation. The results made it possible to contextualise another vision of the reality of the cheeses in the search for a quality seal.

The information contributes to the typification and promotion of cheeses in the process of patrimonialisation, by creating differentiated marketing tools that allow their valorisation.

This work contributes to the knowledge of the perceived authenticity of cheeses in the sociological generations, due to their differentiation by age, sociocultural, ethical, political and consumer aspects. It enables the knowledge of the consumer's perspective on these products.