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This paper aims to study the localization problem for autonomous industrial vehicles in the complex industrial environments. Aiming for practical applications, the pursuit is to build a map-less localization system which can be used in the presence of dynamic obstacles, short-term and long-term environment changes.

The proposed system contains four main modules, including long-term place graph updating, global localization and re-localization, location tracking and pose registration. The first two modules fully exploit the deep-learning based three-dimensional point cloud learning techniques to achieve the map-less global localization task in large-scale environment. The location tracking module implements the particle filter framework with a newly designed perception model to track the vehicle location during movements. Finally, the pose registration module uses visual information to exclude the influence of dynamic obstacles and short-term changes and further introduces point cloud registration network to estimate the accurate vehicle pose.

Comprehensive experiments in real industrial environments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and practical applicability of the map-less localization approach.

This paper provides comprehensive experiments in real industrial environments.

The system can be used in the practical automated industrial vehicles for long-term localization tasks. The dynamic objects, short-/long-term environment changes and hardware limitations of industrial vehicles are all considered in the system design. Thus, this work moves a big step toward achieving real implementations of the autonomous localization in practical industrial scenarios.

To meet the rising global needs, the humanitarian community has signed off on making a strategic change toward more localisation, which commonly refers to the empowerment of national and local actors in humanitarian assistance. However, to this date, actual initiatives for localisation are rare. To enhance understanding of the phenomenon, the authors explore localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and obstacles to its implementation. The authors particularly take the perspective of the international humanitarian organisation (IHO) community as they are expected to implement the localisation strategy.

A phenomenon-driven, exploratory and qualitative study was conducted. Data collection included in-depth interviews with 28 experienced humanitarian professionals.

The findings showed the ambiguity inherent in the localisation strategy with largely different views on four important dimensions. Particularly, the interviewees differ about strengthening external actors or internal national/local offices. The resulting framework visualises the gap between strategy formulation and implementation, which forms major obstacles to the localisation aims.

Further research is required to support the advancement of localisation of logistics preparedness capacities. Important aspects for future research include triangulation of results, other stakeholder perspectives and the influence of context.

The authors add to the important debate surrounding localisation by offering remedies to overcoming obstacles to strategy implementation. Further, the authors’ proposed framework offers a language to precisely describe the ways in which IHOs (should) view localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and its operationalisation.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first academic article on localisation within the humanitarian logistics context.

This chapter is focused on the specification and integration of intercultural variables for human machine systems and the description of content analysis for these variables. Starting with basics of culture-oriented design, these are followed by an approach to machine localization issues and a cost model, then basics of the intercultural design and human machine system engineering process, a definition and specification of intercultural variables, a systematic treatment for their integration into the process, and a description of how to use these variables in the process. Finally, an example of an intercultural variables approach to “information coding” in a human-machine system is presented for China and Germany.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the drivers that influence subsidiaries of international companies in the automobile industry in Thailand and how automobile companies pursue localization in response to these drivers.

Using case research method, examined seven leading automobile manufacturers – Toyota Motor (Thailand); Hino Motors (Thailand); Honda Automobile (Thailand); Isuzu Motors (Thailand); BMW (Thailand); DaimlerChrysler (Thailand); and Auto Alliance (Thailand) – as well as 14 of their dealers and suppliers in Thailand. In total 120 Thai and expatriate managers were interviewed.

Extending the knowledge body from existing research, this study found that there are four drivers for automobile manufacturers to adopt localization strategies. Those are host country characteristics, industry characteristics, company characteristics, and market characteristics. The results show that automobile manufacturers react to drivers by localization of their decision making, building and exploiting knowledge pool of local suppliers and distributors, increasing numbers of Thais at the management level while decreasing the number of expatriates, increasing R&D activities locally, localizing products, increasing usage of local suppliers, adapting manufacturer processes, reinvesting at subsidiary, and localizing corporate image. However, these vary in degree from company to company. Localization strategies produce benefits that go beyond allowing automobile manufactures to compete within the local situation, also enabling them to overcome challenges and use their successes to transform the parent company and other subsidiaries and eventually contribute to the parent company's globalization strategy.

Managers in subsidiaries may first implement localization strategies to cope with driver factors to mitigate risks and uncertainty. By adopting localization, managers should not focus only on short term benefits to gain local advantages in host countries, but these advantages at the subsidiary should be transmitted to the parent company and other subsidiaries to build a competitive international strategy.

CEOs of subsidiaries in emerging markets can learn what drivers influence localization strategies and how to cope and create local advantages for global competitiveness by implementing wide range of localization strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new data set of aerial imagery from robotics simulator (AIR). AIR data set aims to provide a starting point for localization system development and to become a typical benchmark for accuracy comparison of map-based localization algorithms, visual odometry and SLAM for high-altitude flights.

The presented data set contains over 100,000 aerial images captured from Gazebo robotics simulator using orthophoto maps as a ground plane. Flights with three different trajectories are performed on maps from urban and forest environment at different altitudes, totaling over 33 kilometers of flight distance.

The review of previous research studies show that the presented data set is the largest currently available public data set with downward facing camera imagery.

This paper presents the problem of missing publicly available data sets for high-altitude (100‒3,000 meters) UAV flights; the current state-of-the-art research studies performed to develop map-based localization system for UAVs depend on real-life test flights and custom-simulated data sets for accuracy evaluation of the algorithms. The presented new data set solves this problem and aims to help the researchers to improve and benchmark new algorithms for high-altitude flights.

Robot localization in dynamic, cluttered environments is a challenging problem because it is impractical to have enough knowledge to be able to accurately model the robot’s environment in such a manner. This study aims to develop a novel probabilistic method equipped with function approximation techniques which is able to appropriately model the data distribution in Markov localization by using the maximum statistical power, thereby making a sensibly accurate estimation of robot’s pose in extremely dynamic, cluttered indoors environments.

The parameter vector of the statistical model is in the form of positions of easily detectable artificial landmarks in omnidirectional images. First, using probabilistic principal component analysis, the most likely set of parameters of the environmental model are extracted from the sensor data set consisting of missing values. Next, we use these parameters to approximate a probability density function, using support vector regression that is able to calculate the robot’s pose vector in each state of the Markov localization. At the end, using this density function, a good approximation of conditional density associated with the observation model is made which leads to a sensibly accurate estimation of robot’s pose in extremely dynamic, cluttered indoors environment.

The authors validate their method in an indoor office environment with 34 unique artificial landmarks. Further, they show that the accuracy remains high, even when they significantly increase the dynamics of the environment. They also show that compared to those appearance-based localization methods that rely on image pixels, the proposed localization strategy is superior in terms of accuracy and speed of convergence to a global minima.

By using easily detectable, and rotation, scale invariant artificial landmarks and the maximum statistical power which is provided through the concept of missing data, the authors have succeeded in determining precise pose updates without requiring too many computational resources to analyze the omnidirectional images. In addition, the proposed approach significantly reduces the risk of getting stuck in a local minimum by eliminating the possibility of having similar states.

What core strategic capabilities should multinational and domestic firms possess to create competitive organization in Russia? In this chapter, we try to answer this question with our pilot case study of six firms operating in the Russian high-tech, low-tech, and services markets – four global companies and two Russian firms. Our research shows that customer orientation is the crucial strategic capability, highlighted by all of the firms involved in the research. For multinational and high-tech players, this is followed by research and development, mentioned by two-thirds of the respondents. Moreover, the four multinational companies leverage their strategic capabilities of cross-cultural management and general sales capabilities as keys for their success in Russia. Russian firms emphasize importance of entrepreneurship, understanding local customer needs, and an engaged team as strategic capabilities that particularly differentiate them from the multinational players in the Russian market.

The purpose of this paper is to outline how a three phase marketing planning process model can assist marketing managers based in overseas companies to formulate a strategy for entering the South Korean market.

A review of relevant literature and the development of a conceptual marketing planning process model.

South Korea has undergone rapid transformation in the past twenty years and South Korean electronics companies have established themselves as global companies. Overseas companies can operate in the South Korean market provided that they form partnership arrangements with domestic companies. Prior to attempting to enter the South Korean market, managers in overseas companies should study how South Korean companies implement their global marketing strategy(ies). This should provide them with an understanding of the Korean organizational value system and prepare them to enter into partnership arrangements based on mutuality.

Managers based in overseas companies need to understand how facilitating technology such as the internet is helping to transform the retailing sector in South Korea.

There are a number of problems associated with the retail distribution system in South Korea and senior managers based in overseas companies need to have an appreciation of how South Korean companies compete and how they respond to government initiatives/pressure.

The model outlined in the paper should allow marketing managers in overseas companies to implement the strategic marketing approach and select the most appropriate partner organization to do business with.

The aim of the paper is to explore the changing role of a logistics service providers (LSPs) to better support their supply chain (SC) partners on their journey of advancing their product-service systems through distributing manufacturing around the world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a novel route towards service growth followed by the LSP by integrating upstream into the value chain and the resultant consequences in the configuration of the servitisation strategy, SC structure and allocation of roles.

A longitudinal exploratory case study design is followed. The case company is one of the world’s largest LSPs.

The study highlights how companies can transition towards the development of service solutions when not following a uni-directional, downstream pattern of integration in the value chain. The findings challenge the established model of servitisation as a forward uni-directional process across the continuum from goods to a service-focussed logic. They illustrate how companies can also move in a reversed direction, move possible back-and-forth or extend and restrict their position along the servitisation continuum.

The study reveals that service transition involves a deliberate developmental process to build capabilities as firms shift the focus of their product-service offering. It provides novel empirical evidence of how the service growth journey can manifest itself in practice. With insights into the benefits and challenges of distributed manufacturing, it also highlights some of the opportunities available to LSPs to expand their product-service offerings and some of the potential threats.