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To construct a commercial agricultural manipulation for fruit picking and handling without human intervention.

Describes a research activity involving a totally autonomous robot for fruit picking and handling crates.

Picking time for the robotic fruit picker at 8.7 s per orange is longer than the evaluated cited time of 6 s per orange.

The final system, recently tested, has not yet achieved a level of productivity capable of replacing human pickers. Further mechanical modifications and more robust and adaptive algorithms are needed to achieve a stronger robot system.

Experimental results and new simulations look very promising.

Will help to limit costs and guarantee a high degree of reliability.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief, descriptive overview of Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) research with particular reference to studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

A search of electronic databases was carried out to identify English language articles on TSC. The literature was explored in more detail with a focus on neurodevelopmental disorders associated with TSC such as ASD.

The review included 3,679 references. The earliest articles identified were published in the early twentieth century. Since then research on TSC has advanced rapidly and is being carried out worldwide. Just 62 studies have focused on ASD in TSC, although the number of publications is increasing over time.

More research on ASD in TSC is needed to benefit those affected by TSC and the broader ASD scientific community.

Practitioners working with children and adults with ASD should be aware of the wider health issues experienced by those with genetic conditions such as TSC. Similarly, clinicians working with those who have TSC should be aware of the high prevalence of ASD in the group and implications for the way they work with their patients.

This is the first paper to map and characterise the scientific literature on TSC. There remains a focus on the biomedical aspects of TSC with fewer studies on psychosocial/educational or family impacts. The review concludes with recommended research questions for the future.

This paper aims to examine the question of whether commercial, peer-to-peer accommodation platforms (Airbnb, in particular) and hotels are in fierce competition with each other with the possible presence of substitution threats, and compares the time series of the occupancy values across two supplier types.

The cities of Milan and Rome are used as case studies for this analysis. To assess the extent of synchronization, the series of Airbnb and hotels are transformed into a series of symbols that render their rhythmic behavior, and a mutual information metric is used to measure the effect.

The results show that Airbnb hosts and hotels have different seasonal patterns. The diverse occupancy trends support the absence of direct competition between Airbnb and hotels. The findings are consistent in the two analyzed cities (Milan and Rome). Interestingly, there are higher similarities between seasonal occupancy series of Airbnb listings in Milan and Rome, on one side, and hotels in Milan and Rome, on the other, than between Airbnb and hotels in the same city.

The findings show a progressive de-synchronization (within mutual information) among the five groups of Airbnb hosts triggered by the rising professionalization degree. This result suggests the existence of a partial different business model for multi-listing hosts.

The study illustrates an absence of any substitution threat between Airbnb and hotels in both cities. This could have important consequences, especially for the pricing and revenue management policy. In fact, the higher the substitution threat, the higher the attention that Airbnb entrepreneurs should pay to the pricing strategy implemented by hotels, and vice versa.

This study sheds new light on the competition threat between Airbnb and hotels. In this study, hotels and Airbnb hosts appear as two very separate markets.