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The purpose of this paper is to present a high accuracy path following method for low-cost fixed-wing UAVs.

The original vector field (VF) algorithm is condensed. A spatial integration mechanism is added to the existing VF and nonlinear guidance law, aiming to decrease steady-state cross-track-error and cope with long-term disturbance.

Numerical simulations show the proposed method could diminish steady-state cross-track-error effectively. Test flights show the proposed method is applicable on low-cost fixed-wing UAVs.

The path following accuracy shown in simulations and test flights indicates the proposed method could be deployed in scenarios including inflight rendezvous, formation, trafficway take-off and landing.

This paper provides an improved high-accuracy path following method for low-cost fixed-wing UAVs.

Salesperson performance is accepted as a relevant factor of retailing success. However, scarce studies reveal the relationship between sales performance and brand relationship. The purpose of this study is both, from one side, to empirically demonstrate the impact of salesperson brand attachment (SBA) on sales performance and, on the other side, to identify the mediators of this relationship in small retailing.

A survey was conducted with a sample of 206 small retailers from different sectors of an emerging country. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS3.

The results demonstrated that SBA is relevant to driving sales performance through two relevant paths – one following SBA–satisfaction–performance and one path following the SBA–commitment–performance. The model was able to explain 63% of the outcome performance.

Regarding small retailers, where the owners, employees and managers have higher levels of interaction than the large national retail chains, the marketing executives must invest in improving the attachment to the brand and create emotional bonds and cognition between marketers and the brand. They must develop strategies to promote job satisfaction and organizational commitment because they determine performance.

Despite the relevance of small businesses for economies worldwide and the importance of salesperson brand relationships, no study has been developed to demonstrate the impacts of such relationships on salesperson performance in retailing. Furthermore, in addition to the central role of organizational commitment in the sales research, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore how to mediate the relationship between brand attachment and sales performance.

El rendimiento del vendedor se acepta como un factor relevante para el éxito del comercio minorista. Sin embargo, los estudios que revelan la relación entre el resultado de las ventas y la relación con la marca son escasos. El propósito de este estudio es, por un lado, demostrar empíricamente el impacto del apego a la marca del vendedor (SBA) en el resultado de las ventas y, por otro lado, identificar los mediadores de esta relación en el comercio minorista.

Se realizó una encuesta con una muestra de 206 vendedores de pequeños minoristas provenientes de diferentes sectores de un país emergente. El modelo estructural se analizó mediante ecuaciones estructurales basada en mínimos cuadrados (PLS-SEM) utilizando SmartPLS3.

Los resultados mostraron que el SBA es esencial para impulsar el resultado de las ventas a través de dos caminos relevantes: uno siguiendo el SBA-satisfacción-rendimiento y la otra dirección siguiendo el SBA-compromiso-rendimiento. El modelo fue capaz de explicar el 63% del rendimiento.

Con respecto a los pequeños minoristas, donde los propietarios, empleados y gerentes tienen niveles más altos de interacción que las grandes cadenas minoristas nacionales, los ejecutivos de marketing deben invertir en mejorar el apego a la marca y crear vínculos emocionales y cognitivos entre los vendedores y la marca. Deben desarrollar estrategias para promover la satisfacción laboral y el compromiso organizacional ya que determinan el rendimiento.

A pesar de la relevancia de las pequeñas empresas para las economías de todo el mundo y la importancia de las relaciones de marca en los vendedores, no se ha desarrollado ningún estudio para demostrar los impactos de tales relaciones en el rendimiento de los vendedores en el comercio minorista. Además, aparte del papel central del compromiso organizacional en la investigación en ventas, este es el primer estudio que explora cómo media la relación entre el apego a la marca y el resultado de las ventas.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role that the sociocultural, family and university environment play in the entrepreneurial intention of young people in a peripheral and less innovative region.

The authors adopted the perspective of the theory of planned behavior and made an empirical study with a sample of 1,064 Spanish university students who voluntarily participated in the GUESSS Project answering an online questionnaire. A methodology based on structural equations was used employing the partial least squares structural equation modeling estimation technique.

The results show that the university environment directly influences attitude, self-confidence and motivation, and indirectly the students’ entrepreneurial intention. The social context also exerts a weak direct influence on the perceived attitudes or desires toward the option to start a business and indirectly on the intention.

The main contribution of this paper seems to confirm what previous literature highlighted in the terms of regional specificities on the link between innovation systems, the impact of entrepreneurial potential and economic development. In this sense, the university context can play an important role in generating improvements in the entrepreneurial intention’s antecedents of young people with greater potential for innovation in peripheral regions. Therefore, when it comes to defining policies to improve entrepreneurship in these regions, it seems that the establishment of entrepreneurship education and motivation programs in universities is a very effective tool to increase perceived attitude toward the option to start a new business.

This paper studies the lateral stability regulation of intelligent electric vehicle (EV) based on model predictive control (MPC) algorithm.

Firstly, the bicycle model is adopted in the system modelling process. To improve the accuracy, the lateral stiffness of front and rear tire is estimated using the real-time yaw rate acceleration and lateral acceleration of the vehicle based on the vehicle dynamics. Then the constraint of input and output in the model predictive controller is designed. Soft constraints on the lateral speed of the vehicle are designed to guarantee the solved persistent feasibility and enforce the vehicle’s sideslip angle within a safety range.

The simulation results show that the proposed lateral stability controller based on the MPC algorithm can improve the handling and stability performance of the vehicle under complex working conditions.

The MPC schema and the objective function are established. The integrated active front steering/direct yaw moments control strategy is simultaneously adopted in the model. The vehicle’s sideslip angle is chosen as the constraint and is controlled in stable range. The online estimation of tire stiffness is performed. The vehicle’s lateral acceleration and the yaw rate acceleration are modelled into the two-degree-of-freedom equation to solve the tire cornering stiffness in real time. This can ensure the accuracy of model.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is already upon us. The rapid development of AI tools is facilitating sustainable development and its corollary social good. For AI dedicated to social good to be impactful, it has to be human-centred, striving to achieve inclusiveness, sustainable livelihoods and community well-being. In short, it offers major opportunities to holistically enhance peoples' lives in diverse areas: education, health care, food security, disaster reduction, smart cities, etc. However, ethical, unbiased and ‘secure-by-design’ algorithms that power AI are crucial to building trust in this technology. Civil society's engagement can hopefully drive the features and values that should be embedded in AI.

This chapter focuses on the societal benefits that AI can deliver. Our initiatives and decisions of today will fashion the ‘Social Good’ AI applications of tomorrow. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) being addressed are 2–4 and 10–11.

This study aims to assess the efficiency of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) countries in achieving sustainable development by analyzing their ability to convert resources and technological innovations into sustainable outcomes.

Using data envelopment analysis (DEA), the study evaluates the economic, environmental and social efficiency of BRICS countries over the period 2010–2018. It ranks these countries based on their sustainable development performance and compares them to the period 2000–2007.

The study reveals varied efficiency levels among BRICS countries. Russia and South Africa lead in certain sustainable development aspects. South Africa excels in environmental sustainability, whereas Brazil is efficient in resource utilization for sustainable growth. China and India, despite economic growth, face challenges such as pollution and lower quality of life.

The study’s findings are constrained by the DEA methodology and the selection of variables. It highlights the need for more nuanced research incorporating recent global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical shifts.

Insights from this study can inform targeted and effective sustainability strategies in BRICS nations, focusing on areas such as industrial quality improvement, employment conditions and environmental policies.

The study underscores the importance of balancing economic growth with social and environmental considerations, highlighting the need for policies addressing inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.

This research provides a unique comparative analysis of BRICS countries’ sustainable development efficiency, challenging conventional perceptions and offering a new perspective on their progress.

This study aims to propose and test a model that examines the potential connections between two teacher situational variables (teacher immediacy and credibility) and three learner affective factors (motivation, attitudes and communication confidence) and to examine how such associations predict learners’ L2WTC (Foreign/second language willingness to communicate) in a language class via a comprehensive communication model to structurally verify the theoretically based associations among these variables.

In total, 214 females and 198 males took part in the study with age range between 19 and 38 years. Participants filled in a verified, translated Arabic version of the questionnaires using an online questionnaire. Data were gathered using questionnaires and were analyzed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis and sequential mediation analysis using bootstrapping methods to identify and verify direct and indirect paths in the model.

The initial L2 communication structural model showed acceptable goodness of model fit. Teacher credibility and immediacy behaviors only indirectly predicted L2WTC through the mediation of affective variables. Motivation and communication confidence mediated the relationship between credibility and L2WTC, while the association between immediacy and L2WTC was mediated by communication confidence.

The findings of this study have important pedagogical implications globally for professions related to communication instruction, especially with regard to teacher credibility behaviors and particularly for practitioners and beneficiaries in EFL contexts where learners are widely acknowledged for their unwillingness to communicate in foreign language classes.