Abstract
Modern electric vehicles are most often designed with actuator redundancy and in-wheel propulsion, a combination that appears particularly suitable for the design of motion controllers that can optimally blend multiple objectives, such as dynamic, safety and driver-oriented. This paper considers such a technological setting and concentrates on the design of a path-following algorithm with minimum-time features, with the aim of combining performance and energy-oriented optimization of the vehicle motion. Specifically, an approximate minimum-time trajectory is obtained by appropriate convexification of the resulting optimization problem. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed by means of simulation tests carried out on the CarSim vehicle simulation environment.

Abstract
This study presents a scheme to detect and isolate faults in over-actuated electric vehicles. Although this research work is still emerging, it already provides a view of the main challenges on the problem and discusses some possible approaches that can be useful to overcome the key difficulties. This paper intends to present a fault detection algorithm based on Unknown Input Observer (UIO). The residuals are built through the difference of signals between the measured outputs and the output estimations from the observer. The main idea is to detect fault in the electric motors and steering wheel actuator. The algorithm is presented and tested with some fault scenarios using the co-simulation tool between Simulink/MATLAB and the high-fidelity model from Carsim software.

Abstract
This paper presents a new approach to an audio-based indoor localization system. By using audio signals emitted by a public address sound system, mobile devices may globally localize themselves in an indoor environment where global navigation satellite systems are not viable or reliable. The use of data hiding techniques such as spread spectrum coding or echo hiding has allowed to convey information to a receiver avoiding people’s perception of the added audio content. Results demonstrate a relatively quite good localization with centimetre accuracy and precision and successful data transmission using barely perceptible audio signals.

Abstract
The automation of road vehicles has become a necessity to improve the efficiency and safety of this system. In a vehicle formation it is important to maintain a safety distance between the vehicles. The control of a vehicle spacing distance and longitudinal velocity can be achieved through the implementation of a model-based predictive controller. This implementation of a cooperative adaptive cruise control allows the access of another vehicle state information through vehicular communication technology and promote state prediction and ultimately system stability. The optimization algorithm performs the computation of the control input in a control horizon window and ensures that the spacing error takes only positive values. The results of the proposed controller are evaluated through the computational tool Simulink in the two-vehicle platoon. The controller is implemented in the precedent vehicle. To assess the performance of the proposed controller different control parameters and constraints were used.

Abstract
This letter presents a novel architecture for evaluating the success of picking operations that are executed by industrial robots. It is formed by a cascade of machine learning algorithms (kNN and SVM) and uses information obtained by a 6 axis force/torque sensor and, if available, information from the built-in sensors of the robotic gripper. Beyond measuring the success or failure of the entire operation, this architecture makes it possible to detect in real-time when an object is slipping during the picking. Therefore, force and torque signatures are collected during the picking movement of the robot, which is decomposed into five different stages that allows to characterize distinct levels of success over time. Several trials were performed using an industrial robot with two different grippers for picking a long and flexible object. The experiments demonstrate the reliability of the proposed approach under different picking scenarios since, it obtained a testing performance (in terms of accuracy) up to 99.5% of successful identification of the result of the picking operations, considering an universe of 400 attempts.

Abstract
This paper describes a robot with 12 degrees of freedom for pick-and-place operations using bricks. In addition, an optimization approach is proposed, which determines the state of each joint (that establishes the pose for the robot) based on the target position while minimizing the effort of the servomotors avoiding the inverse kinematics problem, which is a hard task for a 12 DOF robot manipulator. Therefore, it is a multi-objective optimization problem that will be solved using two optimization methods: the Stretched Simulated Annealing method and the NSGA II method. The experiments conducted in a simulation environment prove that the proposed approach is able to determine a solution for the inverse kinematics problem. A real robot formed by several servomotors and a gripper is also presented in this research for validating the solutions.