Abstract
Intensive cattle farming as a means of protein production contributes with the direct emission of greenhouse gases and the indirect contamination of soil and water. The public awareness towards this issue is growing in western cultures, leading to the stagnation of meat consumption and to the willingness to adopt alternative sustainable sources of protein. A solution is to farm insects as they present a reduced environmental impact and constitute a well-known source of protein. However, for westerners, eating insects implies a cultural change as they are still seen as dirty and disgusting. In 2022, a team of five EPS@ISEP students chose to design a solution for this problem followed by the assembly and test of the corresponding proof-of-concept prototype. They decided to design a home farming kit to grow mealworms driven by ethical, sustainable and the market needs. Exploring the insect life-cycle, the kit provides protein for humans and animals, chitin for soil bacteria and frass for plants. It can also be used as an educational tool for children to learn about sustainability, social responsibility and insect life-cycles, helping to overtake the cultural barrier against insect eating from a young age. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Abstract
Tourists nowadays tend to avoid tourist traps and are looking for engaging ways to explore cities in the limited time they have. Standard options to explore cities seldom offer a combination between efficiency and fun. Furthermore, a search for an exploration city app returns an unlimited supply of lookalike websites and apps, all claiming to be the best. This paper reports the development of QRioCity, an efficient and exciting way to explore cities, by the “Dragonics” student team. QRioCity offers users the option to sign up for a playful tour through the city of Porto using a public kiosk with an interactive touchscreen. There is no limit to the number of teams playing simultaneously nor there is need to provide personal data. The teams are led through the city using clues and are proposed assignments, like scanning QR codes, to earn points. At the end of the game, every team receives discount coupons for local shops or stores depending on their score, even when they play alone. This way QRioCity helps tourists enjoying the local city life while offering municipalities a chance to strengthen their local economy. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Abstract
The Visual-Action Reinforcement Integrator for Actor-Critic with Temporal Observations (VIRIATO) is a compact multi-input feature-extractor architecture designed to enable robust visual navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) conducting close-range inspection of photovoltaic arrays. The target task of low-altitude flight over dynamic, visually variable surfaces without privileged information is inherently partially observable. VIRIATO augments stacked image observations with a short history of recent past actions, producing a richer latent state for the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agent. Training is performed with domain randomization to expose the policy to diverse lighting, backgrounds and panel layouts. In simulation, VIRIATO yields faster learning and improved sample efficiency compared to a standard image-only Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature extractor, achieving lower position and yaw errors and substantially better robustness under image perturbations while retaining high task completion rates. The architecture is intentionally simple and general: it improves temporal awareness without adding complex recurrence, and it could be adapted to other perception-driven robotic tasks. These results demonstrate that integrating historical action data with visual encoding, together with domain randomization, is an effective way to achieve reliable autonomous vision-based navigation. © 2026 IEEE.