Abstract

Abstract
STEM graduates play a key role in the society's sustainable development, contributing to the productivity, competitiveness and progress of the economy. However, the number of students enrolled in STEM courses is low, despite the high demand and valuation by the labour market. This reality is even more striking when analysing the numbers related to the presence of women in STEM fields, particularly in engineering courses. The under-representation of women is a problem arising from multiple factors that need to be overcome through educational policies and specific initiatives. This article describes the iProg, Scratch on Road, and Scratch4All projects that aimed at the development of competences in technological areas, namely in programming and robotics, among students from basic schools. The positive impacts of the mentioned projects encouraged the authors to create the Make a Lab project, a partnership between Coimbra Institute of Engineering (ISEC) and CASPAE, a Private Social Solidarity Institution. The central goal of this project is to respond to the critical gender gap in STEM subjects, having as a goal that 70% of the students involved in the program activities should be women. This project aims to promote interest in science and technology in students from secondary schools through the use of creative, experimental and exploratory approaches. The development of technological products adopt project based learning methodologies, mainly implemented in a laboratory located at ISEC campus. The co-definition and co-creation of these products is based on a mentoring process carried out by ISEC students, preferably women. One-off initiatives will also be carried out, as for instance hands-on experiences and thematic workshops. An itinerant exhibition will be organized using the technological products developed over the Make a Lab project. The exhibition will be available to basic and secondary schools, after the terminus of the project.

Abstract
This work performs a comparative analysis of battery energy storage system (BESS) participation in the multi-services electricity market, considering the optimal operating cost and better profitability for the BESS portfolios. A comparison of the application of these portfolios in different market conditions is proposed: (i) energy-only market, (ii) reserve-only market, (iii) sequential energy and reserve market, and (vi) joint energy and reserve market. For each BESS portfolio, hourly strategies for buying and selling offers are proposed, to maximize the revenue, accounting for the expected load and generation variations in the grid. The analysis of the BESS strategies is carried out through a case study based on actual generation data, where operating costs and BESS flexibility are assessed. One conclusion is that, even though, BESS makes a profit by participating in single markets, the best strategy is to participate in both energy and reserve markets, especially in the presence of a joint energy and reserve market model.

Abstract

Abstract
Current collaborative augmented reality (AR) systems establish a common localization coordinate frame among users by exchanging and comparing maps comprised of feature points. However, relative positioning through map sharing struggles in dynamic or feature-sparse environments. It also requires that users exchange identical regions of the map, which may not be possible if they are separated by walls or facing different directions. In this paper, we present Cappella11Like its musical inspiration, Cappella utilizes collaboration among agents to forgo the need for instrumentation, an infrastructure-free 6-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) positioning system for multi-user AR applications that uses motion estimates and range measurements between users to establish an accurate relative coordinate system. Cappella uses visual-inertial odometry (VIO) in conjunction with ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging radios to estimate the relative position of each device in an ad hoc manner. The system leverages a collaborative particle filtering formulation that operates on sporadic messages exchanged between nearby users. Unlike visual landmark sharing approaches, this allows for collaborative AR sessions even if users do not share the same field of view, or if the environment is too dynamic for feature matching to be reliable. We show that not only is it possible to perform collaborative positioning without infrastructure or global coordinates, but that our approach provides nearly the same level of accuracy as fixed infrastructure approaches for AR teaming applications. Cappella consists of an open source UWB firmware and reference mobile phone application that can display the location of team members in real time using mobile AR. We evaluate Cappella across mul-tiple buildings under a wide variety of conditions, including a contiguous 30,000 square foot region spanning multiple floors, and find that it achieves median geometric error in 3D of less than 1 meter.

Abstract