2025
Autores
Pacheco, FD; Rebelo, PM; Sousa, RB; Silva, MF; Mendonça, HS;
Publicação
2025 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTONOMOUS ROBOT SYSTEMS AND COMPETITIONS, ICARSC
Abstract
Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technologies automate the identification of objects and persons, having several applications in retail, manufacturing, and intralogistics sectors. Several works explore the application of RFID systems in robotics and intralogistics, focusing on locating robots, tags, and inventory management. This paper addresses the challenge of intralogistics cargo trolleys communicating their characteristics to an autonomous mobile robot through an RFID system. The robot must know the trolley's relative pose to avoid collisions with the surroundings. As a result, the passive tag on the cargo communicates information to the robot, including the base footprint of the trolley. The proposed RFID system includes the development of a controller board to interact with the frontend integrated circuit of an external antenna onboard the industrial mobile robot. Experimental results assess the system's readability distance in two distinct environments and with two different antenna modules. All the code and documentation are available in a public repository.
2025
Autores
Mendonça, HS; Alves, JC;
Publicação
2025 7TH EXPERIMENT@ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, EXP.AT'25
Abstract
As digital design methodologies and tools are evolving to higher abstraction levels, teaching the low-level concepts of digital electronic system design is becoming increasingly challenging. The raise of the design abstraction level and, more recently, the ability of AI-assisted automated design is pushing the interest of students away from the lower-level details of the digital world. Nevertheless, digital electronic systems are (still) made of transistors, gates and flip-flops, and people do need to keep this basic knowledge to be able to build efficient circuits, understand them and develop the essential electronic design automation tools. For learning these subjects, hands-on experimentation, and learning by doing, is proven to be an effective tool, and when students finally see and feel the results of their designs, motivation raises rapidly. This paper presents the technical aspects of a platform created in the DECEL project to support an FPGA-based remote laboratory based on a commercial single-board computer that can be located somewhere in the Internet. This computer runs a Linux operating system and is based on an AMD/XILINX device that integrates in the same chip an ARM Cortex A9 CPU and a region of FPGA programmable logic. The user develops a digital circuit using standard hardware-description languages (Verilog or VHDL) and runs the implementation tools for the target FPGA using a very simple web interface running in a remote server.
2025
Autores
Mendonça, HS; Alves, JC;
Publicação
2025 7TH EXPERIMENT@ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, EXP.AT'25
Abstract
This demo shows an infrastructure that allows for easy implementation of real remote labs. In this infrastructure, several nodes are remotely interconnected by publishing/subscribing MQTT messages. There are physical nodes capable of connecting to real circuits and/or sensors/actuators, and virtual nodes that implement simulated versions of circuits that interact remotely with signals from other nodes. The latencies that occur are low enough for groups of students located in different physical locations to benefit from a near real-time experience in interacting with the circuits thus implemented.
2025
Autores
Almeida, F; Leão, G; Costa, CM; Rocha, CD; Sousa, A; da Silva, LG; Rocha, LF; Veiga, G;
Publicação
ICINCO (1)
Abstract
The textile industry is experiencing rapid advancement, reflected in the adoption of innovative and efficient manufacturing techniques. The automation of clothing sewing systems has the potential to reduce the allocation of repetitive tasks to operators, freeing them for more value-added operations. There are several machines on the market that automatically sew the bottom hem of T-shirts, a key component of the garment that fulfills both functional and aesthetic purposes. However, most of them require the fabric to be positioned manually by an operator. To address this issue, this work presents a solution to automate the process of feeding a T-shirt into a SiRUBA sewing machine using a YuMi dual-arm robot. In this scenario, the T-shirt arrives at the workstation with the main front and back pieces of cloth sewn together, seams facing out, and with no sleeves yet. This setup starts by turning the garment inside out with the aid of an automated hanger, ensuring that the seams are facing inward (as the machine requires), and then using the dual-arm robot to feed the garment into the sewing machine. With our approach, the feeding and hemming process took less than 35 seconds, with a feeding success rate of 98%. Therefore, this work can serve as a steppingstone towards more efficient automated sewing systems within the garment production industry.
2025
Autores
Sousa, J; Brandau, B; Hemschik, R; Darabi, R; Sousa, A; Reis, LP; Brueckner, F; Reis, A;
Publicação
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
Abstract
Bringing AI models from digital to real-world applications presents significant challenges due to the complexity and variability of physical environments, often leading to unexpected model behaviors. We propose a framework that learns to translate images into control actions by modeling multimodal real-time data and system dynamics. This end-to-end controller offers enhanced explainability and robustness, making it well suited for complex manufacturing processes. This end-to-end framework differs from traditional approaches that rely on manually engineered features by learning complex relationships directly from raw data. Labels are only required during training to define the observable feature to be optimized. This adaptability significantly reduces development time and enhances scalability across varying conditions. This approach was tested in the Directed Energy Deposition (L-DED) process, a laser-based metal additive manufacturing technique that produces near-net-shape parts with exceptional energy efficiency and flexibility in both geometry and material selection. L-DED is inherently complex, involving multiphysics interactions, multiscale phenomena, and dynamic behaviors, which make modeling and optimization difficult. Effective control is crucial to ensure part quality in this dynamic environment. To address these challenges, we introduce Joint Embedding Multimodal Alignment with Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics for control (JEMA-SINDYc). It combines an image-based JEMA monitoring model, which predicts the melt pool size using only the on-axis sensor with labels provided by the off-axis camera, and dynamic modeling using SINDYc, which acts as a World Model by capturing system dynamics within the embedding space. Together, these components enable the development of an advanced controller trained via Behavioral Cloning. This approach improves part quality by minimizing porosity and reducing deformation. Thin-walled cylindrical parts were produced to validate and compare this approach with other control strategies, including both open-loop and JEMA-PID. This framework improves the reliability of AI-driven manufacturing and enhances control of complex industrial processes, potentially enabling wider adoption of the process.
2025
Autores
Monteiro, F; Sousa, A;
Publicação
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Abstract
Engineering is considered important in solving unsustainability. However, it is a complex problem that must be viewed, analysed and studied from various perspectives and taking with the contribution of various areas of knowledge. This work studied the use of interdisciplinarity as a contribution to interconnect ethics and sustainability with technical-scientific contents of electrical engineering. The research intended to use interdisciplinarity to help engineering students recognise that engineering is not ethically neutral, and that, therefore, the problems (and solutions) must also be analysed from an ethical and sustainability perspective. A framework was developed, and a pedagogical activity using interdisciplinarity was applied. Results show that, after the activity, students recognise that ethical values influence calculations in the area of electrical installations; and move from a single view to identify different alternatives, perspectives, motivations and multiple objectives. This leads to studying more alternatives and hopefully better overall technical solutions.
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