Abstract
The evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies has been notorious, both for leisure activities and for activities related to education. The efficiency of this technology in education leads us to point out several benefits and strengths, for students with specific educational needs (SEN), especially for those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In this sense, the growing number of students with ASD requires us to innovate so that we can rehabilitate this group of students, giving them a better quality of life. We can improve their skills: social, behavioural, emotional, cognitive; and even their daily tasks. VR offers a panoply of tools, such as interactive three-dimensional simulations of scenarios that can be used with students with ASD. In this literature review several studies were identified, where they differ in the type of applications developed and the technology used by the students. Although optimism prevails, we need more studies on the use of this technology in educational settings. Thus, this article presents a systematic review of the state of the art on VR perspectives and case studies applied to students with ASD. Case studies are presented where VR technology has been successfully applied and with results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology in students with ASD. We are aware that much has to be done still to make the potential of VR an effective reality in the educational context and to allow a better quality of life for students with autism spectrum disorders. Also, we believe that in the next years teachers will be ever more capable of creating specific VR experiences. However, it is essential to have a solid theoretical basis to support the correct use of VR regarding students with ASD. This is our goal with this contribution. © 2022 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
This research project consists of bringing innovation to the shop floor in such a way that it will allow its approach to the Industry 4.0 concept. The main aim includes integrating the present installed systems in order to provide its user with data as if it was a unique system. More concretely, this study intends to unify the information that comes from different systems: Manufacturing Execution System (MES); Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP); Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA); Product Lifecycle Management (PLM); Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS); Quality Management System (QMS). Integrating this data will enable the creation of automatic procedures which can eliminate the existing gaps within the communication among the different systems. Furthermore, this will allow a real-time view of the whole plant so that immediate decisions can be made in case of any occurrence. In order to provide data fusion from the distinct systems previously mentioned, machine learning (ML) methodology will be applied. This document presents the research done and the reviewed literature, as well as the technologies and methodologies needed in this project. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Robotic manipulators rely on feedback obtained from rotary encoders for control purposes. This article introduces a vision-based feedback system that can be used in an agricultural context, where the shapes and sizes of fruits are uncertain. We aim to mimic a human, using vision and touch as manipulator control feedback. This work explores the use of a fish-eye lens camera to track a SCARA manipulator with coloured markers on its joints for the position estimation with the goal to reduce costs and increase reliability. The Kalman Filter and the Particle Filter are compared and evaluated in terms of accuracy and tracking abilities of the marker's positions. The estimated image coordinates of the markers are converted to world coordinates using planar homography, as the SCARA manipulator has co-planar joints and the coloured markers share the same plane. Three laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the system's performance in joint angle estimation of a manipulator. The obtained results are promising, for future cost effective agricultural robotic arms developments. Besides, this work presents solutions and future directions to increase the joint position estimation accuracy.

Abstract
Autonomous driving is one of the fastest developing fields of robotics. With the ever-growing interest in autonomous driving, the ability to provide robots with both efficient and safe navigation capabilities is of paramount significance. With the continuous development of automation technology, higher levels of autonomous driving can be achieved with vision-based methodologies. Moreover, materials handling in industrial assembly lines can be performed efficiently using automated guided vehicles (AGVs). However, the visual perception of industrial environments is complex due to the existence of many obstacles in pre-defined routes. With the INDTECH 4.0 project, we aim to develop an autonomous navigation system, allowing the AGV to detect and avoid obstacles based in the processing of depth data acquired with a frontal depth camera mounted on the AGV. Applying the RANSAC (random sample consensus) and Euclidean clustering algorithms to the 3D point clouds captured by the camera, we can isolate obstacles from the ground plane and separate them into clusters. The clusters give information about the location of obstacles with respect to the AGV position. In experiments conducted outdoors and indoors, the results revealed that the method is very effective, returning high percentages of detection for most tests.

Abstract
The still prevalent use of paper conformity lists in the automotive industry has a serious negative impact on the performance of quality control inspectors. We propose instead a hybrid quality inspection system, where we combine automated detection with human feedback, to increase worker performance by reducing mental and physical fatigue, and the adaptability and responsiveness of the assembly line to change. The system integrates the hierarchical automatic detection of the non-conforming vehicle parts and information visualization on a wearable device to present the results to the factory worker and obtain human confirmation. Besides designing a novel 3D vehicle generator to create a digital representation of the non conformity list and to collect automatically annotated training data, we apply and aggregate in a novel way state-of-the-art domain adaptation and pseudo labeling methods to our real application scenario, in order to bridge the gap between the labeled data generated by the vehicle generator and the real unlabeled data collected on the factory floor. This methodology allows us to obtain, without any manual annotation of the real dataset, an example-based F1 score of 0.565 in an unconstrained scenario and 0.601 in a fixed camera setup (improvements of 11 and 14.6 percentage points, respectively, over a baseline trained with purely simulated data). Feedback obtained from factory workers highlighted the usefulness of the proposed solution, and showed that a truly hybrid assembly line, where machine and human work in symbiosis, increases both efficiency and accuracy in automotive quality control.