The primary objective of a depalletizing system is to automate the process of detecting and locating specific variable-shaped objects on a pallet, allowing a robotic system to accurately unstack them. Although many solutions exist for the problem in industrial and manufacturing settings, the application to small-scale scenarios such as retail vending machines and small warehouses has not received much attention so far. This paper presents a comparative analysis of four different computer vision algorithms for the depalletizing task, implemented on a Raspberry Pi 4, a very popular single-board computer with low computer power suitable for the IoT and edge computing. The algorithms evaluated include the following: pattern matching, scale-invariant feature transform, Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF, and Haar cascade classifier. Each technique is described and their implementations are outlined. Their evaluation is performed on the task of box detection and localization in the test images to assess their suitability in a depalletizing system. The performance of the algorithms is given in terms of accuracy, robustness to variability, computational speed, detection sensitivity, and resource consumption. The results reveal the strengths and limitations of each algorithm, providing valuable insights for selecting the most appropriate technique based on the specific requirements of a depalletizing system.

Battery energy storage systems (BESSs) play a vital role in contemporary smart grids, but their increasing digitalisation exposes them to sophisticated cyberattacks. Existing anomaly detection approaches typically treat sensor measurements as flat feature vectors, overlooking the intrinsic relational structure of cyber–physical systems. This work introduces an enhanced Graph Neural Network (GNN) autoencoder for unsupervised BESS anomaly detection that integrates multiscale graph construction, multi-head graph attention, manifold regularisation via latent compactness and graph smoothness, contrastive embedding shaping, and an ensemble anomaly scoring mechanism. A comprehensive evaluation across seven BESS and firmware cyberattack datasets demonstrates that the proposed method achieves near-perfect Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision–Recall Area Under the Curve (PR AUC) (up to 1.00 on several datasets), outperforming classical one-class models such as Isolation Forest, One-Class Support Vector Machine (One-Class SVM), and Local Outlier Factor on the most challenging scenarios. These results illustrate the strong potential of graph-informed representation learning for cybersecurity monitoring in distributed energy resource infrastructures.

Frequency-invariant beam patterns are often required by systems using an array of sensors to process broadband signals. In some experimental conditions (small devices for underwater acoustic communication), the array spatial aperture is shorter than the involved wavelengths. In these conditions, superdirective beamforming is essential for an efficient system. We present a comparison between two methods that deal with a data-independent beamformer based on a filter-and-sum structure. Both methods (the first one numerical, the second one analytic) formulate a mathematical convex minimization problem, in which the variables to be optimized are the filters coefficients or frequency responses. The goal of the optimization is to obtain a frequency invariant superdirective beamforming with a tunable tradeoff between directivity and frequency-invariance. We compare pros and cons of both methods measured through quantitative metrics to wrap up conclusions and further proposed investigations.