Boosting innovation and research in the agricultural sector is crucial if farmers are asked to produce more with less. Precision agriculture offers different solutions to assist farmers in improving efficiency and reducing labor costs while respecting the legal requirements. Precision spraying enables the treatment of only the plants that require it, with the right amount of products. Our research group has developed a solution based on a reconfigurable vehicle with a high degree of automation for the distribution of plant protection products in vineyards and greenhouses. The synergy between the vehicle and the spraying management system we developed is an innovative solution with high technological content, and attempts to account for the current European and global directives in the field of agricultural techniques. The objectives of our system are the development of an autonomous vehicle and a spraying management system that allows safe and accurate autonomous spraying operations.

This paper is focused on the study and the control of a process of robotic arc welding. The system developed has been used to study the whole process and to develop an automatic controller for the arc process of deposition. The process consists of a shaped metal deposition (SMD) system that is an innovative method for the manufacturing of metal objects, which uses a layer-by-layer deposition technique. A useful software interface has been implemented in a Labview environment to study the system and to develop and tune the parameters of an automatic controller.

Unmanned Ground Vehicles can be a useful tool to help operators in humanitarian demining. However in many difficult environments autonomous operations are impossible and moreover it can be really difficult to teleoperate the robot from an onboard camera. This work presents an architecture to allow cooperation between a ground robot and a quadrotor UAV. The UAV can autonomously follow the ground robot, by using an image processing algorithm. In this way aerial images are provided that can help trajectory planning in rough environments, via a developed webGIS platform.

The study of volcanic activity is important from a scientific point of view as it allows for a better understanding of one of the most spectacular geological phenomena and of the working principles that are at the basis of geophysics. Furthermore, there are numerous events that directly result from volcanic eruptions and that affect many populations. Therefore, improving the prediction methods of eruptive phenomena would be of great benefit. There are more than 1,500 potentially active volcanoes in the world, and roughly 10% of the world's population live in areas directly threatened by volcanoes. In all of these areas, volcanoes have a strong influence on many day-to-day activities. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in April 2010 caused the cancellation of more than 100,000 European flights and, consequently, left more than 10 million passengers stranded. Each year, on a graver note, many regions in the world are destroyed or heavily damaged by lava or pyroclastic flows, in some cases, resulting in numbers of casualties that could have been avoided with the improvement of early warning systems.

This paper focuses on the use of low-cost inertial sensors in industrial manipulators. In particular, an easy-to-install joint-angle estimation method is proposed. This scheme can work independently from the primary encoder-based sensor, for the creation of a fault-detection system. It can also be the primary joint-angle sensor in low-cost robotic manipulators. A robot with six degrees of freedom has been used, with three inertial measurement units set on its arms; one for each pair of joints. Three cascaded extended Kalman filters have been used to estimate the joint angles by the fusion of the outputs of triaxial gyroscopes and accelerometers. The results of three experimental tests are reported in order to show the performance and limitations of this approach, in comparison with the simple gyroscope measurements integration.