This paper presents the design of a wireless sensor network particularly designed for remote monitoring and control of industrial parameters. The article describes the network components, protocol and sensor deployment, aimed to accomplish industrial constraint and to assure reliability and low power consumption. A particular case of study is presented. The system consists of a base station, gas sensing nodes, a tree-based routing scheme for the wireless sensor nodes and a real-time monitoring application that operates from a remote computer and a mobile phone. The system assures that the industrial safety quality and the measurement and monitoring system achieves an efficient industrial monitoring operations. The robustness of the developed system and the security in the communications have been guaranteed both in hardware and software level. The system is flexible and can be adapted to different environments. The testing of the system confirms the feasibility of the proposed implementation and validates the functional requirements of the developed devices, the networking solution and the power consumption management.

Recently, research on hybrid mobile robots is attracting considerable interest due to the ability of these systems to perform service tasks in heterogeneous scenarios and irregular terrains. This paper proposes a specific hybrid locomotion configuration, which combines legs and Mecanum-omniwheels into a six-legged hexapod robot. Theoretical backgrounds and open issues are addressed by considering some challenging problems such as: gait planning, modeling omnidirectional motion and designing a control architecture for combining locomotion modes. The paper demonstrates suitability, feasibility and successful performance of the proposed locomotion strategies and presents experimental results and novel scientific contributions regarding the motion of hybrid mobile robots.

This paper presents a wireless fault detection system for industrial motors that combines vibration, motor current and temperature analysis, thus improving the detection of mechanical faults. The design also considers the time of detection and further possible actions, which are also important for the early detection of possible malfunctions, and thus for avoiding irreversible damage to the motor. The remote motor condition monitoring is implemented through a wireless sensor network (WSN) based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The deployed network uses the beacon-enabled mode to synchronize several sensor nodes with the coordinator node, and the guaranteed time slot mechanism provides data monitoring with a predetermined latency. A graphic user interface offers remote access to motor conditions and real-time monitoring of several parameters. The developed wireless sensor node exhibits very low power consumption since it has been optimized both in terms of hardware and software. The result is a low cost, highly reliable and compact design, achieving a high degree of autonomy of more than two years with just one 3.3 V/2600 mAh battery. Laboratory and field tests confirm the feasibility of the wireless system.

Maneuvering autonomous vehicles in constrained environments is not a trivial task. This paper concentrates in the practical maneuvering of electrical vehicles. The autonomous vehicles considered in the paper, ROMEO-3R and ROMEO-4R, have been developed at the University of Seville, Seville, Spain, as the result of the adaptation of a tricycle and a car-like conventional electrical vehicles for transportation of people, respectively. Moreover, maneuvering of ROMEO-4R backing up a trailer has also been considered. A particular maneuver, namely, autonomous parallel parking, has been used to illustrate the application of the presented methods to different electrical vehicles.