Reverse logistics lacks an exhaustive study on its impact on supply chain management and its integration with Continuous Improvement. Through a survey submitted to companies in the northern region of Portugal, this study shows how reverse logistics and Continuous Improvement have been considered and applied by companies. Microsoft Forms was used to properly administer the survey, which was submitted to 80 companies to collect data from a convenience sample. Yet, it was only possible to validate 60 responses, which, for a confidence level of 90%, represents a margin of error of 10.62%. Regarding the data analysis, descriptive statistics was used to present the main results. Nonetheless, normality tests were also carried out to understand if parametric or non-parametric methods could be applied to analyze the number of weekly hours dedicated to the reverse logistics process. The results show that most companies have informal reverse logistic management, being the biggest companies or those with higher turnover who apply a formal process. The main activity performed in the reverse logistics process is resale and remanufacture. For the interviewed companies, the main reason for having a reverse logistics process is to reduce materials’ or products’ costs and simultaneously increase profits by reusing products or materials. Regarding the factors that impact the performance of RL systems, the non-uniformity of the returned product is the most demandable. The most widely used continuous improvement tools in reverse logistics are 5S and the Kaizen. In sum, despite the benefits of improving customer satisfaction, reverse logistics should also be considered in enhancing sustainability and complying with regulations.

Once a person is diagnosed (or a caregiver suspects that the person may have) cognitive disabilities he may lose the state of being autonomous, which may range from partial to total loss of independence, according to the level of incidence. Smart houses may be used as a tentative solution to overcome this situation. However, when one goes outside their premises, this alternative may become unusable. Indeed, due to the decreased orientation ability, caregivers may prevent these people from going out, as they may get lost. Therefore, we are developing a system for people with mild or moderate cognitive disabilities that guides the user through an augmented reality interface and provides a localization tool for caregivers. The orientation method implements a speculative computation module, thus the system may calculate and anticipate possible user mistakes and issue alerts before he takes the wrong path. Through a trajectory mining module, the path is also adjusted to user preferences. These two modules enable the system to adapt to the user.

Athletic robots demand a whole-body actuation system design that utilizes motors up to the boundaries of their performance. However, creating such robots poses challenges of integrating design principles and reasoning of practical design choices. This paper presents a design framework that guides designers to find optimal design choices to create an actuation system that can rapidly generate torques and velocities required to achieve a given set of tasks, by minimizing inertia and leveraging cooperation between actuators. The framework serves as an interactive tool for designers who are in charge of providing design rules and candidate components such as motors, reduction mechanism, and coupling mechanisms between actuators and joints. A binary integer linear optimization explores design combinations to find optimal components that can achieve a set of tasks. The framework is demonstrated with 200 optimal design studies of a biped with 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) legs, focusing on the effect of achieving multiple tasks (walking, lifting), constraining the mass budget of all motors in the system and the use of coupling mechanisms. The result provides a comprehensive view of how design choices and rules affect reflected inertia, copper loss of motors, and force capability of optimal actuation systems.