Modern manufacturing has to cope with dynamic and changing circumstances. Market fluctuations, the effects caused by unpredictable material shortages, highly variable product demand, and worker availability all require system robustness, flexibility, and resilience. To adapt to these new requirements, manufacturers should consider investigating, investing in, and implementing system autonomy. Autonomy is being adopted in multiple industrial contexts, but divergences arise when formalizing the concept of autonomous systems. To develop an implementation of autonomous manufacturing systems, it is essential to specify what autonomy means, how autonomous manufacturing systems are different from other autonomous systems, and how autonomous manufacturing systems are identified and achieved through the main features and enabling technologies. With a comprehensive literature review, this paper provides a definition of autonomy in the manufacturing context, infers the features of autonomy from different engineering domains, and presents a five-level model of autonomy — associated with maturity levels for the features — to ensure the complete identification and evaluation of autonomous manufacturing systems. The paper also presents the evaluation of a real autonomous system that serves as a use-case and a validation of the model.

In this paper, we present a system for counting people on public transport. The system consists of a single camera, and it process videos obtained from the camcorder to perform an algorithm to identify and to count people using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The system is implemented by Cpp language based on OpenCV. People counting is an important factor to guarantee safe road trips as transport vehicles must not exceed an established number of passengers. This research is aimed to create a technological tool that helps to comply with the Transit Law in Ecuador. We describe different processing blocks dedicated to the detection, segmentation, direction estimation, counting, and evaluation of images to present its results during the standard travel of a bus.

Product development requires sharing information of a diverse nature between several actors. Since the new products resulting from this process often require assembly as part of their manufacturing processes, it becomes necessary to promote a functional information representation for the assembly domain. Several authors have proposed different core concepts to represent the information related to assembly. However, the resulting body of knowledge is fragmented and lacks a unified concept and definition of the information this concept should contain to be broadly adopted by the academy and industry. This study aims to identify and characterize the core concepts used to enclose the assembly information (e.g., assembly features, ports, connectors, and others) by conducting a literature review in the domain of discrete manufacturing, considering the period between 1985 and 2022. It was found that the literature is rich in concepts but often diverging: a clear depiction of the assembly information required by the involved stakeholders during the whole product development process remains elusive. This work's contribution addresses this gap by identifying the perspectives from which the assembly information can be studied, and the information required to describe the assembly process fully. The resulting information requirements were used to assess the existing approaches addressing assembly information representation. These findings can be used as a base to establish a comprehensive assembly information representation in the future.

The different forms of data representation have created the need for a common language capable of describing the design, manufacturing and measurement data. ISO 14649, known as STEP-NC, began as an effort to standardise product data exchange typically for computerised numerical control (CNC). However, although there are several studies involving the application of STEP-NC in CNC machines, which use the G-code format (ISO 6983), there is not much work on the application of STEP-NC in generating programmes for industrial robots, which are being increasingly used in production lines, both in quantity and variety. One of the reasons for the difficulty in applying STEP-NC to robots is that the controller needs to receive commands in a specific language imposed by each manufacturer, resulting in a large number of robot programming languages and difficulty in achieving standardisation. This work proposes a procedure that uses forward and inverse kinematics methods applicable to serial and hybrid robots, allowing STEP-NC-compliant information to be received and generates the path along which the robot should move, reducing the time for setup and integration of robots in manufacturing. These paths were tested on three robots with different morphologies, in a virtual environment, confirming the feasibility of the method.

Medical simulators have become an important tool for teaching and developing skills in health personnel. The present work describes the design and construction of a simulator for cardiopulmonary resuscitation in adults, of intermediate fidelity, equipped with monitoring software. This device has an adult-size torso, with sensors and actuators controlled and monitored wirelessly through the user’s computer. The prototype aims to assist in the training of paramedics and first responders, due to its ability to show real-time data on the execution of the cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuver. The simulator has been designed in a modular way so that it allows an easy assembly and change of pieces if necessary. The graphical interface gives feedback in real time on the effectiveness of the maneuver. Based on surveys carried out in trained personnel, it was confirmed that the simulator is very useful to carry out practices for which it was designed, as well as to reduce the cost of implementation by being built with materials available in the local market.