Author supplied: Abstract—The growing importance and impact of new technologies are changing many industries. This effect is especially noticeable in the manufacturing industry. This paper explores a practical implementation of a hybrid architecture for the newest generation of manufacturing systems. …

Research and development of robots which can support elderly or disabled people is pursued to increase the quality of home care. With the ever increasing quality and functions of robots, full-time care by these robots becomes feasible. To make the robot function without any human interferences, the robot …

Vertical farming is a promising new technology for increasing crop yields per square meter. However, little research has been done so far in people's perception of this technology. The aim of this project was to gain a better understanding of consumers' attitude on small scale vertical farming at home. …

Recently, the use of military robots – which may be drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), remotely piloted systems, autonomous weapon systems or ‘killer robots’ – has been debated in the media, politics, and academia. Military robots are increasingly automated, which means that they can perform tasks …

When using autonomous reconfigurable manufacturing system, that offers generic services, there is the possibility to dynamically manufacture a range of products using the same manufacturing equipment. Opportunities are created to optimally scale the production using reconfiguration means and automatically …

Swarm planning is a theory and practical approach to deal with uncertain futures. By anticipating scenarios such as a ‘post-carbon’ world and a ‘pre-adaptive’ landscape, it offers an alternative pathway to prepare for medium-term incremental and step changes. The focus is on the regional scale with a …

Introduction: Ambient intelligence technologies are a means to support ageing-in-place by monitoring clients in the home. In this study, monitoring is applied for the purpose of raising an alarm in an emergency situation, and thereby, providing an increased sense of safety and security. Apart from these …

This paper describes an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based underlying …