Usually, upon ordering a product, a robot selected the purchase from a shelf, read the barcode and delivered it to the counter for packaging. And hopefully, it didn’t collide with a human worker on its journey and lose its way.
The odds of that happening have now shortened, with the University of South Australia researchers developing an algorithm to help robots avoid running into humans and other moving obstacles in their path. UniSA mechatronics engineering lecturer Dr Habib Habibullah and colleagues have built a computer model that ensures mobile robots can recognise and avoid unexpected obstacles, finding the quickest and safest path to their destination.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Field Robotics, Dr Habibullah describes how his team combined the best elements of existing algorithms to achieve a collision-free TurtleBot able to adjust its speed and steering angles.
Dr Habibullah stated that there are two types of path planning strategies for mobile robots, depending on whether they are being used in fixed environments or where they are encountering moving obstacles, such as humans or machines. The first is fairly easy to program but the second is more challenging. There are several algorithms on the market trying to address the issue of robots colliding with moving objects, but none are fool-proof.
The UniSA researchers tested their model against two common online collision avoidance algorithms – Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) and Artificial Potential Field (APF) – and found theirs came up trumps. In a series of simulations in nine different scenarios, they compared collision rates, the average time to destination and the average speed of the robot.
In every scenario, the UniSA-designed algorithm helped robots successfully navigate a path without any collisions. In comparison, the DWA model was only 66 per cent effective, colliding with objects in three of the nine simulations. The APF model was also collision-free but took more time to reach its destination. The team’s proposed method sometimes took a longer path, but it was faster and safer, avoiding all collisions.
Dr Habibullah says their algorithm could be applied in many environments, including industrial warehouses where robots are commonly used, for robotic fruit picking, packing and pelletizing, and also for restaurant robots that deliver food from the kitchen to the table. The UniSA-designed algorithm can direct the TurtleBot to stop, take a turn and even reverse direction if it encounters anything in its path.
This could also be a potential solution for agricultural robots, for example, autonomous lawnmowers, ground robots for crop surveillance and autonomous weeding robots, where children, pets and other animals are often present,” Dr Habibullah said.
The global warehouse robotics market was valued at US$3.97 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach US$7.63 billion by 2026 and grow at a CAGR of 11.54% over the forecast period (2021-2026). The emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the advent of a network of connected systems are helping industries perform a multitude of tasks, such as material batching, picking, ordering, packaging, warehouse security, and inspection, as well as improve the operational efficiency by huge margins.
The growth in the e-commerce industry worldwide and the growing need for efficient warehousing and inventory management is driving the market growth. Automation in warehousing offers extreme convenience when it comes to cutting down overall business costs and reducing errors in product deliveries. According to a prominent 3PL company and a significant end-user of warehouse automation solutions, despite the advantages, 80% of warehouses are still manually operated with no supporting automation.
Further, warehouses, i.e., those that use conveyors, sorters, pick and place solutions, among other equipment (not necessarily automated), account for 15% of total warehouses. In contrast, only 5% of current warehouses are automatic.
Significant technological advancements, such as sensors technologies that enable an enhanced object perception and an accurate positioning system, have made way for the robotics industry to explore the untapped potential in various warehousing applications, while attaining an optimal operational flow and logistics efficiency, among other accomplishments, across the different industry verticals.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) has stated it expects to finish linking 100% of its administrative procedures to the National Single Window (NSW) system in the first quarter of 2022. To carry out the national and ASEAN single-window mechanisms, MARD has connected 29 of the 33 administrative procedures at its subordinate units and granted digital licences to over 1.4 million dossiers via the NSW. According to a news report, the Deputy Head of MARD’s Division for Organisational and Personnel Affairs, Nguyen Xuan An, made the announcement at the Ministry’s meeting earlier this week.
In terms of administrative reform, in 2021, the Ministry updated and publicised 119 administrative procedures on the National Public Service Portal, abolished 58 others, and simplified three procedures related to natural disaster prevention and control. It proposed 429 of the 2,559 regulations on business activities be removed or simplified while reducing nearly VND219 billion (US$9.6 million), or 13.2%, of the compliance cost related to business activities.
Regarding administrative modernisation, An noted that MARD stepped up IT application to its operations, completed its information and reporting system, which was also linked to the government, and applied digital signatures to all documents. In 2022, An informed it would handle administrative procedures online to enhance transparency and save time and costs. The Ministry would deal with people and businesses’ opinions about problems related to the mechanisms, policies, and procedures within its remit online and overhaul the institutional system on agriculture and rural development.
The country has been pushing to digitise its services and core government operations. Earlier this month, OpenGov Asia reported that Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh signed a decision approving a project to develop the population database and applications for e-identification and e-authentication for the 2022-2025 period with a vision to 2030. Under the scheme, apart from the database and applications, citizen ID cards with electronic chips will serve administrative procedures and online public services supply, socio-economic expansion, and digital citizens development. The project will aid the completion of the ecosystem on connecting, exploiting, and enriching population data and the directions by leaders at all levels. In 2022, the old and new versions of citizen IDs will be integrated, enabling the e-identification of all citizens.
The connection and sharing of data between the national population and tax databases are expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, while personal paper documents, including health insurance cards, driving licences, job licences, and vaccination certificates, will be integrated into the citizen IDs and the e-identification app VNEID. This year, e-authentication will be used for all information provided on the citizen IDs and VNEID. From 2023 to 2025, e-identification and e-authentication are expected to be applied to all people conducting administrative procedures at a one-stop-shop office at all levels. By 2023, the e-identification and e-authentication system will be upgraded, completed, and applied in e-transactions serving socio-economic development.
Smart cities are here to stay and are fast becoming the norm rather than an outlier. Smart cities use ICT to improve the lives of residents through more efficient utilisation of resources, assets and funds in an effort to better serve citizens. Smart cities optimise services and operations to enhance the overall citizen experience while simultaneously driving development and growth. Cutting edge technology is used to plan, design and manage resources and infrastructure in the best way possible.
According to a report, cities can use smart technologies to improve some key quality-of-life indicators by 10% to 30%. These increases could mean more lives saved, lesser crime, lowered health system burden and a cleaner, green environment.
There are, of course, challenges in creating smart cities. These challenges can seem overwhelming, as they range from things like legislative and policy roadblocks to funding challenges to technology infrastructure and security. The fact is, in as much as smart cities rely on technology, the key is not necessarily in how much technology is available but rather how well the available technology is deployed and exploited – Smart City Technology Management.
Read on to know about the five primary technologies required for a highly successful smart city environment and how all the pieces of the city’s infrastructure can work together as a cohesive whole.
The Odisha Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik, recently launched an online service for the identity verification and submission of life certificates for pensioners of the state government. The initiative was inaugurated under the state’s Digital Life Certificate system initiative. According to a report, the Chief Minister virtually launched the service while attending the orientation programme for newly recruited 153 officers of Odisha Civil Services. He claimed that Odisha is the first state in the country to implement such a digital service for pensioners.
Through the service, pensioners can now submit identification and life certificates using artificial intelligence (AI) based video-verification processes. It will be of immense help to the pensioners as they can submit their identification and life certificates digitally, without having to visit government offices and simply by using their mobile phones, Patnaik stated. This will help citizens follow COVID-19 social distancing protocols.
The facility will be available at the ‘Mo Seva Kendras’ located across the state. Patnaik also launched an E-Dairy, through which citizens can access all the information contained in the government diary, via their mobiles. These initiatives are part of the Odisha government’s 5T and ‘Mo Sarkar’ initiatives. The 5Ts stand for teamwork, technology, transparency, transformation and time-limit on which the performance of government officials and projects are judged. The ‘Mo Sarkar’ initiative attempts to bring in professionalism and behavioural changes in public offices through a direct random feedback system from citizens.
The Indian government is developing and implementing several AI-driven initiatives in education, healthcare, agriculture, and finance. Educational institutes and national agencies are launching centres and offering courses in emerging technology to help build a skilled workforce. For instance, last year, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ (IIT-Madras) Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) launched the ‘RBCDSAI Industrial Consortium’ to provide information resources on cutting-edge technologies to industries working on AI.
The consortium will help industry members learn about the scientific developments and latest trends in AI and data science through broad-based interactions with the centre and its faculty. As OpenGov Asia had reported, the centre offers two membership plans to the interested industries: platinum and silver. The membership plans will enable priority access to four RBCDSAI events, namely, colloquia, quarterly workshops, industry conclaves, and annual research showcases. The centre will organise two special half-day workshops on their voted topic of interest from a slate for its members. Additionally, platinum members will have a dedicated in-domain contact faculty at the centre for close interaction to seek suggestions on their industry’s plans. They will get to exclusively interact with the students to know more about their research and have early access to RBCDSAI publications, reports, datasets, and other research material.
The need for skilling and upskilling reached a new high amid the pandemic and in 2022, big data analytics, along with AI and machine learning (ML) are forecast to be the most in-demand skills in India, as per a news report. With rapid tech adoption across industries and entirely tech-enabled sectors such as IT and BFSI, the role of AI/ML will continue to grow in 2022, with a significant increase in the demand for related roles.
As the pandemic shifted more work online and remote work became the norm, government agencies move to a multi-cloud environment quickly. However, many agencies are realising that not all apps and workloads are suited to the cloud. Skyrocketing costs due to data egress, poor performance from lack of in-house skills to manage workloads in public clouds and security complications related to compliance demands have made many cloud workloads problematic.
This year will be “the year of multi-cloud strategy” when federal IT leaders take a step back and prioritise creating a comprehensive plan for deploying multicloud environments. There are three critical phases to thoughtful deployment that will allow agencies to reap all the benefits that multicloud has to offer. These three stages include assessing the current IT system, determining where workloads belong and mapping out plans and achieving business goals set out in those plans.
Phase 1: Assess the current IT ecosystem
Throughout this process, agencies may determine that some apps must be repatriated, or moved back from the cloud to on-premises. For best decision-making, this is the time to examine data egress (when applications send data back and forth from clouds or downloads and files are moved to external storage).
This is especially important for agencies that have experienced unforeseen cloud costs due to unanticipated egress costs and misunderstanding how chatty their on-premises apps would be with apps in the public cloud. The key to success for this phase will be less about applications and more about where workloads and corresponding data reside.
Phase 2: Determine where workloads belong and map out a plan
After thoroughly vetting the current IT environment and app workloads, it’s time to map out getting from an “as-is” state to the “to be” state. This process will encompass gauging what workloads need to be containerized and ported, which refactored and which rewritten entirely.
Phase 3: Achieve goals set out in the plan
This phase should also be iterative, never stopping after implementation, and aim to reduce time to value, minimize risk and manage costs more effectively. Navigating multicloud is not simply a matter of technology. Successful transitions involve people, processes and technology. Agencies will have to prepare for a cultural shift, process changes and be equipped with the necessary technologies and training to enable successful multi-cloud deployment.
To effectively manage costs, agencies will need automated continuous monitoring that focuses on instances. Too often, organizations have been surprised by shadow IT where employees knowingly or unknowingly use cloud services that contribute to exhausting the cloud budget. Actively managing instances and services in the multi-cloud environment is vital to monitoring costs.
By incorporating a more thoughtful approach to multi-cloud, federal agencies stand to glean more of its benefits in the coming year, including increased agility, flexibility, efficiency, performance, security and cost management.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, a report titled “Government Cloud Platforms 2021–2022 RadarView” evaluated 15 providers based on product maturity, enterprise adaptability and future readiness. The report identifies four trends that are shaping the market. The first is the increasing compliance needs that are accelerating the shift to the cloud. The cloud helps agencies address sensitive workloads, such as those involving health care data while complying with requirements.
The second trend is the emergence of tailored cloud regions for communities such as defence and intelligence. Such regions can address the level of sensitive data that these communities work with, and these users can look to these isolated cloud resources to deploy workloads securely and compliantly.
The third trend is the fact that convergence with emerging technologies is driving change. Fourth, government cloud providers are expanding their influence by growing into new regions and helping the public sector shift to cloud while maintaining data governance and sovereignty.
To co-create innovative technologies and solutions, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and an aviation company have launched a new digital aviation corporate laboratory. The laboratory will accelerate the digital transformation of Singapore’s aviation sector, and help redefine the air travel experience for passengers. Situated at the Innovation 4.0 Building at NUS Kent Ridge campus, the S$45 million research facility is the seventh Corporate Laboratory at NUS.
The launch of the Corporate Laboratory comes at an opportune time as the global aviation industry tackles the challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. An acceleration of its digital transformation programme will help to keep the aviation company vibrant and contribute towards the development of a digital aviation and travel technology community in Singapore.
This significant collaboration will tap into NUS’ deep-tech and multi-disciplinary research expertise across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data science, operations research and analytics, optimisation, sleep studies and industrial design, to deliver high value and productivity improvements. The innovative technologies developed from the research will redefine the air travel experience for passengers worldwide while accelerating the digital transformation of Singapore’s aviation sector.
– Professor Tan Eng Chye, NUS President
The partnership between supports Singapore’s ongoing digital transformation as it adopts a data-driven research approach to develop rich insights and deployable technologies. With the strong industry experience and the multi-disciplinary capabilities from NUS, the Corporate Laboratory is primed to develop innovative and exciting solutions for the aviation sector, and take them to greater heights of excellence.
The objectives of the Corporate Laboratory are to drive traveller-centric digital services, ensure security and safety in air travel, and enhance organisational effectiveness and workplace productivity for the aviation company and Singapore’s aviation sector.
Featuring state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, such as a cabin simulator and a cockpit simulator with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, the Corporate Laboratory will leverage NUS’ wide and deep research expertise across its faculties and research institutes to embark on research activities in the following areas:
As reported by OpenGov Asia, the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of the Built Environment has established a new research centre to augment the digital capability of Singapore’s construction industry, accelerate 5G training and promote the adoption of 5G technologies in Smart Facilities Management (FM).
As Singapore pushes to offer nationwide 5G coverage by 2025, the centre for 5G Digital Building Technology aims to play an important role in Singapore’s digital research. It has set its sights to be a leading centre in digital building technology through high impact research, broad-based education, and implementing best practices. It will harness 5G connectivity, cloud-based digital twin and robotics for Smart FM and Built Environment industry applications and seek to transform the way people design, deliver and manage Singapore’s built environment.
The 5G Centre is uniquely positioned at Singapore’s first new-built net-zero energy building. This allows its researchers the ability to test and develop 5G digital technologies, which typically consumes a high amount of energy, within a net-zero energy environment. This is significant as more businesses will increasingly adopt 5G technology along with the nationwide coverage by 2025, and buildings are expected to be more energy-efficient by 2030 to mitigate climate change.
Projects led by University of Wollongong (UOW) researchers have been awarded $3.4 million in the latest round of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects. The grants formed part of a total of $258.6 million for 587 new projects over the next five years. The latest round has funded eight UOW-led projects, five of which are tech-centred.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Council (ARC) noted that the funding would support excellent basic and applied research projects and enhance the scale and focus of research in Australian Government priority areas. The intended outcomes of the Discovery Projects scheme are to expand the knowledge base and research capacity in Australia and provide economic, commercial, environmental, social and cultural benefits for Australia.
The tech-driven UOW-led Discovery Projects
Investigating supported molecular catalysts for fuel cell applications.
A team led by Professor Jun Chen, from the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, will develop an innovative and sustainable system, which could promote the N2 fixation along with the CO2 conversion process. It will thereby contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse emissions and create an eco-friendly protocol/technology for distributed production of C-N products under ambient conditions.
Affordable battery storage for renewable energy
This project, led by Professor Shulei Chou, Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Innovative Materials, seeks to develop sodium-ion sulfur batteries as a novel technique for large-scale stationary energy storage, especially for intermittent solar and wind energy storage in Australia. Expected outcomes include a breakthrough in affordable battery storage technology, leading to significant benefits by integrating this battery system with renewable energy.
Stability for applications in quantum devices
Associate Professor Adam Rennie, from the School of Mathematics and Applied Sciences, and his team aim to use mathematical scattering theory to find and study new topological features to be used in applications for quantum devices. The results will give topological stability from the scattering spectrum, a feature not previously seen. The benefits stem from new results in mathematical scattering theory with a primary novelty being the analysis of “zero energy resonances” in mathematical models of graphene.
Improving the accuracy and security of crowd-sourced data
The goal to enable quality data classification via secure crowdsourcing is the aim of a team led by Professor Willy Susilo, from the School of Computing and Information Technology. The quality of a data-intensive process, such as a Machine Learning algorithm, depends on the input data quality. By using a crowdsourcing classification, the project expects to overcome the painstaking and costly process of humans annotating extensive input data from diverse real information. The project will benefit large data-intensive applications, such as cybersecurity protection.
New ways of improving machine learning
A team led by Professor Lei Wang, from the School of Computing and Information Technology, will develop novel machine learning techniques to make machines better at using experience to solve new tasks with fewer data. It expects to reduce the undesirable dependence of current machine learning on labelled data and significantly expand its application scope. This should be able to produce solid benefits to the science, society, and economy of Australia via the application of these advanced intelligent systems.
The Indian Army, with support from the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), has established a quantum computing laboratory centre at the Military College of Telecommunication Engineering (MCTE) in Madhya Pradesh. The centres will carry out extensive research in developing transformative technologies for use by the armed forces. The Army also set up an artificial intelligence (AI) centre at the same institution with over 140 deployments in forward areas and active support of the industry and academia.
Through a state-of-the-art cyber range and cybersecurity labs, the centre will run training sessions on cyber warfare. The Army’s involvement in electromagnetic spectrum operations was discussed during a seminar on Electromagnetic Spectrum and National Security organised in October last year. Since then, the government has urged Army technology institutions to invest in AI, quantum technology, and cyberspace.
According to the Defence Ministry, the research undertaken by the Indian Army in the field of quantum technology would help it leapfrog into next-generation communication and transform the current system of cryptography to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Key thrust areas are quantum key distribution, quantum communication, quantum computing, and PQC. The initiative uses a multi-stakeholder approach and incorporates academia (such as the Indian Institutes of Technology), the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), research institutes, corporate firms, start-ups, and industry players. Requisite timeline-based objectives with adequate funding have been worked out for projects and the progressive fielding of solutions in the Army is expected on a fast-track basis.
Last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched the country’s first Quantum Computer Simulator (QSim) Toolkit. The project was developed by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee (IIT-Roorkee), and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Quantum Simulators are devices that allow scientists to study quantum effects, which are otherwise difficult to study in a lab. The simulator is a software library that simulates quantum computation on classical computers. The novelty of this simulator is that it includes various types of errors that can occur in a realistic, practical device.
Similarly, in September 2021, the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi (IIT-Delhi) set up a Centre of Excellence on Quantum Technologies. The centre brings research in the field into one facility. As OpenGov Asia had reported, the centre focuses on quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology, and quantum materials and devices. The centre helps principal investigators pitch more projects from the Indian Department of Science and Technology. Along with the design and development of new quantum materials, the centre carries out research activities related to quantum processors and cryogenic controllers, the modelling and technology development of semiconducting qubits, and CMOS and 2D materials. Furthermore, the centre explores quantum sensing and metrology, quantum biophotonics, the development of single-photon detectors, and sources based on semiconductors (2D materials, III-V). The centre also studies superconductors, the development of bright single and entangled photon sources based on SPDC, quantum secure communication in free space, and optical fibre, quantum imaging, and sensing using quantum correlated photons.
The global quantum computing market size is expected to reach US$3728.4 million by 2030 at a CAGR of 25.40%, according to a recent report. Countries from around the world, including India, are increasing investment and fostering partnerships to improve quantum technology development.
