The day all of us enjoy electricity dynamic prices thanks to the smart grid, we will see how the washing machine and other home appliances come into life. And they will do it to allow us to pay less for the energy they need to do their duties. This will be one of the advantages of dynamic prices that are those that change along the day to encourage us to use energy when there is a surplus and to dissuade us of using energy when there is a shortage.
To have a better understanding of how dynamic prices will impact on our lives, there has been a research project conducted in Belgium that involved 250 families equipped with smart home appliances, namely washing machines, tumble dryers, dishwashers, water heaters and electric car chargers. Smart home appliances are those that receive information about electricity rates and that can make decisions about their own operation. For the purposes of the project, the day was divided into six time slots with different electricity prices according to the energy market. The families involved in the experiment were divided into two groups.
Researchers of Liner Intelligent Networks project in a demostration
The first group got information about next day electricity prices through an app installed in a mobile device. Then, they have to plan the use of the appliance for the next day considering the prices and their needs.
The second group have appliances that reacted to the prices in an automated fashion while preserving the owners’ utility. To understand how it worked, imagine a family who wants to have their dishes ready for dinner at 6PM. At 8AM, when they left home to work, they switch on the washing machine and indicate the hour the dishes must be ready. In the case the washing machine needs two hour to complete the work, the machine knows it could start to work at some moment between 8AM and 4PM and it chooses the moment in the time slot with lower price. In the case the energy were cheaper after 4PM, the washing machine started to work at 4PM to assure the dishes were clean and dry at the moment the owners needed them. Other appliances, like the water heater, just chose the time slots with cheaper energy to keep water at desired temperature.
The customers in the first group found the system annoying and they left the experiment. However, those in the second group found the method did not affect their comfort and that their appliances preferred the night to work. Besides this, there was a reduction in the electricity bill: 20% for dishwashers, 10% for washing machines and tumble dryers, and 5% for water heaters.
One of the findings of the project was that customers do not like to be on the lookout of the next day prices. This result is quite surprising if we consider the success of the Opower company, that according to them they were capable of reducing the bill, energy use and CO2 emissions using a customer information system quite similar to the one used by the Belgians with the first group, the one based on getting information the day before to make decisions in advance. But today Opower is in the Oracle realm, maybe because this big company was more interested in the data and knowledge Opower had about how people demand energy than in the possible benefits for environment, electric grid and customers’ wallets. Anyway, it seems the original’s Opower spirit remains alive.
The smart grid will make possible our washing machines will be connected to the power company through Internet soon and it will be in charge of making decisions about when to work in order to reduce our electricity bill. After that, if the washing machine makers were able to design a machine capable of ironing the clothes our happiness would be complete.
The main interest of this event “Robocup” is the advances in development of service robots, whose goal is to help humans in their daily life
At the end of July it took place in Nagoya Japan RoboCup 2017, and for the first time, I had the great opportunity to participate in this competition which brings together roboticists from around the world. Currently, RoboCup is the world’s largest robotic competition (this year participated almost 500 teams from 50 different countries), looking at a proud history of 20 years, starting from one league of football-playing robots, to now also cover many application areas of robots, such as rescue, logistics, and also service robots in people’s homes (RoboCup@Home).
As part of the SQPReL team, a very international team integrated by members of the L-CAS (University of Lincoln) and the LabRoCoCo (University of Rome “Sapienza”), I participated in the RoboCup at Home league. In that league the robots must be able to perform different housework in order to try to help humans in their daily life. Maybe one day in the future, most of the population will have one of these kinds of robots at home.
After 6 days of hard work in Nagoya added to the previous 2 months of preparation, the team was very proud to have achieved a good 3rd place in the RoboCup@Home Social Standard Platform League.
Nice but, what is actually the Robocup and what is it for?
RoboCup born as an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related fields. An attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing standard problems. One of the effective ways to promote science and engineering research is to set challenging goals and these kind of competitions promote to compare developments and collaboration between the research community. Focusing on the RoboCup@Home, this league aims to develop service and assistive robots with high relevance for future domestic applications.
And when is the future? Are there no robots able to perform these tasks yet?
These kinds of robots have had a major presence in research centers in the recent years, such as Sacarino, the robot designed by CARTIF. However, there are few applications where robots are part of our daily life activities due to the difficulty to evaluate service robot applications and to obtain feedback mechanisms aimed at improving the general performance of the robot. Benchmarking in robotics has emerged as a solution to evaluate the performance of robotic systems in a reproducible way and to allow comparison between different research approaches, and here is where appears RoboCup@Home providing benchmarking through scientific competitions.
RoboCup@Home use a set of benchmark tests to evaluate the robot abilities and performance in a realistic non-standardized home environment setting (it changes every year and is not known until the day before the competition). Focus lies on the following domains:
Navigation: path-planning and safely navigating avoiding (dynamic) obstacles.
Mapping: building a representation of a partially known or environment.
Person Recognition: detecting and recognizing a person.
Person Tracking: tracking the position of a person over time.
Object Recognition: detecting and recognizing objects in the environment.
Object Manipulation: the ability of grasping, moving or placing an object.
Speech Recognition: recognizing and interpreting spoken user commands.
Gesture Recognition: recognizing and interpreting human gestures.
Cognition: understanding and reasoning about the environment.
How are those ability evaluated?
The competition is organized in several tasks (host a cocktail party, act as a waiter in a restaurant, follow verbal commands given by a human) that must be accomplished by the robots autonomously. These tasks are integrated tests, thus each test comprises a set of functionalities that must be properly integrated to achieve good performance. However, the scoring system allows for giving partial credit if only a part of the test is achieved.
In a future post I will explain more in detail the tasks that were carried out this year during the competition and our team’s experiences.
Urban mobility is paramount to address cities’ sustainable regeneration due to the number of issues that derive from a non-sustainable and non-efficient urban transport strategy. Urban transport represents almost a quarter of all the EU transport CO2 emissions. Conventional fuel vehicles contribute to the 40% of the city pollution, leading both to environmental damage and severe illnesses.
The challenge is to identify and analyze the best strategies to introduce clean technologies within an urban environment aligning with the city transport plans and policies and complying with the citizens’ needs.
Valladolid city has a strong commitment with sustainable transport and electromobility, as it is inferred from the list of measures taken at city level and their participation in a number of smart city projects at national and European level.
One of the most remarkable ones is REMOURBAN (REgeneration MOdel for accelerating the smart URBAN transformation) that is implementing a number of actions with the aim of boosting even more the penetration of electric mobility in Valladolid city.
Before REMOURBAN:
The largest share of public city transport in Valladolid is covered by the buses fleet, which consists of 103 PLG fuelled, 46 biodiesel, and one hybrid (non plug-in) Additionally, there are currently 466 taxis operating along the city. Among them, there are several hybrids (non plug-in) and others PLG fuelled. There are also two FEV, the first one operating since December 2011.
Mobility actions to be deployed within REMOURBAN project:
Though not fully deployed, most of the foreseen actions are already in progress.
Five plugged-in hybrid buses have been in operation for one year now. Two of them have been partially funded through REMOURBAN project.
Two FEV cars belonging to the City Hall private fleet are also providing service.
Additionally, a set of 45 fully electric vehicles (taxis, last mile delivery and other private business) are expected to arrive soon. To achieve this ambitious target, the City Hall has launched an interesting offer to boost the adoption of electric vehicles by these professionals. Interested parties will be able to apply as long as they commit to monitor the performance of their electric vehicles and related charging infrastructure. In return they will be getting as much as 8.350€ along 24 months.
Charging infrastructure has also been duly considered and the 34 slow charging points currently available all along the city will be soon upgraded and integrated in a remote management system to allow for seamless and reliable monitoring. Moreover, new charging infrastructure is being put in place to ensure fast charging to the buses and last mile delivery vehicles. In this sense, two pantographs (120kW) have also been installed at the beginning and end of bus line 7, and are currently being commissioned. They will provide the required electricity for their batteries so as to cover the inner area of the city in fully electric mode. The charging process should take around 8 minutes.
The freight delivery vehicles will profit from a fast charging station (50kW) that will also be installed in CENTROLID logistics hub. Last but not least, 4 additional charging points (22kW, Schuko, Mennekes) will be installed to provide charging to the taxis (not exclusively).
Monitoring actions:
A local ICT platform, in Valladolid, will be managed by CARTIF and further on will feed a global one for the whole project. Everything is being currently set up in order to get ready to register data, both from vehicles performance and from charging processes once the vehicles are in place. This is expected to happen by the beginning of year 2018 and will allow for two years monitoring (as requested by the EC).
On-board Units (provided and installed by GMV) will be registering a number of variables (speed, electric instantaneous engine consumption, battery level, instantaneous auxiliary systems consumption, GPS, emissions, etc.) that relate only to vehicle performance while on route. Additionally, data from charging processes will be collected by a charging manager. This will consist of initial and final charging time, as well as related charging energy.
Information from each monitored vehicle will come from both sources (driving route and charging process). The related set of data will be anonymized and processed by the local platform.
The final aim is to get valuable knowledge from electric vehicles performance in real conditions. All lessons learnt and experience gained will be transferred to other cities willing to adopt these technologies.
Traditionally, factors that were taken into account in manufacturing processes were economic, management, production, etc. However, this situation has changed in recent years. Energy efficiency and sustainable management are fundamental aspects that many companies have incorporated in their processes. Aware of that reality, CARTIF is accompanying the companies to incorporate in them the “Factories of Future” concept. An example of work done is the REEMAIN project.
REEMAIN moves toward zero carbon manufacturing and Energy Efficiency 2.0 through the intelligent use of renewable energy technologies and resource saving strategies that consider energy purchase, generation, conversion, distribution, utilization, control, storage, re-use in a holistic and integrated way.
In addition to that, REEMAIN project has provided us with the opportunity to expand our knowledge and experience in the Resource and Energy Efficient Manufacturing world. During the demonstration actions at the factories, the team has experimented energy and materials saving technologies and process and, of course, tested their effectiveness.
As the project comes to an end, we have produced a Best Practices Book as a way of sharing our experience with other professionals in the material and energy efficiency manufacturing domain.
The REEMAIN Best Practice Book summarises the key findings from our experience of over four years working on the project and are recommendations we make to the overall community involved in this kind of projects (designers, research institutions, factory owners, workers, contractors, public bodies, investors, etc.), in order to provide a help if some of them decide to get involve in an efficiency improvement project within a factory.
18 Best Practices are featured. They were based on our experience while searching and testing efficiency measures in our three demo factories: GULLON (Biscuit), BOSSA (Textile) and SCM (Iron & Steel). Three main thematic areas had been identified: Best practices on “design”, best practices on “Operation and maintenance” and “Exploitation & Dissemination”.
Each of them is presented in a short and visual way. They are composed of: title, description (being itself a recommendation), stakeholders, replicability, practical guidelines and things to avoid, impact rating, and finally the REEMAIN practical experience.
I have tried my best to avoid starting this post with the awarded as the most-used-ever sentence in this sort of texts that states that “buildings account for a 40% of the energy consumption and the 36% of the GHG emissions” but the fact is that it is good starting point when writing about buildings and energy. To tell the truth, in this field, with the unsustainable energy consumption rates, CO2 and other contaminants emissions, and their still too low improvement trends, everyone knows that a 40% is much more than we can afford.
When searching for reasons, it is more than evident that there is a moment in which the architecture is somehow decontextualized; losing its connection with the environment and nature, and the so called “international” style defends architecture valid for every place, where machines solve all those aspects that have not been solved during the design. But in 1973 a reality check came, and an unprecedented crisis saw the first laws about energy and the first awareness campaigns were launched. Once the energy “free-for-all” was ended, it was time to think of how to reduce the energy consumption but without affecting comfort in all its levels.
In that moment, after the effects of the crisis, architecture had a great opportunity to self-reinvent and introduce into its principles (those from Vitrubio, Le Corbusier or whatever fundaments the design process of every architect) the energy efficiency. Sigfired Giedion (Space, Time, and Architecture, 1941) states that “architecture is intimately linked to the life of an age in all its aspects (…). When an age tries to hide, its actual nature will be transparent through its architecture”. Thus, in my humble opinion, the last quarter of the 20th Century will be characterised by a strange mix of three tendencies: a magazine architecture far from understanding that the energy sources are limited; the housing bubble (this bubble could be issue for more than one post), also far; and a third movement that looks behind to find the origin of the architecture and searching to be adapted to climate while taking advantage of the latest technical developments. The two first (and many other factors, let’s avoid putting the blame only on construction) made that the 73s crisis has reappeared –or perhaps it never went– into what we know today as “energy poverty”, that has been set up to affect sectors of society that didn’t seem to be that vulnerable in the gold years of the bubble.
And, being realistic, with a necessarily low tax of new construction, and with a building stock that suffers the consequences of the above, make that energy retrofitting is one of our best “weapons” in the fight against climate change while, at the same time, one of the main opportunities for the construction sector, so hardly penalised in the recent years. But the problem with this is found on the “agnosticism” that has been set up around energy savings, which still are not understood as an economic, social and environmental benefit. It is, thus, our responsibility (read here the technicians of the construction sector) to quantify and valorise these benefits so that financial institutions, public bodies, companies of the sector and specially users, demand energy efficiency in buildings not as an extra, but as a must.
In CARTIF we have been working during years in the sector of energy efficient retrofitting and, specially, in quantifying and valorising energy savings to make of them a guarantee both economic and social. Thus, projects like OptEEmAL, about which we have already talked in this blog, work capturing all the knowledge that we have generated these years when developing methodologies to evaluate these issues and offer tools that support this change of paradigm: from establishing approaches of collaborative work and risk sharing during the design and execution, to the support in the informed decision-making to all stakeholders involved through the use of modelling and simulation tools.
All in all, we only aim at recover the relevance of the energy efficiency as project mechanism in architecture, what could make Vitrubio reformulating its principles as firmitas, utilitas, venustas et navitas efficientum.
With this post, I would like to try to show a very clear example where, the intelligent use of a suitable artificial vision system can solve a major problem in a production line at a reasonable price.
The body of our vehicle consists of a multitude of metallic pieces, each with its own requirement. The automotive industry manufactures these parts through a laminating sheet forming process called stamping. In this process a metal sheet is placed on a matrix, it is fixed and later, a punch pushes the sheet towards the matrix generating the desired cavity.
Depending on the temperature of the steel blanks two types of stamping are defined: cold stamping and hot stamping. In this case, we will focus on the hot stamping, which is applied mainly in elements of high structural requirement, such as reinforcements, pillars, etc.
Image captured by the vision system at the exit of the oven
In this process the steel blanks is heated above the austenization temperature, obtaining a high ductility and then proceeding to a rapid cooling to achieve the martensitic hardening of the sheet. The pieces obtained reach high resistance, complex shapes are obtained and the effects of springback are reduced. This allows, among other things, to improve the passive safety of our cars and reduce their weight.
In this manufacturing process, the steel blanks leave the furnace at high speed, at a temperature around 900-950 ºC, they stop abruptly in a fixed position and, later, a robot collects them to introduce them in the press as quickly as possible , In order to avoid its cooling before the press stroke.
The problem arises from the difficulty of ensuring a fixed position with mechanical fasteners. This is due, among other things, to the speed of the line, the great variety of references, the high temperatures of the steel blanks (which cools very quickly at the point where there is a contact) and the internal characteristics of the furnace (which can measure up to 30m).
An incorrect position means that the robot fails to pick up the steel blanks, or worse, to pick it up incorrectly and place it incorrectly in the press, producing a wrong press stroke and stopping the line, together with a deterioration of the tools.
In this case, the artificial vision is presented as the best choice to indicate to the robot if the actual position of the steel blanks is correct. The most important task of the vision system will be to correctly segment the steel blanks into the image in order to accurately determine the position of the steel blanks.
CARTIF position. Application developed by CARTIF
A priori, given the intense infrared radiation emitted by the plates due to their high temperature, it seems that the easiest alternative to achieve this task is to use industrial infrared cameras. This solution presents two problems: the high cost of these equipments and the low resolution of the infrared sensors.
The working area in which the steel blanks are positioned is very wide, due to the size of the parts and because in many cases it is worked in batches, handling up to four units simultaneously. Given the low resolution of these sensors, it is necessary to use several cameras to increase the precision with which the position is defined.
From CARTIF we have been developing more economical solutions, using industrial cameras within the visible electromagnetic spectrum with a greater sensitivity in the infrared range. The resolution of these cameras is much higher than that of the infrared cameras which allows to increase the accuracy of the measurements.
This has allowed companies such as Renault to obtain a robust and configurable system that avoids undesirable stops of the line and extends the useful life of its tools, which leads to a considerable improvement in the production line.
