The HERCULES project has begun. HERCULES has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and will provide the required technological infrastructure to obtain an order-of-magnitude improvement in the cost and power consumption of next generation robotic applications. The Consortium is composed of Pitom and 6 more partners, namely the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (project coordinator), University of Prague, ETH Zurich, Evidence, Magneti Marelli, and Airbus. PITOM will support Magneti Marelli and Airbus on their respective Use Cases, and lead the industrial exploitation of the project results. HERCULES will develop an integrated framework to allow achieving predictable performance on top of cutting-edge heterogeneous CTOS multi-core platforms, implementing real-time scheduling techniques and execution models recently proposed in the research community. The framework will be applied to two innovative industrial use cases: a pioneering autonomous driving system for the automotive domain, and a visual recognition system for the avionic domain .
Vittorio Cipolla and Fabrizio Oliviero, researchers at the University of Pisa, and Michele Franchi from Pitom, have presented the topic "Performance Analysis of a Hybrid Airplane Through a Light Simulator", as a research result of the HYPSTAIR project at the Conference of the Italian Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics – AIDAA 2015.
The HYPSTAIR project has received fundings from the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme and concerns the design of components of a serial hybrid propulsion system for small aircraft. Pitom has operated as subcontractor of the University of Pisa, supporting the design and implementation of the aircraft dynamic simulator, the Human Machine Interface, and the algorithms for residual energy estimation.
The Conference was organized in cooperation with Aerospace & Defense Meetings Torino (A&DM) and Additive Manufacturing (AM) Meetings in Torino on 17-19 November 2015. A&DM is the only international business convention for the aerospace and defence industry organized in Italy, based on a program of pre-arranged meetings. AM Meetings focus on additive manufacturing technology and production.
It has been signed today a new contract to design, produce and deliver novel special UAVs in multirotor configuration for Defence applications. Built by a network of selected Italian companies specialized in Robotics, Aeronautical systems and Composite materials, the new Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) will show special features, like full autonomous operations from take-off to landing (also from moving vehicles), flight capability in adverse meteorological conditions, and will support a novel payload with disruptive technology on board.
The overall Autopilot systems and the Ground Control Station will be specially designed and customized by Pitom, that will also lead the Integration task. Special unconventional functionalities will be designed to make the Multirotor fulfil the overall autonomous missions.
The novel platform is expected to set a new milestone in the UAS industry.
It has been started today the LOGIS project, born to increase safety in port areas. Thanks to the fundamental contribution of the Tuscany Region (LOGIS is among the 2012 R&D granted projects) innovative systems will be developed to help drivers of reach-stakers and forklifts avoiding accidents with ground personnel. Due to the distraction and fatigue of personnel, every year a number of serious accidents is registered in Italian and Worldwide ports. The big and heavy vehicles (their empty weight can reach even 100 tons) used to move containers around the port usually have large blind spots. In case a ground operator enters into one of these portions, the risk of accidental collision rapidly increases, because the human driver cannot see him. Automatic People Detectors will be developed by the LOGIS consortium and integrated to the vehicles as a supplemental artificial eye, capable of identifying ground people by using the most advanced artificial vision techniques. System features will include pedestrian’s distance estimation, so different alerts (audio, visual) will be used to warn the driver in different situations. In case of fatal injury risk, the vehicle will come to an automatic stop.
The LOGIS project involves Port Technical Service (Coordinator), Pitom (Innovation&Technology Responsible) and Puccioni Vasco (Carpentry Responsible), and will end in June 2015.
