Abstract
Reliable operation of production lines without unscheduled disruptions is of paramount importance for ensuring the proper operation of automated working cells involving robotic systems. This article addresses the issue of preventing disruptions to an automotive production line that can arise from incorrect placement of aluminum car parts by a human operator in a feeding container with 4 indexing pins for each part. The detection of the misplaced parts is critical for avoiding collisions between the containers and a high pressure washing machine and also to avoid collisions between the parts and a robotic arm that is feeding parts to a air leakage inspection machine. The proposed inspection system relies on a 3D sensor for scanning the parts inside a container and then estimates the 6 DoF pose of the container followed by an analysis of the overlap percentage between each part reference point cloud and the 3D sensor data. When the overlap percentage is below a given threshold, the part is considered as misplaced and the operator is alerted to fix the part placement in the container. The deployment of the inspection system on an automotive production line for 22 weeks has shown promising results by avoiding 18 hours of disruptions, since it detected 407 containers having misplaced parts in 4524 inspections, from which 12 were false negatives, while no false positives were reported, which allowed the elimination of disruptions to the production line at the cost of manual reinspection of 0.27% of false negative containers by the operator.

Abstract
How we perceive and experience the world around us is inherently multisensory. Most of the Virtual Reality (VR) literature is based on the senses of sight and hearing. However, there is a lot of potential for integrating additional stimuli into Virtual Environments (VEs), especially in a training context. Identifying the relevant stimuli for obtaining a virtual experience that is perceptually equivalent to a real experience will lead users to behave the same across environments, which adds substantial value for several training areas, such as firefighters. In this article, we present an experiment aiming to assess the impact of different sensory stimuli on stress, fatigue, cybersickness, Presence and knowledge transfer of users during a firefighter training VE. The results suggested that the stimulus that significantly impacted the user's response was wearing a firefighter's uniform and combining all sensory stimuli under study: heat, weight, uniform, and mask. The results also showed that the VE did not induce cybersickness and that it was successful in the task of transferring knowledge.

Abstract
There is a growing demand for persistent data in IoT, edge and similar resource-constrained devices. However, standard FLASH memory-based solutions present performance, energy, and reliability limitations in these applications. We propose MRAM persistent memory as an alternative to FLASH based storage. Preliminary experimental results show that its performance, power consumption, and reliability in typical database workloads is competitive for resource-constrained devices. This opens up new opportunities, as well as challenges, for small-scale database systems. MRAM is tested for its raw performance and applicability to key-value and relational database systems on resource-constrained devices. Improvements of as much as three orders of magnitude in write performance for key-value systems were observed in comparison to an alternative NAND FLASH based device. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

Abstract
Variational quantum circuits are being used as versatile quantum machine learning models. Some empirical results exhibit an advantage in supervised and generative learning tasks. However, when applied to reinforcement learning, less is known. In this work, we considered a variational quantum circuit composed of a low-depth hardware-efficient ansatz as the parameterized policy of a reinforcement learning agent. We show that an epsilon-approximation of the policy gradient can be obtained using a logarithmic number of samples concerning the total number of parameters. We empirically verify that such quantum models behave similarly to typical classical neural networks used in standard benchmarking environments and quantum control, using only a fraction of the parameters. Moreover, we study the barren plateau phenomenon in quantum policy gradients using the Fisher information matrix spectrum.

Abstract
The proper integration of technology in teaching and learning processes must consider the role of teachers and students, as well as the design of tasks and the context in which they are implemented. Teachers' perceived self-efficacy significantly influences their willingness to integrate educational robotics (ER) into their practice, so initial teacher training should provide opportunities for teachers to participate in structured activities that integrate ER. In this study, a class of pre-service teachers from an initial teacher training programme were provided with their first contact with an ER platform through the use of a simulator. We present the design process of a student exploration guide and teacher guide, developed over three iterative cycles of implementation, assessment and redesign. The analysis of the data collected allowed for improvements in the design of the tasks, the graphic component of the student exploration guide, and more precise indications for the teacher's actions. The main contribution of this study is the chain orchestration between the simulator, student exploration guide and teacher guide, which allowed pre-service teachers to solve a set of challenges of increasing complexity, thereby progressively decreasing their difficulties and contributing to an adequate integration of ER in their future teaching practices.