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Industry 4.0 (I4.0) brings a set of challenges that need to be settled to enable the expected industrial revolution. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Autonomous Robots are two of mainstream I4.0 technologies and can be combined with other Enabling Technologies to overcome main I4.0 challenges. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) aimed to understand how these Enabling Technologies were combined with CPS and Autonomous Robots to achieve fully featured I4.0 solutions. The 5C is a CPS architecture which was used as a measurement to CPS compliance. After filtering and processing 15,144 papers from six different academic search engines, it was found that full 5C compliant solutions are rare to find; that not all enabling technologies were integrated; and most of existing research focused in implementing practical solutions, but comparison to conventional approaches is scarce. We conclude that there is a need for further research to accomplish full 5C I4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial note is dedicated to the 10th Scientific Conference which was held on June 2022 in Galati, Romania, and was organized by the Council of Doctoral Schools of the "Dunarea de Jos" University of Galati (SCDS-UDJG). Three articles in this Special Issue present findings in the field of mechanical and industrial engineering. Four articles present studies related to artificial intelligence technologies, representing the majority of papers published in this Special Issue. [Extracted from the article]

Autonomous robots become increasingly widespread in public spaces. Human‐robot interactions (HRI) with pedestrians is essential by visualizing trajectory information. We evaluated various display technologies for bright indoor conditions such as animated projection and LED lighting as well as displays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AUVs are autonomous underwater robots equipped with advanced sensors and navigation systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the marine environment, AUVs are susceptible to the effects of the marine environment and may experience communication delays or even accidents. Based on the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a prediction method for lost AUVs based on an adaptive optimization depth BiLSTM (AWOA-DBiLSTM) neural network model. To enhance prediction accuracy, AWOA-DBiLSTM employs a double BiLSTM to extract AUV features from positional information and physical attitude. Additionally, AWOA-DBiLSTM utilizes a gating mechanism to filter and reset physical attitude feature information to obtain features associated with positional information. After undergoing filtering operations, the physical attitude information of the AUV is fused with the position information to achieve trajectory prediction. For the first time, the differentiation and stratified extraction of AUV data features are presented in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves significant improvements in prediction accuracy and generalization, and the present study is of great significance for application in the task of predicting the trajectories of lost AUVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the use of advanced sensors, such as terrestrial, mobile 3D scanners and photogrammetric imaging, has become the prevalent practice for 3D Reality Modeling (RM) and the digitization of large-scale monuments of Cultural Heritage (CH). In practice, this process is heavily related to the expertise of the surveying team handling the laborious planning and time-consuming execution of the 3D scanning process tailored to each site's specific requirements and constraints. To minimize human intervention, this paper proposes a novel methodology for autonomous 3D Reality Modeling of CH monuments by employing autonomous robotic agents equipped with the appropriate sensors. These autonomous robotic agents are able to carry out the 3D RM process in a systematic, repeatable, and accurate approach. The outcomes of this automated process may also find applications in digital twin platforms, facilitating secure monitoring and the management of cultural heritage sites and spaces, in both indoor and outdoor environments. The main purpose of this paper is the initial release of an Industry 4.0-based methodology for reality modeling and the survey of cultural spaces in the scientific community, which will be evaluated in real-life scenarios in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will compare two solution options to determine whether the deployment of an autonomous mobile robot will be a beneficial investment for a company not only in terms of cost, time, and manpower savings, but also in terms of efficiency and reliability in the implementation of selected logistics processes to ensure the smooth running of production. In this paper, we would like to analyse the technology in terms of functions, carrying capacity, and interconnection within the infrastructure in the enterprise. The logistics processes from material order to export to the final customer will be analysed when an automatically controlled robot is deployed. One of the solutions discusses the use of personnel and material handling equipment (tractor with transport kit). The second solution discusses the deployment of the robot and selected logistics processes. The paper concludes with a summary of both options in terms of time, cost, and efficiency of the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: An autonomous mobile robot (AMR) is a self-navigating vehicle capable of executing specific tasks such as transportation and cruising. As a crucial component of the logistics system in Industry 4.0 and smart factories, AMRs leverage sensors, including cameras, to gather information about their external environment and chart navigational paths. Their applications are diverse, spanning across warehousing, manufacturing, healthcare, hazardous locations, and specialized industries. Road recognition, a key feature of AMRs, employs technologies like semantic segmentation to extract high-level scene information, including object locations and semantic data from images. This technology can be integrated with Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), enhancing the AMR's ability to navigate complex environments. This integration is pivotal in enabling AMRs to successfully complete their navigation tasks. The rapid development and application of AMRs is important for Industry 4.0 and smart logistics. For large-scale dynamic flat warehouses, vision-based road recognition amidst complex obstacles is paramount for improving navigation efficiency and flexibility, while avoiding frequent manual settings. However, current mainstream road recognition methods face significant challenges of unsatisfactory accuracy and efficiency, as well as the lack of a large-scale high-quality dataset. To address this, this paper introduces IndoorPathNet, a transfer-learning-based Bird's Eye View (BEV) indoor path segmentation network that furnishes directional guidance to AMRs through real-time segmented indoor pathway maps. IndoorPathNet employs a lightweight U-shaped architecture integrated with spatial self-attention mechanisms to augment the speed and accuracy of indoor pathway segmentation. Moreover, it surmounts the challenge of training posed by the scarcity of publicly available semantic datasets for warehouses through the strategic employment of transfer learning. Comparative experiments conducted between IndoorPathNet and four other lightweight models on the Urban Aerial Vehicle Image Dataset (UAVID) yielded a maximum Intersection Over Union (IOU) of 82.2%. On the Warehouse Indoor Path Dataset, the maximum IOU attained was 98.4% while achieving a processing speed of 9.81 frames per second (FPS) with a 1024 × 1024 input on a single 3060 GPU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artificial potential field method has efficient obstacle avoidance ability, but this traditional method suffers from local minima, unreasonable paths, and sudden changes in heading angles during obstacle avoidance, leading to rough paths and increased energy consumption. To enable autonomous mobile robots (AMR) to escape from local minimum traps and move along reasonable, smooth paths while reducing travel time and energy consumption, in this paper, an artificial potential field method based on subareas is proposed. First, the optimal virtual subgoal was obtained around the obstacles based on the relationship between the AMR, obstacles, and goal points in the local environment. This was done according to the virtual subgoal benefit function to solve the local minima problem and select a reasonable path. Secondly, when AMR encountered an obstacle, the subarea-potential field model was utilized to solve problems such as path zigzagging and increased energy consumption due to excessive changes in the turning angle; this helped to smooth its planning path. Through simulations and actual testing, the algorithm in this paper demonstrated smoother heading angle changes, reduced energy consumption, and a 10.95% average reduction in movement time when facing a complex environment. This proves the feasibility of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]