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We present a case of 6-year- and 10-month-old boy with an impacted primary molar. An x-ray photograph revealed the impacted mandibular right primary second molar with small hard tissue on the crown of the tooth as an obstacle. We extracted the small hard tissue and the mandibular right primary second molar. A histopathological examination of the obstacle revealed a tooth germ containing dental papilla, dentin, and enamel. The obstacle was diagnosed as the tooth germ of the mandibular right second premolar. In conclusion, the early detection of impacted primary molars is important for children's healthy growth and development. (C) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Japanese Society of Pediatric Dentistry.

In human-populated environments, robot navigation requires more than mere obstacle avoidance for safe and comfortable human-robot interaction. Socially aware navigation approaches become vital for deploy-ing mobile service robots in human interactive environments, where the robot operates in interaction with human implicitly or explicitly. These approaches aim to generate human-friendly paths in human-robot interactive environments considering social cues and human behaviour patterns. This paper proposes a social navigation framework for mobile service robots, maintaining humans' safety and comfort while navigating towards the goal location in human interactive environments. Our main contribution is that the presented social navigation framework is designed to be used in human interac-tive unknown environments. To achieve this goal, we use a variant of a pedestrian model called Collision Prediction based Social Force model (CP-SFM). This model is particularly developed for low or average density environments and takes the motion of the people tracked in the environment into account during the navigation. The model is employed as a local planner to generate human-friendly plausible routes for our service robot in corridor like indoor environment scenarios. A variety of different extensions and improvements of the conventional social force model are employed in the implementation stage. A novel improvement in producing multi-level mapping, identifying obstacle repulsion points and adopting CP-SFM for application in motion planning as local task solver is presented. The whole framework has been implemented as ROS nodes, and tested both in real world and simulation environments and successfully verified based on the obtained results. (C) 2020 Karabuk University. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V.

Cases of disability have been on record since the beginning of time. There are several types of disabilities, including physical and mental. The negative impact of disability should have minimal effect on a person’s quality of life, and this statement motivated this research. One of the most influential physicists, Stephen Hawking, once said, “Disability need not be an obstacle to success.” This specific study focuses on the physically impaired who are unable to move about or carry out their day-to-day tasks independently. The study presents a mechanical wheelchair system controlled by the user’s head movement. This is particularly most useful to disabled individuals suffering from paralysis or impaired muscle function. The basic design of the proposed system includes a wearable headpiece and the electronic mechanical wheelchair unit. The system is light and easy to use, and these features ensure a smooth and easy transition to a substantially improved quality of life.

Blindness is one of the major health problems faced by many people today. This health problem is due to some factors including aging, genetics, etc. Visually impaired people experience a lot of difficulties including the inability to move without an aid, and this makes them dependent and also makes them feel different from others. After rigorous research, we were able to construct a cost-effective ultrasonic sight device. The device has an ultrasonic sensor that measures the distance, and a buzzer that beeps when an obstacle is encountered. Availability of the proposed device in large quantities would eliminate the use of the conventional stick, which is heavy with less positive effect. The functionality of the proposed device would aid the visually impaired people in accessing things with ease, improving their quality of life.

Visually impaired people are faced with a lot of problems in their daily life due to their inability to see and move around. These individuals are ultimately dependent on others for assistance, or they may use a trained dog to help them navigate as they travel outdoors. This problem has motivated the development of the smart stick with the aim of providing a better alternative to assist the visually impaired. This is achieved by novel connection of an ultrasonic sensor, a buzzer, and a vibrator. When the stick senses an obstacle, the buzzer and vibration motor are activated, and the user is alerted. The alert is in the forms of sound and vibration from the buzzer and the vibrator, respectively. The system is designed and programmed using C programming language. With the help of the proposed novel technology, the visually impaired individual can live independently and move freely, easily, and safely without any assistance required. After some rigorous tests, the system is proven to be efficient and cost effective.

This paper proposes an efficient path planning technique for the autonomous collision-free navigation of wheeled mobile robots with simple hardware based on an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The distance between the robot and obstacles is measured using three ultrasonic sensors that are installed on the left, front, and right of the robot. These distances from the sensors form the inputs to the ANFIS-utility function block that calculates an obstacle avoidance steering angle for the robot. The obstacle avoidance behavior of the robot is modeled under six scenarios of facing an obstacle. The instantaneous position of the robot and the target are available from Global Positioning System (GPS) modules. A simulation mobile robot in V-REP has been integrated into the ANFIS controller coded in MATLAB. The simulation results show that the proposed ANFIS-utility function-based path planning technique surpasses some of the related algorithms in terms of finding near-optimal paths. Web of Science 13 1 art. no. 101491

Conducting urban ecological civilization (UEC) evaluation and identifying its key obstacle factors will help to formulate regionally differentiated ecological civilization promotion paths. From three dimensions of “pressure-state-response” (PSR) and four aspects of “Economy-Resources-Environment-Society”(ERES), this paper constructs an extended PSR index system of UEC to reflect the interactive relationship between humans and nature, and integrates the exponential variable weight (EVW) method, technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) model and obstacle degree (OD) model to evaluate and diagnose the regional differences and obstacle factors of UEC in Jiangsu Province. The results show that the performance of UEC in each city shows an increasing trend during the inspection period, but there are significant regional differences. The performance of UEC construction in Jiangsu Province has improved year by year, but the increase in its response index is relatively small, indicating that the response capacity of UEC in Jiangsu Province needs to be strengthened urgently, and its fundamental lies in reversing the GDP-oriented performance evaluation model. The key obstacles to the construction of UEC vary depending on the uneven regional development, but there are some common obstacles in the construction of UEC, such as clean energy investment, urban residents’ water supply, foreign capital utilization, land resource protection, population education quality, etc. It is recommended that local governments improve the top-level system design of UEC construction, avoid a one-size-fits-all governance model, and adopt differentiated ecological civilization control measures according to local conditions.

The optical see-through near-eye display finds wide applications in various areas such as medical treatment, education, tourism and entertainment. However, the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) is an obstacle in developing the optical performance of high quality. Conventional stereoscopic displays provide the virtual images in single focal plane, which cannot satisfy the accommodative perception of human eyes. In this review, we elaborate the causes of VAC, discuss various methodologies to solve the VAC problem and compare the advantages and shortfalls of typical designs. It is concluded that the mandatory software and hardware combining methods for the system is developing trend. A prospect is also given for the future development from the users’ perspective.

The Beijing(Jing)-Tianjin(Jin)-Hebei(Ji) (JJJ) urban agglomeration is one of the three major urban agglomeration in China, which plays an important strategic role in China’s regional development pattern. Based on the concern of inter-relationship within urban agglomeration, this paper creatively proposed a comprehensive gravity-Gram Schmidt Orthogonalization coupling model (CG-GSO) to quantitatively measure the urbanization development level at different regional scales. Compared with the information entropy method, the CG-GSO model was more reliable and fairer in evaluating the urbanization development of an urban agglomeration in the inter-annual dimension. We used the obstacle factor model to find out important ways to realize sustainable development at different regional scales. According to the trends from 2003 to 2017, the urbanization development levels were predicted by using the gray forecast model at different regional scales during 2018–2030. There was an upward trend in urbanization development at different regional scales. Compared with the internal single regions, a high starting and slow developing trend was in the urban agglomeration. In Beijing, the obstacle factors in urbanization development were in the demographic, social and eco-environmental subsystems. However, the obstacle factors were in the economic, eco-environmental and social subsystems in Tianjin, Hebei and JJJ urban agglomeration. The forecast results showed that urbanization development was going strong in internal regions from 2018 to 2030, while the overall urbanization development was slow in urban agglomeration. Urbanization development should focus on labor redistribution, weakening the boundary on social welfare, improving the efficiency of economic development and paying attention to protecting eco-environment for taking the sustainable development road in the JJJ urban agglomeration.

High-quality development (HQD) is the requirement for adapting to the changes in the main contradictions of Chinese society and achieving sustained and stable development. Based on the discussion of its connotation, this study constructed an evaluation model covering five aspects of society, economy, resources, ecology, and culture. Then we used the obstacle diagnosis model to analyze the main obstacle factors of restricting the improvement of HQD level. Finally, 4 future policy scenarios were designed under the system dynamics (SD) model to simulate the variation of the future development in each province along the Yellow River Basin (YRB). The results show that: (1) The level of HQD in the YRB changed dynamically over time, and it has also improved to varying degrees in all provinces. (2) The cultural subsystem hindered the further improvement of the HQD; for the indicator layer, the proportion of cultural industry in GDP is the main obstacle factor for most provinces. (3) Speeding up economic development and increasing ecological protection is the optimal development path of the YRB. Scientific evaluation of the regional HQD status and simulating the development situation under different scenarios can improve the accuracy and efficiency of managers’ decision-making.

A high level of corruption usually constrains economic development in emerging countries. However, anti-corruption campaigns often fail because the relevant policies need to be implemented by existing corrupt governments. This article studies the extent of bureaucrats’ heterogeneity in attitude to the problem of corruption. Due to the sensitivity of direct questions on corruption, we conduct the list experiment among public procurement officials in Russia. We show that female bureaucrats consider corruption an obstacle to public procurement development, and find no such evidence for male bureaucrats. This heterogeneity holds even at the high-level occupied positions. Although the negative attitude to corruption does not necessarily imply the anti-corruption activity by women, recognition of the problem seems to be a prerequisite for supporting an anti-corruption policy.

This paper presents the autonomous swimming technology developed for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operating in the underwater jacket structure environment. To prevent the position divergence of the inertial navigation system constructed for the primary navigation solution for the vehicle, we've developed kinds of marker-recognition based underwater localization methods using both of optical and acoustic cameras. However, these two methods all require the artificial markers to be located near to the cameras mounted on the vehicle. Therefore, in the case of the vehicle far away from the structure where the markers are usually mounted on, we may need alternative position-aiding solution to guarantee the navigation accuracy. For this purpose, we develop a sonar image processing based underwater localization method using a Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) mounted in front of the vehicle. The primary purpose of this FLS is to detect the obstacles in front of the vehicle. According to the detected obstacle(s), we apply an Occupancy Grid Map (OGM) based path planning algorithm to derive an obstacle collision-free reference path. Experimental studies are carried out in the water tank and also in the Pohang Yeongilman port sea environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed autonomous swimming technology. Keywords: Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), Autonomous navigation, Underwater localization, Occupancy Grid Map (OGM), Obstacle detection, Path planning

In this paper, a four-dimensional coordinated path planning algorithm for multiple UAVs is proposed, in which time variable is taken into account for each UAV as well as collision free and obstacle avoidance. A Spatial Refined Voting Mechanism (SRVM) is designed for standard Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to overcome the defects of local optimal and slow convergence. For each generation candidate particle positions are recorded and an adaptive cube is formed with own adaptive side length to indicate occupied regions. Then space voting begins and is sorted based on voting results, whose centers with bigger voting counts are seen as sub-optimal positions. The average of all particles of corresponding dimensions are calculated as the refined solutions. A time coordination method is developed by generating specified candidate paths for every UAV, making them arrive the same destination with the same time consumption. A spatial-temporal collision avoidance technique is introduced to make collision free. Distance to destination is constructed to improve the searching accuracy and velocity of particles. In addition, the objective function is redesigned by considering the obstacle and threat avoidance, Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA), separation maintenance and UAV self-constraints. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. Keywords: 4D path planning, Collision free, Multiple UAVs, Obstacle avoidance, Particle swarm optimization, Spatial refined voting mechanism

Background: Obstacle crossing requires sufficient toe clearance for trip and fall prevention for which postural stability is a prerequisite. It is thought that the upper visual field plays an important role in the maintenance of postural stability, but its influence and age-dependence have not been investigated yet. Research question: What is the role of the visual fields in maintaining postural stability during crossing an obstacle in young and older adults?. Methods: This study included 14 young adults and 14 older adults. The participants, wearing an accelerometer and liquid crystal shutter goggles, were asked to cross an obstacle under the following three conditions (i) full vision; (ii) total visual field occlusion at two steps before the obstacle, and (iii) lower visual field occlusion at two steps before the obstacle. The root mean square ratio in the mediolateral direction (RMSRML) for the three sections (i.e., approach to the obstacle, lead limb crossing, and trail limb crossing), as well as the root mean square in the mediolateral direction (RMSML) for each section were calculated. Results: RMSML during lead limb crossing was significantly increased in older adults compared to young adults (p

The paper deals with the variational iteration method to obtain a semi-analytical solution to some obstacle problems. We will focus on applications of a contact problem for a deformed beam with an elastic obstacle. To validate the accuracy this approach,the obtained solution has been compared with the exact solution, in the case where it can be calculated in the closed-form expression. Otherwise, a comparison of variational iteration method with the Adomian decomposition method for some nonlinear examples has been used.

This chapter presents an effective approach to path planning combined with task assignments for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Path planning for a UAV is a challenging task. Handling multiple UAVs in dynamic environments makes planning more complicated. On the other hand, coordination and cooperation is very significant for multi-UAV planning. To find a collision-free optimal cost path, a particle swarm optimization-based algorithm is used here. The proposed path planning algorithm has the capability to replan the path to avoid collision with static and dynamic obstacles and with other UAVs as well. One of the main contributions of the proposed approach is that it can efficiently solve the task assignment problem for multiple UAVs in a distributed manner. A nearest neighbor search model is applied to decompose/divide a set of tasks into several subsets of tasks and distribute them among UAVs. Following this approach, UAVs can effectively perform their mission in complex environments. The simulation results, using different obstacle configurations and different task distributions, are presented and discussed to validate the proposed approach. The proposed approach is tested with multiple UAVs under various reality factors such as breakdown of UAVs and task switching between UAVs. The result shows that, even in the presence of such uncertainties, UAVs are able to successfully complete all of the given tasks without any collision with other UAVs or obstacles.

Smart cities are a leading concept on the current global urbanization agenda. Despite such widespread acclaim, with respect to their actual development, planners face many operational challenges; one such obstacle involves a lack of inclusion for diverse actors in existing research methods. Collaboration in the planning process can be enhanced by formulating an empirical research framework for evaluating stakeholder opinions and potential conflicts. This paper seeks to isolate the stakeholder’s perspective as an assessment factor for smart city development. The researchers utilize a Q methodology to extract stakeholder attitudes and subjective opinions in the case of the Smart Gusu project in China. Conclusions drawn from this research will contribute toward the broader subjective landscape of knowledge involving our ongoing understanding of smart cities and their implications toward evolving urbanization strategies. By continuing to develop empirical tools for mapping conflicts within the expanding field of smart cities, this chapter aims to contribute to the efficiency of associated and future projects.

Pakistan has been striving for a sustainable power sector for the past two decades. However, the goal has not been achieved yet, due to a long-lasting electricity crisis. This electricity crisis has led to long hours of blackouts, increasing electricity prices, distribution losses, circular debt, and deterioration in the quality of service. This situation requires that we identify the root cause of the electricity crisis that has been an obstacle to the achievement of a sustainable power sector in Pakistan. For that purpose, this research reviewed the power sector of Pakistan over the period 1998–2017. The analysis revealed that the result of catering to the continuously increasing electricity demand under a conventional strategy with unidirectional focus has resulted in a supply-demand deficit, thermally dominated fuel mix, and inefficient recovery. All these issues have undesirable outcomes, with adverse effects on the economy, environment, and social life, resulting in an electricity crisis. Based on this analysis and recent global technological trends, this study proposes the introduction of a prepaid metering system as a practical solution to manage the continuously increasing electricity demand and, hence, the electricity crisis. In the context of Pakistan, this research also identifies administrative, technological, and financial challenges that may affect the smooth implementation of the prepaid metering system and presents policy guidelines to overcome these challenges.

We report the results of a new tacit bargaining experiment that provides two key insights about the effects of payoff inequality on coordination and cooperation towards efficient outcomes. The experiment features the novel Pizza Night game, which can disentangle the effects of payoff inequality and conflict of interest. When coordination relies on focal points based on labelling properties, payoff inequality does not interfere with the successful use of those properties. When there are efficiency cues that assist coordination, payoff inequality is not an obstacle to the maximisation of efficiency. Conflict of interest is the main barrier to successful coordination.\ud \ud

The nature inspired Swarm Intelligence has laid the foundation for many eclectic applications. This work considers a solution to one such application of Search and Rescue operation, based on Cohort Intelligence (CI) methodology which aims at modelling the behaviour of candidates based on the interaction amongst each other to achieve a common goal. Every candidate improves its own behaviour by observing all other candidates in the cohort. This method results in the refinement of the performance of the entire system. The research done so far in this application using CI is associated with robots deployed in a static alien establishment. However, this assumption is not suitable in real-life scenarios. In this paper, the obstacle avoidance and path planning of a swarm of robots was implemented while considering a dynamic alien establishment. The problem of robots occasionally getting stuck in the non-convex obstacles has also been solved using a perturbation technique. The following test cases were implemented - No Obstacle Case (NOC), Stationary Obstacles Case (SOC), Single Dynamic Obstacle Case (SDOC), Multiple Dynamic Obstacles Case with Same Velocity (MDOC-SV) and Multiple Dynamic Obstacles Case with Different Velocities (MDOC-DV).

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. Recent research on automotive driving has developed an efficient end-to-end learning mode that directly maps visual input to control commands. However, it models distinct driving variations in a single network, which increases learning complexity and is less adaptive for modular integration. In this paper, we re-investigate human's driving style and propose to learn an intermediate driving intention region to relax the difficulties in end-to-end approach. The intention region follows both road structure in image and direction towards goal in public route planner, which addresses visual variations only and figures out where to go without conventional precise localization. Then the learned visual intention is projected on vehicle local coordinate and fused with reliable obstacle perception to render a navigation score map that is widely used for motion planning. The core of the proposed system is a weakly-supervised cGAN-LSTM model trained to learn driving intention from human demonstration. The adversarial loss learns from limited demonstration data with one local planned route and enables reasoning of multi-modal behaviors with diverse routes while testing. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with real-world datasets. Results indicate the proposed paradigm can produce more consistent motion commands with human demonstration and shows better reliability and robustness to environment change. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuifangZJU/visual-navigation.

The use of battery electric vehicles - BEVs in commercial transport may require the integration of recharging during the usual operating hours. This might lead to a conflict between the commercial activity and a non-usability period of the vehicles due to charging. This conflict is an obstacle to the suitability of BEVs. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse the charging behaviour of organisations, which already use BEVs in commercial transport. Furthermore, this paper provides conclusions on the feasibility of integrating recharging into the daily routine and the pursued energy-related and temporal charging behaviour.

This paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the temporal and geographical distribution of green technology, and on how specific country characteristics enable or thwart environmental inventive activities. Using patent data on 63 countries over the period 1971–2012 we identify key drivers of cross-country diversification and specialisation. Our first finding is that countries diversify towards green technologies that are related to their existing competences. Notably, the degree of green technology maturity matters more than a country`s level of development. The second main result is that countries move along cumulative paths of specialisation, and towards more mature green technologies. Interestingly, the complexity of green technologies is not an obstacle to further specialisation. This holds also for developing countries that are most exposed to climate change hazards., DC acknowledges the financial support of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) “Ayuda de Incorporación para Científicos Titulares” (OEP2014) and of the Ministerio de Economia Industria y Competitividad “Programa Estatal de I+D+i Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, 2017” (ECO2017- 86976R). FP acknowledges the financial support of European H2020 Project RISIS2 (grant agreement n∘ 824091).

Industrialization and a significant increase in energy requirement in the last decades have resulted in an increase in CO2 emission and consequently the global warming. Hence the environmental protection criteria enforced the scientific researches into the more efficient CO2 capture processes. In this case, increasing the efficiency of gas-liquid contact, e.g., increasing the contact time, contact area, and removing the mass transfer resistance, within the conventional and novel contactors plays the important role. Different novel contactors, e.g., rotating packed bed, mini- and micro-channels are three prototypes of the efficient contactors in gas-liquid processes. Besides the advantages of these contactors, industrialization of such processes is the main obstacle for real future applications. In this chapter, the main advantages, different types, basic principles and theoretical aspects, as well as fluid dynamics and design criteria of the aforementioned contactors were described.

The main objective of our project is to provide assistance to people who are visually impaired so that they will be able to walk like a normal human being. Thus the project aims to develop a device that would serve as a guiding assistance to them. This would help them to travel independently and also with more ease when they are in unfamiliar public places. Blind shoe is a wearable system designed to provide directional information to visually impaired people. Ultrasonic sensors are put on shoes so that it can detect any obstacle which comes across the person and will alert them from the obstacle on their way. This shoe can also determine light intensity around the person for their safety while they enter dark places; this is possible because we have used light dependent resistor in it. The main aim of this project is to address a reliable solution encompassing a shoe that could communicate with the user through buzzer beep alerts.

This chapter deals with a scenario analysis for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in the context of road freight transport in Germany for the year 2030. Interdependency and similarity analysis identified relevant key factors that were used to generate three environment scenarios for the future of ITS for road freight transport. The first scenario “Efficiency is key” shows a development toward a strongly cooperating and networking society. In the second scenario, “Uncertain times,” political unrest is expected, which leads to a cautious and protectionist attitude to communication openness. The third scenario “Standstill” is negative in its basic tone and formulated as an obstacle to development for ITS. All three scenarios depend on the development of the identified key factors, which range from political upheaval and disastrous road infrastructure to prosperous economic and technological development.

As estimated by the World Health Organization, there are millions of people who lives with some form of vision impairment. As a consequence, some of them present mobility problems in outdoor environments. With the aim of helping them, we propose in this work a system which is capable of delivering the position of potential obstacles in outdoor scenarios. Our approach is based on non-intrusive wearable devices and focuses also on being low-cost. First, a depth map of the scene is estimated from a color image, which provides 3D information of the environment. Then, an urban object detector is in charge of detecting the semantics of the objects in the scene. Finally, the three-dimensional and semantic data is summarized in a simpler representation of the potential obstacles the users have in front of them. This information is transmitted to the user through spoken or haptic feedback. Our system is able to run at about 3.8 fps and achieved a 87.99% mean accuracy in obstacle presence detection. Finally, we deployed our system in a pilot test which involved an actual person with vision impairment, who validated the effectiveness of our proposal for improving its navigation capabilities in outdoors. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515R Grant, supported with Feder funds, the University of Alicante project GRE16-19, and by the Valencian Government project GV/2018/022. Edmanuel Cruz is funded by a Panamenian grant for PhD studies IFARHU & SENACYT 270-2016-207. This work has also been supported by a Spanish grant for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243. Thanks also to Nvidia for the generous donation of a Titan Xp and a Quadro P6000.

This chapter discusses the concept of protective barriers—they are used to define the physical limits of an installation, activity, or area. The various uses of barriers are also discussed—to restrict, channel, or impede access—and are fully integrated to form a continuous obstacle around the installation. Protective barriers are used to define the physical limits of an installation, activity, or area. Barriers restrict, channel, or impede access and are fully integrated to form a continuous obstacle around the installation. They are designed to deter the worst case threat. The barriers should be focused on providing assets with an acceptable level of protection against a threat.

This chapter deals with the human lower limb tracking via motion capture system from fundamentals up to recent advances. Gait analysis is the systematic study of human walking. This analysis is helpful in the medical management of those diseases which affect the locomotion systems. It can also be used as reference knowledge for the research and development of humanoid robots. Two instances are presented in this work to illustrate how the gait analysis can be useful for each one of these fields. The first one is carried out to perform the quantitative analysis of a normal gait, which will be used as an input to the inverse dynamic model of a cable-based gait training machine. The second one is performed to characterize the human biped walking in obstacle overcoming that can be used as reference knowledge for the research and development of humanoid robots. For this purpose, a commercial Vicon Nexus motion capture system is used in this work for analyzing typical walking mode of human beings. With the aim to obtain moving trajectory and to calculate joint variation during walking, a general markers configuration fitted to lower body of an adult human is presented. The markers configuration is divided into seven segments, and three markers are placed on each segment.

This paper investigates the importance of landscape analysis in designing the public participation process for rural sustainable development projects, using a case study of a non-governmental organization (NGO)'s development projects in Chonburi province. Mixed methods were applied, using focus group and in-depth interview techniques with the former members of a community-based organization and the NGO's staff members, and quantitative data derived from 250 questionnaires which were gathered from the former targeted group of that NGO. The results of this research found that the lack of impact of landscape analysis on the spatial distribution or density of the target population had become a significant intervening obstacle in promoting public participation. It has also resulted in a proportionate discontinuity of the process of the development projects. Specifically, the size of and the space between human groupings, together with the different physical environments of each specific area, have resulted in some targets becoming marginalized from full participation in the development project. Additionally, some other target areas were not willing to join the project due mainly to their way of life and economic conditions, and these two factors are in turn the result of the geographical environment.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Among many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs), the proportion of nondominated solutions is too large to distinguish among different solutions, which is a great obstacle in the process of solving MaOPs. Thus, this paper proposes an algorithm which uses a weighted subpopulation knee point. The weight is used to divide the whole population into a number of subpopulations, and the knee point of each subpopulation guides other solutions to search. Besides, Additionally, the convergence of the knee point approach can be exploited, and the subpopulation-based approach improves performance by improving the diversity of the evolutionary algorithm. Therefore, these advantages can make the algorithm suitable for solving MaOPs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better on most test problems than six other state-of-the-art many-objective evolutionary algorithms.

Places where people live are important for their personal and social lives. This is also the case for people with mental health problems living in supported housing. To summarise the existing knowledge, we conducted a systematic review of 13 studies with different methodologies regarding the built environment in supported housing and examined their findings in a thematic analysis. The built environment of supported housing involves three important and interrelated themes: well-being, social identity and privacy. If overregulated by professionals or located in problematic neighbourhoods or buildings, the settings could be an obstacle to recovery. If understood as meaningful places with scope for control by the tenants or with amenities nearby, the settings could aid recovery.

SMEs are drivers of economic growth and job creation in developing countries. It is paramount to determine the factors that hinder their growth. This paper uses the Enterprise Survey from the World Bank which covers data from 119 developing countries to investigate the biggest obstacles SMEs are confronting and the determinants that influence the obstacles as perceived by enterprise managers. The results show that SMEs perceive access to finance as the most significant obstacle which hinders their growth. The key determinants among firms' characteristics are size, age and growth rate of firms as well as the ownership of the firm. The latter – the role of the state in financing SME – is particularly intriguing. External reasons for the financing dilemma are also examined. It is shown that the main barriers to external financing are high costs of borrowing and a lack of consultant support.

Revenues from taxation gain in importance to finance economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One obstacle to enhancing the willingness to remit taxes can be the extortion of bribes by public officials. Using micro-level data from the Afrobarometer, we show that petty corruption erodes tax morale. The effect on tax morale is more severe in countries and regions where fewer people are affected by petty corruption and becomes insignificant if extortion of bribes is particularly prevalent. Differing levels of civic participation and potential access to tax funded services are also found to induce heterogeneous reactions to corruption experience. Applying a mediation analysis, we demonstrate that petty corruption not only has a direct effect on tax morale but also diminishes confidence in tax authorities and therefore affects tax morale indirectly. The harmful effects of corruption experience, however, operate mainly through a generally lowered inclination to uphold high levels of tax morale.

Rapidly-exploring Random Tree star (RRT*) has recently gained immense popularity in the motion planning community as it provides a probabilistically complete and asymptotically optimal solution without requiring the complete information of the obstacle space. In spite of all of its advantages, RRT* converges to optimal solution very slowly. Hence to improve the convergence rate, its bidirectional variants were introduced, the Bi-directional RRT* (B-RRT*) and Intelligent Bi-directional RRT* (IB-RRT*). However, as both variants perform pure exploration, they tend to suffer in highly cluttered environments. In order to overcome these limitations we introduce a new concept of potentially guided bidirectional trees in our proposed Potentially Guided Intelligent Bi-directional RRT* (PIB-RRT*) and Potentially Guided Bi-directional RRT* (PB-RRT*). The proposed algorithms greatly improve the convergence rate and have a more efficient memory utilization. Theoretical and experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithms have been made and compared to the latest state of the art motion planning algorithms under different challenging environmental conditions and have proven their remarkable improvement in efficiency and convergence rate.

Sustainable supply chain management has developed at an exponential rate into a distinct research field, but its progress towards sustainability is rather modest, and a coherent theoretical foundation for\ud guiding companies towards a stronger integration of sustainability into their operations and supply\ud chains is still missing. This article outlines how the tradition of critical management studies could foster higher levels of sustainable business and sustainable supply chains. We argue that the underlying\ud instrumental logic of contemporary corporate engagement with sustainability, driven by stakeholder pressures, is a key obstacle when aiming for ‘truly’ sustainable supply chains. Referring to a recognition\ud perspective may dissolve the reified pursuit of profit-seeking and other merely economic performance targets to recall the genuinedand in its essence truly radicaldclaim that the concept of sustainable\ud development is inherently a normative one imposed on all of us. Recognition may lead the way for companies to adopt a caring stance for people and the surrounding environment and to respond to the legitimate expectations of all groups in society while conceiving themselves as an integral part of such a society. We conclude by discussing how far the theoretical perspective of recognition is enrooted in the European tradition of institutionalised businessesociety relationships and therefore could be seen as a rediscovery of a genuinely European way of making business and managing supply chains.

A bridge is a construction made for carrying the road traffic or other moving loads in order to pass through an obstacle or other constructions. The required passage may be for pedestrians, a road, a railway, a canal, a pipeline, etc. Obstacle can be rivers, valleys, sea channels, and other constructions, such as bridges themselves, buildings, railways, or roads, etc. Bridges are important structures in modern highway and railway transportation systems, and generally serving as “lifelines” in the social infrastructure systems. Bridge components (superstructure, bearing, substructure, etc.), bridges classification (e.g., according to materials of construction, span length, span type, deck location, usage, geometric shape, and structural form), and selection of bridge types are discussed in this chapter.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.02.009 Energy policy research has highlighted systematic shortfalls in the adoption of new energy technologies owing to market failures and behavioral factors. However, less research has examined how organizational processes may block energy innovations. In this paper, we propose that a key organizational obstacle in the adoption of innovations may be the lack of a good justification for implementing a technology. In situations where there is no obviously correct answer regarding the adoption of an innovation, organizations put a premium on developing a justification that may be favorably received in the context of an organization’s energy culture. Absent a favorable justification an organization may abandon a new technology, or delay implementing it until a suitable justification becomes available. We draw our insights about the role of justifications in organizations from a study of the U.S. Navy’s decade-long attempt to justify LED lighting on its ships. LED lighting proponents in the Navy cycled through several justifications for the technology with little success. We conclude that a better appreciation of the organizational processes involved in justifying new energy investments is essential for the development of more effective energy policy.

Assessment of scholarly outcomes is based on certain bibliometric indexes that indicate the quality of the work. It is found that Chinese researchers have made tremendous contributions to scholarship regarding the number of their publications in international journals. However, these numerous publications are not cited adequately because of their quality (?) or language (?). It is indeed true that English is an obstacle for the Chinese in the process of writing scientific articles. A performance difference between scientists and social scientists is also discovered. In addition, this chapter highlights the achievements that the Chinese have made in scholarly publishing and patent creation.

While the Internet is providing an ever-increasing amount of information, readers are in need of a selection which takes into account the quality of the information. An important aspect of the information is the reliability of the source involved and (at least in many cases) its independency. This is a role to be provided by digital libraries. Essential values of the library sector are its reliability, independence, accessibility, pluriformity and authenticity. This role, by definition, cannot be taken over by the market. To organise this on a national scale, one is confronted with a serious obstacle: the library sector, financed by public money, is organised in a number of ‘columns’ of which the public libraries, university libraries and the national library are the largest. And all of them, except the national library, are financed to serve a local community. An increasing number of communities, however, are not restricted to one city, region or organisation. To give an example: citizens in need of scientific information cannot turn to university libraries since these libraries are not paid (and not allowed by publishers) to serve outside communities. Public libraries, on the other hand, cannot provide access to scientific information. Moreover, they are heavily concentrated on their own city or region. The situation therefore calls for cooperation, across regional borders and across organisational borders within the library sector. It also calls for pilot projects which involve publishers. The national library is the natural candidate for the coordination.

Shop and window display are considered to be one of the most effective and potential tools in the hands of retailers not just to create visual delight and fascination for random visitors and passerby but also to draw foot traffic. Apart from the visual aids, props, signage, and conventional methods of display, manikins are increasingly being used to embellish and design window and display inside the store. Manikins strategically chosen and positioned in prime display locations of store can go a long way in creating emotional connect with shoppers prompting them to step in and very often make unplanned, impulsive purchases. The chapter highlights the role of manikins in visual display of merchandise, composition, and selection of manikins as per changing themes—holiday, party, festive. Target customers and their expectations from the store are prerequisite while selecting the manikins for shop display. Likewise, the positioning of manikins inside the store and in window is accomplished with utmost care as wrongly positioned, cluttered, and unorganized manikins can be obstacle in free movement of shoppers and can repel them. The potential of manikins in attracting masses inside retail stores and their unprecedented advantages compared to conventional methods of display have encouraged retailers to experiment with look of manikins—body physiques, facial expressions, hair length, and thus customizing the manikins to impersonate famous celebrities or style icons.

A series of 51 experiments was conducted in a laboratory flume to investigate hydromorphological processes at submerged solitary boulder-like obstacles. As part of a programme to validate the experimental results, five sites with obstacle marks at large boulders were surveyed in two gravel-bed ephemeral streams located in eastern Spain. Three hydromorphological system states (I–III) were observed, each exhibiting characteristic dynamic interactions between hydraulic and sedimentary processes: (I) wake-vortex domination and absent scouring; (II) wake-vortex domination and downstream scouring; (III) horseshoe-vortex domination, frontal scouring and ridge-like sediment accumulation at the lee-side. The latter system state (III) comprises ‘typical’ fluvial obstacle marks. In mobile alluvial beds, obstacles may tilt upstream into the scour hole when frontal scour depths exceed 0.6 times obstacle length, favouring the rapid achievement of steady state conditions (state III). Field and experimentally modelled obstacle marks are related to each other when frontal scour depth, -width and -length as well as ridge width are used as morphometric variables. An analytical model was adapted and successfully applied for determination of these variables at the steady state condition. The model was also used to assess the critical threshold for the formation of obstacle marks. It integrates mean flow velocity, water depth, obstacle height and width, obstacle shape, median grain size relative to obstacle width and grain size distribution. Dynamic interactions between hydraulic processes and sediment exchange around obstacles, together with well-defined boundaries between evolutionary states (critical thresholds), suggest a self-organised, scale-invariant mechanism driving the generation of obstacle marks., We would kindly like to thank the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ (DFG) for project funding (project-number: HE 3006/8-1). Field logistic was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the research project CLARIES (ref. CGL2011-29176).

We investigated after effects of automation in take-over scenarios in a high-end moving-base driving simulator. Drivers performed evasive manoeuvres encountering a blocked lane in highway driving. We compared the performance of drivers 1) during manual driving, 2) after automated driving with eyes on the road while performing the cognitively demanding n-back task, and 3) after automated driving with eyes off the road performing the visually demanding SuRT task. Both minimum time to collision (TTC) and minimum clearance towards the obstacle disclosed a substantial number of near miss events and are regarded as valuable surrogate safety metrics in evasive manoeuvres. TTC proved highly sensitive to the applied definition of colliding paths, and we prefer robust solutions using lane position while disregarding heading. The extended time to collision (ETTC) which takes into account acceleration was close to the more robust conventional TTC. In line with other publications, the initial steering or braking intervention was delayed after using automation compared to manual driving. This resulted in lower TTC values and stronger steering and braking actions. Using automation, effects of cognitive distraction were similar to visual distraction for the intervention time with effects on the surrogate safety metric TTC being larger with visual distraction. However the precision of the evasive manoeuvres was hardly affected with a similar clearance towards the obstacle, similar overshoots and similar excursions to the hard shoulder. Further research is needed to validate and complement the current simulator based results with human behaviour in real world driving conditions. Experiments with real vehicles can disclose possible systematic differences in behaviour, and naturalistic data can serve to validate surrogate safety measures like TTC and obstacle clearance in evasive manoeuvres.