•During the COVID-19 pandemic, the surveyed community gardeners quickly and autonomously set rules through discussions and continued their activities even with some restrictions.•Community gardeners ...felt more spiritual well-being than physical health benefits.•The need to care for the vegetables was also a motivation to continue their activities.•Community gardens can play a pivotal role in bolstering urban resilience.
Numerous studies underscore the role of community gardens in sustaining food security, physical and mental health, and social networks during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to community resilience in different contexts of each country. Despite the rich history of urban gardening, Japan remains a geographical gap. This study conducted a mixed-method case study in suburban Tokyo and addresses the unique response of community gardeners to the pandemic within the Japanese context. The survey revealed that gardeners proactively established rules to navigate the crisis quickly through discussion and sustained their gardening activities. The findings also showed that their continuing activities helped the gardeners maintaining physical and mental health, and notably keeping their ikigai, sense of purpose in life in the unusual days. Thus, this study provided new evidence that community gardens may contribute to urban resilience, which indicates the significance of incorporating them into urban green space planning as a preparatory measure for future social crises.
In this article, we present a framework for visual action planning of complex manipulation tasks with high-dimensional state spaces, focusing on manipulation of deformable objects. We propose a ...latent space roadmap (LSR) for task planning, which is a graph-based structure globally capturing the system dynamics in a low-dimensional latent space. Our framework consists of the following three parts. First, a mapping module (MM) that maps observations is given in the form of images into a structured latent space extracting the respective states as well as generates observations from the latent states. Second, the LSR, which builds and connects clusters containing similar states in order to find the latent plans between start and goal states, extracted by MM. Third, the action proposal module that complements the latent plan found by the LSR with the corresponding actions. We present a thorough investigation of our framework on simulated box stacking and rope/box manipulation tasks, and a folding task executed on a real robot.
Active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the problem of planning and controlling the motion of a robot to build the most accurate and complete model of the surrounding environment. ...Since the first foundational work in active perception appeared, more than three decades ago, this field has received increasing attention across different scientific communities. This has brought about many different approaches and formulations, and makes a review of the current trends necessary and extremely valuable for both new and experienced researchers. In this article, we survey the state of the art in active SLAM and take an in-depth look at the open challenges that still require attention to meet the needs of modern applications. After providing a historical perspective, we present a unified problem formulation and review the well-established modular solution scheme, which decouples the problem into three stages that identify, select, and execute potential navigation actions. We then analyze alternative approaches, including belief-space planning and deep reinforcement learning techniques, and review related work on multirobot coordination. This article concludes with a discussion of new research directions, addressing reproducible research, active spatial perception, and practical applications, among other topics.
As more neurodivergent students enroll in college, academic libraries need to examine how accessible their space is for these students. Susquehanna University, a private, four-year college, has many ...neurodiverse students on our campus. When librarians met with the Counseling and Psychological Services ASD and Neurodiversity student group, they discovered the library was a difficult space for many of them to use. To create a more welcoming space, the library purchased fidget toys for in-library use, created an occupancy counter, and renovated three study rooms into sensory-friendly spaces. Librarians learned a lot from this experience about groups to collaborate with and things to be mindful of when working with neurodiverse students.
•In Berlin, informal strategies explicitly refer to the ecosystem service framework.•Financial constraints on municipal budget severely affect green space development.•Low awareness of benefits & ...insufficient communication challenge green development.•The ecosystem services framework is useful to communicate green space benefits.
Urban landscape planners are increasingly becoming aware of the value of ecosystem services to the quality of life of city residents. However, the ecosystem service framework has not yet been integrated in spatial planning in a systematic way. In this paper, we assess how the ecosystem service framework is organized and implemented in the current urban green planning structure of the city of Berlin. Based on an analysis of strategic planning documents and expert interviews with local stakeholders, this work explores to what degree the ecosystem service framework is integrated in the planning system and identifies major challenges in urban green governance. As an output of the analysis of planning documents, it is identified that only very recently developed informal strategies explicitly relate to the ecosystem service framework although stakeholders are aware of the term. Identified main challenges in Berlin's urban green governance include (a) increasing development pressure from population growth and financial constraints on the municipal budget, (b) loss of expertise and (c) low awareness of green benefits among different actors through insufficient communication. The concept of ecosystem services, however, may provide a useful argument to promote the conservation of existing urban green spaces and to communicate the benefits that urban nature provides for citizens to all levels of green space governance.
Urban studies attempt to assess open space fragmentation and develop sustainable policies in high–density cities. However, the complex characteristics of open space fragmentation and the multiple ...scenarios comprising various fragmentation forms have not been adequately documented, potentially leading to irrelevant control strategies and controversial results. Therefore, this study aims to propose a systematic procedure for elaborating the patterns, forms and scenarios of open space fragmentation in Hong Kong's built–up area. The series of metrics proposed to capture the complex relationships among various fragmentation forms has been validated by principal components analysis for its wide application in open space fragmentation research. The results reveal that open space fragmentation takes the form of morphological (use, internal, extensive and shape) and connectional (location) fragmentation, which covers nine scenarios. Open space fragmentation shows spatial heterogeneity, as evidenced by the highest fragmentation index of 0.259 in the Kowloon region, followed by the Hong Kong Island and the New Territories regions with fragmentation indexes of 0.237 and 0.187. The average value of open space fragmentation in the old towns is 0.250, which is considerably higher than that of 0.187 in the new towns. Old towns manifest numerously more and complicated scenarios than new towns. The findings inform refined open space management in high–density cities.
•Understanding the characteristics of open space fragmentation in high–density cities.•Establishing metrics for capturing morphological and connectional fragmentation.•Nine scenarios based on various forms of open space fragmentation were identified.•Old towns have a higher level of open space fragmentation compared to the new towns.•Beneficial strategies are proposed for multiple open space fragmentation scenarios.
•This paper tackles an omnichannel product selection and shelf space planning problem, considering a wide range of demand effects such as space elasticity, cross-space elasticity, substitution, and ...showroom effects.•To handle the complexities of this optimization problem, we first reformulate it into a mixed integer quadratic programming by exploring the structural properties, and then use the RLT method to decrease the solving time, ensuring practical feasibility even for large-scale scenarios.•We demonstrate the clear advantage of joint optimization over the separate optimization method in diverse cases, highlighting its potential to enhance profits.•We identify how the involved effects and parameters may influence retailers' profits and decisions, including the showroom effect, the facing effect, the proportion of online customers and positive evaluations of brick-and-mortar stores. Retailers can leverage these insights to make informed business adjustments.
As the retail industry is evolving toward an omnichannel paradigm, we study a product selection and shelf space planning problem faced by omnichannel retailers. We aim to maximize aggregated profits across channels by determining the optimal product offerings for the offline and online channels while optimizing the allocation of limited shelf space to these products in brick-and-mortar stores. Furthermore, the showroom effect of physical stores on online sales is also taken into account. We propose a corresponding model that jointly optimizes these decisions. To solve the nonlinear nonconvex model of practical scale, we first reformulate it into a mixed integer quadratic programming by exploring the structural properties. Next, we use the reformulation linearization technique to further improve the computational speed. Our numerical studies validate the efficiency of the proposed solution approach. In addition, we derive some managerial insights, including that retailers should adopt joint optimization and consider how the involved effects and parameters may influence their profits and decisions.
We present a new approach to motion planning under sensing and motion uncertainty by computing a locally optimal solution to a continuous partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Our ...approach represents beliefs (the distributions of the robot’s state estimate) by Gaussian distributions and is applicable to robot systems with non-linear dynamics and observation models. The method follows the general POMDP solution framework in which we approximate the belief dynamics using an extended Kalman filter and represent the value function by a quadratic function that is valid in the vicinity of a nominal trajectory through belief space. Using a belief space variant of iterative LQG (iLQG), our approach iterates with second-order convergence towards a linear control policy over the belief space that is locally optimal with respect to a user-defined cost function. Unlike previous work, our approach does not assume maximum-likelihood observations, does not assume fixed estimator or control gains, takes into account obstacles in the environment, and does not require discretization of the state and action spaces. The running time of the algorithm is polynomial (On6) in the dimension n of the state space. We demonstrate the potential of our approach in simulation for holonomic and non-holonomic robots maneuvering through environments with obstacles with noisy and partial sensing and with non-linear dynamics and observation models.
Product proliferation and changes in demand require that retailers regularly determine how items should be allocated to retail shelves. The existing shelf‐space literature mainly deals with regular ...retail shelves onto which customers only have a frontal perspective. This study provides a modeling and solution approach for two‐dimensional shelves, e.g., for meat, bread, fish, cheese, or clothes. These are categories that are kept on tilted shelves. Customers have a total perspective on these shelves and can observe units of one particular item horizontally and vertically instead of just seeing the foremost unit of an item, as is the case of regular shelves. We develop a decision model that optimizes the two‐dimensional shelf‐space assignment of items to a restricted, tilted shelf. We contribute to current literature by integrating the assortment decision and accounting for stochastic demand, space elasticity and substitution effects in the setting of such self types. To solve the model, we implement a specialized heuristic that is based on a genetic algorithm (GA). By comparing it to an exact approach and other benchmarks, we prove its efficiency and demonstrate that results are near‐optimal with an average solution quality of above 99% in terms of profit. Based on a numerical study with data from one of Germany’s largest retailers, we were able to show within the scope of a case study that our approach can lead to an increase in profits of up to 15%. We demonstrate with further simulated data that integration of stochastic demand, substitution, and space elasticity results in up to 80% higher profits.
Spatial equity embeddedness in fragmented open space has long been neglected but is now becoming a pivotal topic in sustainable urban development. It is unclear whether open space fragmentation has ...widened existing spatial inequalities. Thus, this study proposes an integrated methodological framework of open space fragmentation and its associated spatial equity issue in towns at different stages of urbanisation development. Hong Kong's built–up area could provide a typical case to unveil this topic due to the high shortage of open space, continued urbanisation, high immigrant rate, large wealth gap and aging population. The characteristics of open space fragmentation forms in old and new towns are elaborated through landscape pattern analysis and principal components analysis. Spatial horizontal equity and spatial vertical equity based on demographic characteristics and social economic status are portrayed by means of the Theil index and spatial matching. The findings indicate that the heterogeneity of open space fragmentation is evidenced by the uneven distribution of residents' environments in the old and new towns. Statistics reveal that in addition to shape fragmentation, the mean values of use fragmentation, internal fragmentation, extensive fragmentation and location fragmentation in old towns are all larger than those in new towns. Additionally, internal fragmentation overall is embedded in more spatial horizontal inequalities, and there is a higher level of spatial horizontal inequality in old towns than in new towns. Vulnerable groups that rely more on open spaces, including children, the elder, low education groups, immigrant groups and unemployed groups, suffer more from spatial vertical inequalities in old towns than in new towns. The knowledge gained from this research could provide a valuable reference for open space planning at home and abroad.
•Understanding open space fragmentation via horizontal and vertical equity lenses•Various open space fragmentation forms are characterised by spatial heterogeneity.•Old towns are embedded in more spatial horizontal inequalities than new towns do.•Vulnerable groups are exposed to more fragmented open spaces, notably in old towns.•New knowledge is gained regarding open space fragmentation and related inequalities.
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