In Japan, the number of elderly households facing difficulties in snow removal work is increasing due to the rapid aging and depopulation. Moreover, because of the declining birthrate, human ...resources needed for the work are insufficient. Therefore the elderly are forced to do the snow removal work on their own, and as a consequence serious accidents may occur during the work. Currently, as a means for solving this problem, there are snow removal substitution services and construction of electric road heating. However, they are not definitive solutions since they are very expensive. The purpose of this study is to develop an autonomous robot system which can perform snow removing with low cost and simple construction. Through the experiments using the prototype, and the cost estimate that assumed practical use, the effectiveness of this system was confirmed.
Web-based process planning is an internet application for distributed and knowledge-sharing process planning providing important support for virtual enterprises. Route sheet documents are widely ...adopted as user interfaces for information input, output, browsing, sharing and integration. In traditional applications, data and their presentation in specially formatted route sheet documents are implemented together. Separation of data and their presentation is emphasized in this paper because not only can it provide multi-level and multi-orientation views of the same data, but it can also improve context-sensitivity in process planning by better information sharing. An eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based method for route sheet presentation and implementation is proposed to support context-sensitive and web-based process planning. The route sheet document includes a declarative user interface, a tree-style data structure, and processing rules embedded in documents to support context-sensitive information processing. An XML application named Manufacturing Process XML (MPXML) was developed as a meta-language for description of manufacturing process information.
