Traded and combined cooperative control of a smart wheelchair

This article deals with a human–machine cooperative system for the control of a smart wheelchair for people with motor disabilities. The choice of a traded control mode is first argued. The paper then pursues two objectives. The first is to describe the design of the cooperative system by focusing on the dialogue and the interaction between the pilot and the robot. The second objective is to introduce a new cooperative mode. In this one, three features are proposed: two semi-autonomous features, a wall following and a doorway crossing, during which the user can intervene punctually to rectify a trajectory or a path, and an assisted mode where, conversely, the machine intervenes in a manual control to avoid obstacles. This mode of intervention of an entity, human or machine, supervising a movement controlled by the other is referred as “combined control.” Examples of scenarios exploiting the cooperative capabilities of the system are presented and discussed.

ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES: ANTECEDENTS OF WELL-BEING AT WORK FOR RURAL SUCCESSORS

ABSTRACT Purpose: This study sought to explore the relationship between well-being at work and organizational values in rural properties’ successors in a cooperative system. Originality/value: Empirically, the study presents elements for the strategic management of rural properties, especially for the challenge of preparing successors. For cooperatives, it contributes towards presenting elements for members’ management policies and practices. The study also extends the field of studies on well-being at work and the relationship between well-being and values in the organizational environment. Design/methodology/approach: The method design adopted followed a quantitative approach, with a relational scope, survey type, and cross-sectional. Successors representing 119 rural properties in western Santa Catarina participated in the study. Questionnaires assess organizational values and well-being at work as constructs. The descriptive, correlational statistics and structural equations modeling with partial least squares estimation confirm the hypothesis. Findings: The study’s main conclusion suggests that the values of environment dominance and autonomy are associated with commitment, satisfaction, and involvement with work for successors of rural properties in a cooperative system.

Investigating factors affecting Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation based on the COM-B behaviour changing theory

Purpose This study aims to present the Chinese entrepreneurial environment and explore Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation on live streaming platforms. Based on the COM-B behaviour changing theory, this paper discovers various influencing factors from environmental opportunity and personal capability aspects. It analyses their effects under the cooperative system established among official departments, industries and universities. Meanwhile, considering social and cultural control, it also refers to the uncertainty-avoidance dimension from the Hofstede cultural theory and re-evaluates its influence on Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyse 474 responses from online questionnaires through partial least squares path modelling and variance-based structural equation modelling. The paper claims that environmental opportunity and personal capability factors positively affect students’ online-startup motivation, but uncertainty-avoidance thinking plays a negative role. The study also measures the importance-performance map analysis to explore additional findings and discuss managerial implications. Findings Both platform support and official department support positively impact Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation and entrepreneurial skills learned from universities are beneficial for them to build online-startup confidence. Meanwhile, influenced by the cooperative system implemented among official departments, industries and universities, official department support positively affects platform support and entrepreneurial skills. Conversely, influenced by Chinese traditional Confucian culture, uncertainty-avoidance thinking negatively affects tertiary students’ online-startup motivation. Originality/value This paper demonstrates the analysis of Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation drawing on the COM-B behaviour changing and Hofstede cultural theories. Specifically, this study divides influencing factors into three specific aspects as follows: environmental opportunity, personal capability and social and cultural control. Unlike existing research applying traditional research models, the combination of the COM-B behaviour changing theory and the Hofstede cultural theory could be conducive to making the research model reflect influencing factors and present their different relationships.

Existence of traveling wave solutions in nonlocal delayed higher-dimensional lattice systems with quasi-monotone nonlinearities

In this paper, we are concerned with the existence of traveling wave solutions in nonlocal delayed higher-dimensional lattice systems with quasi-monotone nonlinearities. By using the upper and lower solution method and Schauder’s fixed point theorem, we establish the existence of traveling wave solutions. To illustrate our results, the existence of traveling wave solutions for a nonlocal delayed higher-dimensional lattice cooperative system with two species are considered.

Mission Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Voronoi Diagram-Tabu Genetic Algorithm

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in different military missions. In this paper, we focus on the autonomous mission allocation and planning abilities for the UAV systems. Such abilities enable adaptation to more complex and dynamic mission environments. We first examine the mission planning of a single unmanned aerial vehicle. Based on that, we then investigate the multi-UAV cooperative system under the mission background of cooperative target destruction and show that it is a many-to-one rendezvous problem. A heterogeneous UAV cooperative mission planning model is then proposed where the mission background is generated based on the Voronoi diagram. We then adopt the tabu genetic algorithm (TGA) to obtain multi-UAV mission planning. The simulation results show that the single-UAV and multi-UAV mission planning can be effectively realized by the Voronoi diagram-TGA (V-TGA). It is also shown that the proposed algorithm improves the performance by 3% in comparison with the Voronoi diagram-particle swarm optimization (V-PSO) algorithm.