Advanced Measurements for Industry 4.0

Dear Colleagues,

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0, has introduced new forms of industrial processes that benefit from innovative technologies, such as advanced robotics, machine learning, cloud computing, additive manufacturing, big data analytics, cybersecurity, and augmented reality. The main advantages are related to an overall reduction of costs and an increase in process reliability, robustness, maintainability, and re-use.

Industry 4.0 is a framework that requires high-automation of processes where the human support is more related to supervisor tasks than operator ones. Human supervisor can be in a remote position with respect to core processing activity to increase safety or to reduce costs by teleworking. Therefore, proper sensing solutions are required to provide adequate awareness about the status of each activity. Several cases can be considered, such as visual cameras for augmented reality, motion sensors for robotics, and chemical sensors for additive manufacturing. New systems need to be adopted for specific processes, such as drones for large infrastructure inspection, digital twins to assess risk and sources of failures, and avatars to guide maintenance operations by means of augmented reality solutions.

Sensors used for advanced industrial applications shall be smart-sensors, i.e., they need to have internal data processing capabilities to provide built-in functions such as digital noise filtering, bias and scale factor error compensation, and automatic detection of measurement anomalies. Sensors shall be networked to improve overall awareness by means of cross-sensor cueing and sensor data fusion. Sensors providing a very large quantity of output data, such as cameras and radars, can be exploited by applying big data analytics or machine learning solutions to provide synthetic information to support correct decision-making.

The Special Issue will deal with all innovative research solutions that fit the above-described framework. The following list reports some non-exhaustive examples:

1. Innovative solutions for sensing the motion of industrial robots or human supervisors;
2. Robust pose determination solutions for augmented reality;
3. Original sensing solutions to improve additive manufacturing;
4. Sensors and systems for industrial infrastructure inspection;
5. Sensing solutions adopted to increase the safety of human operators;
6. Integrated sensing systems that exploit broadband wireless communications with reduced latency, such as 5G mobile networks;
7. Smart sensors for industrial applications;
8. Networked sensor systems to support innovative industrial processes;
9. Internet of Things for industry applications;
10. Innovative navigation solutions for autonomous transport platforms used in industrial production processes, including ground platforms and aerial drones;
11. Innovative sensor data fusion solutions to improve manufacturing processes;
12. Novel big data analytics applications that improve the capability to handle sensor data output.

Prof. Dr. Leopoldo Angrisani
Prof. Dr. Domenico Accardo
Guest Editors

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