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Abstract. Automatic visual inspection has become an important application of pattern recognition, as it supports the human in this demanding and often dangerous work. Nevertheless, often missing abnormal or defective samples prohibit a supervised learning of defect models. For this reason, techniques known as one-class classification and novelty-or unusual event detection have arisen in the past years. This paper presents a new strategy to employ Hidden Markov models for defect localization in wire ropes. It is shown, that the Viterbi scores can be used as indicator for unusual subsequences. This prevents a partition of the signal into sufficient small signal windows at cost of the temporal context. Our results outperform recent time-invariant one-class classification approaches and depict a great advance for an automatic visual inspection of wire ropes.

Shuttle-based storage and retrieval systems (SBS/RS) are an important part of automated warehouses. SBS/RS are often used if throughput demand is high. SBS/RS can have significant advantages compared to crane-based automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) with regard to throughput, energy efficiency and flexibility, depending on the application. Therefore, in the last ten years, the market for SBS/RS has grown considerably. Research of SBS/RS has not been as thorough as in the case of AS/RS. In particular, the development and investigation of the storage management policies class-based storage, sequencing of retrieval requests and warehouse reorganization and the resulting throughput increases and reductions in energy consumption during their application have considerable potential. This paper demonstrates the potential for throughput improvement in the application of these storage management policies. A simulation model is used to determine the throughput. The results show that significant optimization of the throughput is achieved by the application of the presented storage management policies.

Modern fiber ropes have several distinctive properties which predestine them amongst others for high dynamic applications in robotics. Beside their great breaking load, the extremely low density and weight are the most important advantages over steel wire ropes. For steel wire ropes, it is generally known that their lifetime drops when raising the dynamic stress on running or static ropes. The long-time behavior of high-dynamically stressed fiber ropes is totally unexplored up to now. This lack impedes the breakthrough of fiber ropes and causes a safety gap, which has to be closed. This paper describes the research on modern fiber ropes regarding their lifetime in normal and high dynamic applications. The derived results are interpreted with respect to application in robotics.

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