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h i g h l i g h t sAn innovative on board hydraulic system fed by a KERS is presented. A complete model of the proposed system is presented. The model is validated on experimental data. a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c tMany conventional truck and working machines are equipped with additional hydraulic tooling or manipulation systems which are usually fed through a mechanical connection with the internal combustion engine, involving a poor efficiency. In particular, this is a common situation for industrial vehicles whose mission profiles involves a relevant consumption of energy by the on board hydraulic systems, respect to the one really needed for only traction purpose. In this work it is proposed an innovative solution based on the adoption of a system aimed to recover braking energy in order to feed an efficient on board hydraulic actuation system. The proposed system is then adopted to a real application, an Isuzu truck equipped with a hydraulic tooling for garbage collection. A prototype of the system has been designed, assembled and tested showing a relevant improvement of system efficiency and the feasibility of the proposed approach. In the paper the proposed solution is presented, showing the simulation models and preliminary validation results including experimental devices assembled to perform the tests.

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European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Robots is an outdoor robotics contest focusing on multidomain emergency response scenarios. In this context, the deployed robots are expected to fulfill land, underwater, and flying cooperative tasks which emulate real-world situations inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident.Participation of the Tuscany Robotics Team at ERL Emergency Robots 2017 was deeply affected by damage to (and resulting unavailability of) the unmanned ground vehicle to be used in the competition. This damage occurred 3 days before the challenge. An entirely new working mobile platform was built from scratch using a low-cost chassis. It was able to compete with the other participants in the challenge and achieved various tasks (~83% of the tasks completed by the best performer).The paper provides a complete description of the work carried out and the system used during the competition. The development was based on low-cost solutions, in particular:• Adoption of open-hardware and open-software technology, providing cheap and fastprototyping solutions.• Use of smartphones, allowing sophisticated sensors to be exploited in an affordable way.• Employment of Cloud infrastructures, to reduce the computational burden of offloading heavy processes.Results of this experience represent a concrete demonstration, showing that even lowcost solutions can achieve complex tasks, such as those required for the European robotic competition. The presented lessons learned aim to provide guidelines useful for reacting to unexpected events. Finally, the team was honored with the Creativity

Design of autonomous underwater vehicles is deeply influenced by required mission specifications. In particular, some activities like inspection of offshore plants or harsh marine environments require underwater vehicle with high autonomy, good propulsion performances and manoeuvrability. These features are deeply influenced by design and performances of the propulsion system. In particular, performances of underwater vehicles (both remotely operated and autonomous) are deeply influenced by four quadrants performances of propellers and by complex fluid dynamics interactions that are difficult to be, even roughly, evaluated. In this work, a study of a reconfigurable propulsion layout and its comparison with a conventional one is introduced. In particular, this study is also focused on modelling techniques that should really represent a reasonable trade-off in terms of accuracy and involved computational resources for fast prototyping and simulation of this kind of mechatronic systems.