Stakeholders throughout Swedish society have come together to get to grips with the problem of vibration injuries. Vibration injuries lead to great personal suffering and significant costs for society and businesses, as sufferers must be redeployed or placed on sick leave.

We are now moving on from individual low-vibration concept prototypes to antivibration demonstration environments These are delineated industrial production environments at a fully operational company with associated productivity and quality assurance requirements.

Goal

The goal is to eliminate vibration injuries with the aid of innovative technology and by making better use of existing knowledge. This is achieved by developing low-vibration handheld machines. Existing machines, such as hammer drills, impact wrenches and dental tools, are rebuilt to reduce levels of vibration. This is achieved by using balance rings and auto-tuning vibration absorbers (ATVA), as well as traditional vibration isolation techniques.

The emphasis is on making it possible to specify requirements and thereby manufacture and procure low-vibration machines. The goal is to further develop prototypes so that the technology can used in serial manufacture and sold on an international market. The demand for low-vibration machines also needs to be increased through increased awareness of the injuries caused by vibrations.

Participant

Machine users: Bilia Personbilar, Höganäs, Benders Sverige, Betonghåltagning i Göteborg, Finnveden Lastvagnar, Naturstenskompaniet, NCC, Swedish Rental Association, Skanska Sverige, Swimpex, Granit, Volvo Construction Equipment, Xylem Water Solutions Manufacturing

Machine manufacturer: Atlas Copco Industrial Technique, Chicago Pneumatics, Swepac, SETEK

Research performers: RISE, University of Gothenburg, Lund University, Malmö University, Umeå University, Chalmers University of Technology

Reference group: Arbetsmiljöverket, IF Metall, Teknikföretagen, Svenska Byggnadsarbetarförbundet, Sveriges Byggindustrier, Transportföretagen

Luftfartsverket (LFV) has initialized a program with the vision of “The Autonomous Airport”. The first step was to establish a test site at Sundsvall and Örnsköldsvik Airports – currently under way. In order to support the vision for autonomous and remotely controlled airports and utilization of drones for the Swedish society, this project will develop drone solutions for automated operations at airports with the aim to minimize operational costs and environmental impacts, as well as to improve airport safety and resource efficiency. Airport surveillance such as border inspection is challenging and labor-intensive, especially for small airports. The project will emanate from the test site at Örnsköldsvik airport (OER) and will develop and demonstrate drone-based solutions for automatic airport surveillance. The major tasks include 1) use case identification and requirement analysis, 2) drone system investigation and prototyping, 3) drone communication solutions investigation and development for remote control and video streaming, 4) drone system demonstration at the airports.

This project serves as a first step to introduce drones in daily operations for airports. It will support OER airport as a pioneer test site for future airport automation, and for drone innovation in Swedish airports. The project will be supervised by LFV and Swedish Regional Airports and will consider the expansion to other small airports, as well as medium and large airports. While focusing on drone development, the project will also consider future integration of advanced intelligence. The knowledge will contribute to the society with e.g., automation techniques, policies, as well as business insights of drones in airports.

Aim and goal
The goal of this PhD project is to bridge science fiction and reality for crime scene investigation. The work focuses on sensing challenges defined by NFC utilizing nanophotonic design, fabrication and integration based on the joint and complementary competences and facilities of the partners.

Challenge
Analysis of evidence traces requires instruments with high sensitivity and specificity. Today's instruments can in most cases only be used in a laboratory environment, due to both size and complexity of the analysis. First responders at a crime scene are thus not equipped to make other than very crude on-site sample analysis, which results in a high number of samples being sent to the lab for further analysis, only a small part of which may turn out to be of any value.

Solution
Nanophotonics has a great potential to lead to portable equipment that could streamline crime scene investigations. While the targeted sensors, e.g. for age analysis of blood stains, are not expected to render existing lab analysis obsolete, they will rather help to indicate which samples to send for further analysis as well as to give a first impression of the situation at hand.

Effect
The possibility to analyse traces directly at the crime scene is expected to result in a higher resource efficiency and quicker turnaround times, as well as provide information directly to the preliminary investigation and thereby benefit the entire criminal justice system by shortening the investigation times.