MOTIVATION: The need for more effective and safer pharmaceuticals is a persistent quest. Microbial adaptations create the need to permanently develop new antimicrobials (AMPs), for instance. Similarly, intracellular delivery of drugs is still a challenge and translocation of membranes for drug delivery is an area of intense research. Peptides can be used both as AMP drug leads and drug carrier systems for intracellular delivery. Multifunctional proteins are abundant in viruses but, surprisingly, have never been thoroughly screened for bioactive peptide sequences. RESULTS: Using the AMPA and CellPPD online tools, we have evaluated the propensity of viral proteins to comprise AMP or cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs). Capsid proteins from both enveloped and non-enveloped viruses, and membrane and envelope proteins from enveloped viruses, in a total of 272 proteins from 133 viruses, were screened to detect the presence of potential AMP and CPP sequences. A pool of 2444 and 426 CPP and AMP sequences, respectively, were discovered. The capsids of flaviviruses are the best sources of these peptides reaching more than 80% of CPP sequence coverage per protein. Selected sequences were tested experimentally and validated the results. Overall, this study reveals that viruses form a natural multivalent biotechnological platform still underexplored in drug discovery and the heterogeneous abundance of CPP/AMP sequences among viral families opens new avenues in viral biology research.

The rise of global competition and the demands for mass customization observed in recent years are the main shaping forces of the manufacturing domain. Current approaches to industrial production automation are not suitable to cope with the resulting increasing requirement in term of system agility and sustainability. While a quite large amount of innovative and sound technical solutions for automation address such an issue, it is not clear how the new generation of automatic production system will be economically connoted. This work proposes a first step towards an economical characterization of the Evolvable Paradigm: one among the most promising aforementioned innovative industrial automation technologies. A basic description of the state-of-the-art of the related Evolvable Assembly/Production System allows inferring a cost model able to account for such an installation. This, in turn, enable a quantitative description of how the focal innovative approach enables a more effective and rational use of industrial automation.

As automated manufacturing systems become more and more complex, the need for new methodologies to improve the design and development of industrial monitoring and control solutions is becoming peremptory. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) dominates the application domain meaning that they are established as the most popular industrial controllers used in factory and shop floor. Although the capabilities of these controllers have strongly improved in the last decades, their historical background as the easy understand by the electricians who had previously worked on electrical systems has meant that the de-facto standard for the implementation of control and monitoring solution for these devices remains the ladder logic. However, to face the globalization challenges, the manufacturing companies needs to improve their productivity by reducing the costs, delivering high-quality of products with high variety and improving their responsiveness to changing market condition. Moreover productivity gains can also be achieved by reducing the life-cycle costs of manufacturing production systems implying the using of more flexible and agile approaches. In this scenario, the proposed methodology aims to provide a homogeneous and optimum process that, starting from a set of mechanical specifications and behavioural models of machines, enable the generation of industrial logic automatically ensuring the same structure and naming standard in every project and the quality of the code.

This paper presents ARES-III, a multi-purpose service robot for robust operation in all-terrain outdoor environments. Currently in pre-production phase, ARES-III is aimed to fulfil the requirements of a robotic platform that is able to support the development of real world applications in surveillance, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and other related domains. These demanding scenarios motivate a design focused on the reliability of the mechanical platform, the scalability of the control system, and the flexibility of its self-diagnosis and error recovery mechanisms. These are key features of ARES-III often disregarded in current commercial and research platforms. First, a comprehensive set of field trials demonstrated the ability of the ARES-III chassis, made of durable materials and with no-slip quasi-omnidirectional kinematic characteristics, to perform robustly in rough terrain. Second, supported by a control system fully compliant with the wide spread Robot Operating System (ROS), the scalability of ARES-III is enforced. Finally, the integration of active self-diagnosis and error recovery mechanisms in ARES-III control system fosters long lasting operation.

This paper describes the development of a multi-robot system for area reduction in humanitarian demining. In spite of the specific requirements imposed to the work being carried out by the humanitarian demining domain, the results being achieved can also be used in other domains such as surveillance and remote monitoring. A multi-agent based architecture is responsible for coordinating a progressive stochastic analysis of the terrain. The all-terrain navigation used by the mobile robots is attained by a novel embodied reactive obstacle avoidance method. A control mission software has been developed to plan, configure and supervise the operations. Highly compliant legged and wheeled platforms have been developed accomplishing low-cost all-terrain robots. Digital signal processing algorithms have been applied for landmine detection using the payload sensors.

Control systems development for the automotive industry is done pretty much the same today as it was 15 years ago. Therefore, the usefulness of a high level structured approach for Control Systems Engineering is undeniable. This paper describes how object-oriented programming (OOP) or the frame paradigm can be used to program PLCs even though using their old fashioned programming abstract model. To prove the validity of the proposal a real industrial implementation is shown.