BU Research Blog

Urbanisation and changes in modern infrastructure have introduced new challenges to firefighting practices. The entire direct and indirect cost of fire is about 1% GDP losses in the world annually. For example, in 2013, the USA had over 1.2 million fires which resulted in about 3.4 thousand civilian fatalities, 16 thousand injuries and property losses of about $12.4 billion. In addition, about 100 fire fighters lost their lives and over 65 thousand were injured on the fire ground. UK had over 190 thousand fires responses, about 350 civilian fatalities, over 10 thousand injuries.

BU will be leading, under direction of Prof Hongnian Yu and Dr Shuang Cang, an international consortium on a project receiving €0.9 million in funding to address these challenges. SMart rObOTs for fire-figHting (SMOOTH) is a four-year project awarded under the EU Horizon 2020 MSCA program. It is the further expansion and development of the previous four-year RABOT (real-time adaptive networked control of rescue robots) project funded under FP7-IRSES, led by Dr Cang and Prof Yu.

The RABOT consortium consisted of two EU and three Asia Partners, and made numerous tangible results and activities. Examples are: 1) facilitated 77 mobility visits conducted by 46 researchers and trained 22 ESRs directly and over 250 ESRs through the project workshops, seminars, invited sessions etc. where BU hosted 18 international research visitors under the support of the RABOT project; 2) published over 60 journal and conference papers including the best conference paper awards, fired four patents, and won five international awards; 3) organised three invited sessions (another one to be organised along SKIMA 2016(http://fusion-edu.eu/SKIMA2016/special-session/)); 4) organised nine training workshops; 5) produced the workspace and dexterity of the haptic mechanism, deduced the kinematics and kinetics of the haptic device and implemented it with performance evaluation; 6) studied multi-agents’ coordinate control, leader-follower control and consensus control, and based on differential manifold method, simulated the proposed formation control method; 7) investigated and established an interaction model between human and a robot; 8) developed the Damping interface using Dynamic Hybrid Force Position Sensing (DHFPS) methods; 6) developed  the intelligent interface for modelling the platform balance amplitude using DHFPS methods; 7) developed the interface tilt over robot control using DHFPS methods; 8) designed and developed a haptic interface for the rescue walking robots motion in the disaster areas; 9) designed and developed a networked control approach for operating robots remotely; 10) designed and prototyped a wearable robot for supporting a human who works in the disaster areas; 11) designed and prototyped the autonomous legged & wheeled robot; 12) designed and developed a novel hexapod robot.

In addition, the RABOT consortium has received the following funding for further expanding and sustaining the collaboration and research: 1) VIPRO (2014-2017), financed by the Romanian Scientific Research Agency (ANCS), Partnerships Program in priority fields; 2) Mechanism Design of Rescue Robots for Nuclear power plant emergency relief, China 973 Programme; 3) Urban Fire and Rescue Robots, China Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation programme;  4) Adaptive Learning Control of a Cardiovascular Robot using Expert Surgeon Techniques, China NSF and UK Newton Funds; 5) China – Romania intelligent rehabilitation robot joint laboratory, China Science and Technology Programme; and 6) SMOOTH (Horizon 2020).

Those results and activities have made the positive contributions in achieving the BU top 200 most international universities.

The new SMOOTH project aims to innovate a smart robot-assisted firefighting platform to perform searching and rescuing practice in the fire ground, and to facilitate the efficient decision makings. Concerning harsh environments for the complex fire ground (including chemical plants and other venues), the consortium will investigate, study, and innovate information acquisition (sensing and visioning technology), transmission (ultra-remote signal transmission) and processing (multi-sensor fusion technology), instrumentation (actuating technology, robotics thermal protection technology), control (multi-degree of freedom mobile and operating robot control methods, obstacle avoidance and sweeping, Decision Support Systems (DSS)) and communication (Human-Robot (H2R) interaction systems, Machine-to-Machine (M2M)).

The SMOOTH research programme will provide three EU industrial partners (SMEs), one EU university, one EU research institution, two TC universities and one TC research institution the opportunity to move between sectors and countries in order to provide, absorb, implement, share and disseminate new knowledge in a professional industrial-academic environment at the European and global levels. It will be implemented via functional secondments and the organisation of/participation in training courses, workshops, summer schools, seminars, industrial forums, and conferences for sharing knowledge, acquiring new skills and developing careers for Consortium staff members and early stage researchers.  SMOOTH will foster a shared culture, and reward creativity and entrepreneurship.  A distinctive feature of this international consortium is its multidisciplinary nature (combining computer sciences, engineering, technology and business expertise) and its designed interaction between academic researchers and industrial practitioners in order to create an internationally excellent hub centred on advancing firefighting robotics utilisation as part of search and rescue tasks for the benefit of humanity.

The Daily Monitor in Uganda published the sad story of the death in childbirth of Juliet Angwech Opoka-Kinyera and her new-born baby.  The story is told by Juliet’s sister Alice Opoka.  Before starting her PhD in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences Alice worked in the field of maternal health as a researcher and health educator.  Alice Opoka is cited in the newspaper article as saying: “Childbirth in other parts of the world is a moment of joy and expectation for the newest addition to the family. Sadly, in the developing world, it is a bridge between life and death.”

But rather than silently remembering her sister, Alice uses her story to highlight the imporance of reducing maternal mortality.  She expresses this eloquantly in the following sentences: “To save even just one woman and baby from the claws of death at a time when she is meant to be bringing life to this earth. If we see human faces beyond the statistics, perhaps there will be a new sense of urgency to prevent maternal deaths from happening anywhere in the world.  Each one playing their part in the community, health facility and government.”

Every day nearly 800 women die in childbirth, nearly all of them in low-income countries and nearly all there deaths are ‘avoidable’.  Nearly two decades ago Dr Brundtland, the then Director-General of the WHO (World Health Organization), highlighted that “Because of our collective failure to solve this problem, the tragedy of maternal mortality represents a major source of suffering and injustice in our societies.” She added “This situation cannot be allowed to continue.”  Today women are still dying unnecessary.  Alice’s story is a stark reminder why research into improving maternity care for women in low-income countries is so very important.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinal Health

To help support staff in global engagement endeavours, we have funds available from Erasmus and Santander under the revised Staff Mobility scheme.

Erasmus staff mobility funding can be used to support the travel, accommodation and subsistence costs of academic and professional support staff undertaking training at an organisation/ institution in Europe. It can also be used to support the same costs for any academic staff member wishing to teach at a European university. The guidance to the application form contains more details as to the amounts available and duration and our priority institutions. Erasmus funds are a great way to build networks and gain a great experience.

Santander staff mobility funding can be used to support travel, accommodation and subsistence costs for staff wishing to develop research, education and professional practice projects. This fund is ideal to support academic staff in travelling to an international university in order to develop a collaborative relationship.

All the details needed to make the application as well as sources of advice can be found on this dedicated webpage.

The deadline for submissions is 9am on 24th October 2016.

Migration Research Conference: Borderless worlds – for whom?

University of Oulu, Finland

I recently attended a migration research conference, “Borderless Worlds- for whom? Ethics, moralities and (in)justice in migration and tourism” organized by the RELATE Centre of Excellence/Academy of Finland & University of Oulu. This was an interdisciplinary conference with leading border and migrant scholars, human geographers, anthropologists and tourism scholars. They also invited journalists, activists, activist researchers and migrants themselves as part of panel sessions. Interestingly, the panel sessions were held at at a local library (Oulu City Library) while being open to local people, which lead to perspectives ‘beyond academia’ (speaking of ‘borderless’!). Through the two day conference, we were exposed to the complexity of the terrain and to pay much-needed attention to the ethics, moralities and (in)justices in border struggles, migration and tourism mobilities. Instead of taking territorial or relational views as normative givens, we came to consider how the simultaneous ‘geographies’ of bounded and open, networked spaces are realised in the contemporary world.

In the State and the Governance of Mobilities session, I presented a paper on tourism development and Filipino migrant workers’ community in Macau (co-authored with Dr. Michael O’ Regan at BU). We discussed how rapid tourism development in Macau attracts high populations of Filipino migrant workers, and how Filipino migrants perceive their quality of life and constraints while working and living in Macau. Most of the migrant workers left family in the Philippines and support them financially, and I showed this was the biggest issue for their happiness and life satisfaction. Another interesting issue was the sense of community. Filipino migrants expressed that it is not only difficult to integrate into the Macau society, but also hard to have their own Filipino community due to multiple complex reasons. We concluded that the government should consider the migrant workers’ subjective quality of life, and introduce new policies to support the migrant workers, and create a livable place for everyone.

Migration research in tourism and leisure has gained more attention, and I am very interested in developing more research projects around ‘migration’ issues starting with the current working paper.

Jaeyeon Choe

Department of Events & Leisure

Faculty of Management

@choe_jaeyeon

On Thursday BU Professor Jonathan Parker delivered a plenary address to I Convegno Internazionale ‘Social Work Education’ Innovazioni ed Esperienze (The International Conference on Social Work Education: Innovations and experiences) in Milan, Italy. Having represented the UK higher education sector when vice chair of the Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee body and drawing on wide research, knowledge and experience of the reforms in English social work education he presented the dangers of replicating England’s changes before introducing innovations that offset some of the risks.

In an effort to ‘raise the quality’ of social work education, and to respond cynically to popular pressure, successive UK Governments, particularly in England, have imposed standards and regulatory frameworks that have curtailed the capacity of universities to educate students according to their specialist interests and research areas. Rather than focusing on pedagogy, universities have allowed employer organisations to set the agenda. They have increasingly restricted their curricula and by so doing have co-created, with various governments, a social work that is predominantly concerned with protection and safeguarding. Addressing a wide audience including the current president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, Professor Annamaria Campanini, Jonathan Parker focused on the dangers of transferring these models and replicating them rather than promoting social justice and relational social work practice. He called for education that championed passion and joy in teaching and learning, was student-centred and actively challenged the corporate homogenisation of education. He suggested a focus on ethnographic practice in education, learning and onward into social work practice could offer a way forward and was needed.

Two other British academics, Professor Peter Beresford and Dr Pamela Trevithick, provided plenary sessions on service user involvement in education and relational skills. The conference was keen to learn about the innovations in and the problems of the English sector and to promote relationship skills and wisdom not the rigid application of standards that have crossed into higher education from the adoption of neoliberal market practices.

Jonathan Parker