Biscarboxy-Functionalized Imidazole and Palladium as Highly Active Catalytic System in Protic Solvents: Methanol and Water

The coupling reaction between aryl bromides and boron reagents is efficiently catalyzed by an in situ generated palladium complex obtained from palladium(II) acetate (0.1 mol%) and 1,3-bis(carboxymethyl)imidazole (0.2 mol%). The catalytic system is very active in protic solvents, especially in methanol. Biaryl derivatives have been prepared in good isolated yields (up to >99%), and additionally styrene and stilbene derivatives have also been prepared by means of this protocol.

Multi-agent system for control of robots inspired on the distributed activity and hormonal regulation of humans

Robotics is an emerging field with great activity. Robotics is a field that presents several problems because it depends on a large number of disciplines, technologies, devices and tasks. Its expansion from perfectly controlled industrial environments toward open and dynamic environment presents a many new challenges. New uses are, for example, household robots or professional robots. To facilitate the low cost, rapid development of robotic systems, reusability of code, its medium and long term maintainability and robustness are required novel approaches to provide generic models and software systems who develop paradigms capable of solving these problems. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a model based on multi-agent systems inspired by the human nervous system able to transfer the control characteristics of the biological system and able to take advantage of the best properties of distributed software systems. Specifically, we model the decentralized activity and hormonal variation.

Active packaging for fresh food based on the release of carvacrol and thymol

Active packaging is becoming an emerging food technology to improve quality and safety of food products. One of the most common approaches is based on the release of antioxidant/antimicrobial compounds from the packaging material. In this work an antifungal active packaging system based on the release of carvacrol and thymol was optimized to increase the post-harvest shelf life of fresh strawberries and bread during storage. Thermal properties of the developed packaging material were determined by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Volatile compounds in food samples contained in active packaging systems were monitored by using headspace solid phase microextraction followed by gas chromatography analysis (HS-SPME-GC-MS) at controlled conditions. The obtained results provided evidences that exposure to carvacrol and thymol is an effective way to enlarge the quality of strawberries and bread samples during distribution and sale.

Active Visual Features Based on Events to Guide Robot Manipulators in Tracking Tasks

Traditional visual servoing systems do not deal with the topic of moving objects tracking. When these systems are employed to track a moving object, depending on the object velocity, visual features can go out of the image, causing the fail of the tracking task. This occurs specially when the object and the robot are both stopped and then the object starts the movement. In this work, we have employed a retina camera based on Address Event Representation (AER) in order to use events as input in the visual servoing system. The events launched by the camera indicate a pixel movement. Event visual information is processed only at the moment it occurs, reducing the response time of visual servoing systems when they are used to track moving objects.