The construction industry has undergone several changes in recent years linked to new laws and international conventions aimed at protecting the environment and combating pollution. Construction industry alone produces tons of waste annually due to debris produced either during construction or during deconstruction. To combat this, companies are forced to control their debris either by…

The design, fabrication and testing of a power availability recorder (PAR) to track the duration of electricity supply in facilities is presented. The design was executed with C-Language encoded in a microcontroller which served as the central processing unit of the device. Proteus software was, subsequently, used to simulate the real-life practicability of the device…

The increasingly rapid development of science and technology, as well as the influence of globalization has contributed to updates in educational so that one method taken by apply experiments in horticulture learning activities. This study aims to determine the effect of rice straw mulch on tomato production and the effectiveness of the implementation of this…

This paper presents a design of parallel gripper finger for robotic dual-arm working with an automatic push-down bottle crown cork cap opener on ABB’s Yumi collaborative bartender robot. A safe gripper finger is made from ABS plastic by 3D printing for human-based interaction design for grasping and holding a glass bottle. Rack design and proposed…

More than one year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic the behavior of figures published by official sources of the countries are skeptical for the public. Many probability tests are used to detect the reliability of information among which Benford’s Law. This study focused on the Western Balkan countries, as one of the foremost…

Municipal general waste accumulation including the general waste category of end-of-life tyres has become a universal predicament especially in the majority of first world countries as well as in the third world countries. South Africa is recognized for its economic growth and improved living standards of people which has led to the increased accumulation rates…

Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) decentralisation brings about reductions in the amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) earmarked for landfilling worse still under situations where MSW is being sent to dumpsites. It also reduces the distances MSW collection vehicles travel during MSW collection, maintenance and transport costs due to the establishment of local level decentralised…

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is composed of items that are discarded or disposed of daily including paper, plastics, glass, metals, used gadgets, paint and old furniture. The plastic waste stream has proven to be problematic to manage sustainably on a global scale. Various researchers are trying to come up with innovative ways of alleviating the…

The suitability of incorporating waste transfer stations (WTS) in likely future Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) systems for Harare city and neighbouring urban centres was assessed under this study. WTS will bring about location of landfills and other MSWM facilities further away from population centres, increasing recycling, reducing waste collection costs and burden on the…

A new approach for designing RF energy harvester with a single stage converter circuit is presented in this paper. The proposed converter configuration is integrated with an antenna that is based on the coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission line with improved gain resonated at 2.45 frequency ISM band. The CPW patch antenna as a harvester antenna…

Early detection and proper management of adult degenerative scoliosis (ADS) are important for health promotion. This study aims to develop an ADS screening tool from markerless digital photography and verify its reliability. The study included 17 participants. Outer canthus–horizontal angle (OHA) and trapezius–horizontal angle (THA) were calculated from the image of the upper body of…

Face Recognition (FR) is considered as a heavily studied topic in computer vision field. The capability to automatically identify and authenticate human’s faces using real-time images is an important aspect in surveillance, security, and other related domains. There are separate applications that help in identifying individuals at specific locations which help in detecting intruders. The…

This paper presents a new observer-based method which deals with the extraction of amplitude of characteristic frequencies for the fault diagnosis in permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM). First, a pilot survey is made to investigate the typical harmonics in the line currents of PMSM. Second, an appropriate structure of observer is formulated with the input…

Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps are used as a replacement of “old-fashioned” or incandescent lighting sources, as they reduce the amount of energy consumed. As a side-effect of more efficient energy usage they produce electrical noise. This noise reduces the efficiency of information signal transfer when Power Line Communications (PLC) are used. This study focuses…

In this paper, a novel is proposed for real-time tracking human targets in cases of high influence from complexity environment with a normal camera. Firstly, based on Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF features, the Lucas-Kanade Optical Flow algorithm is used to track reliable keypoints. This method represents a valuable performance to decline the effect of…

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the Southern African Developing Countries (SADC) had a varied energy mix including renewable energy, fossil fuels, and military energy production. The use of fossil fuels in the energy mix is known to be the source of the growing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, there was a reduction in…

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can contribute to find solutions and add value to several agricultural problems, favoring thus productivity, better quality control processes and flexible farm management. In addition, the strategies that allow the acquisition and analysis of data from agricultural environments can help optimize current practices such as crop counting. The…

With a view to detecting whether economic activity deterioration for elderly people at age of sixty-five or over could be observed, anonymous data (AD) were used as analysis data, which were obtained from the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). We have developed…

It has become difficult to handle traditional networks because of extensive network developments and an increase in the number of network users, and also because of new technologies like cloud computing and big data. Traditional networks are experiencing an increase in VM load and in the time taken for processing tasks. Hence, it has become…

The main contribution of this paper is the framework of Application Programming Interface (API) to be integrated on a smartphone app. The integration with algorithm that generates fingerprints from the method ST-PSD with several parameter configurations (Windows size, threshold, and sub-score linear combination coefficient). An approach capable of recognizing an audio piece of music with…

Formal methods are one of the efficient tools to verify and validate designs for different kinds of systems. Smart systems are attracting researchers’ attention due to the rapid spread of new technologies all over the world. Modeling a smart system requires connecting heterogeneous subsystems together to build it. Our contribution to this work is in…

Depth prediction plays a key role in understanding a 3D scene. Several techniques have been developed throughout the years, among which Convolutional Neural Network has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on estimating depth from a single image. However, traditional CNNs suffer from the lower resolution and information loss caused by the pooling layers. And oversized parameters…

Haze removal is an extremely challenging task, and object detection in the hazy environment has recently gained much attention due to the popularity of autonomous driving and traffic surveillance. In this work, the authors propose a multiple linear regression haze removal model based on a widely adopted dehazing algorithm named Dark Channel Prior. Training this…

In the Internet of Things era it is expected that low-end processor domination of the embedded market will be further reaffirmed. Then, a question will arise, on whether it is possible to enhance performance of such processors without the cost of high-end architectures. In this work we propose a better-than-worst-case (BTWC) methodology which enables the…

Brain-computer interface (BCI) has extensively been used for rehabilitation purposes. Being in the research phase, the brainwave based wheelchair controlled systems suffer from several limitations, e.g., lack of focus on mental activity, complexity in neural behavior in different conditions, and lower accuracy. Being sensitive to the color stimuli, the EEG signal changes promises a better…