Gearing Up For Safety

Long hours, low wages, and unsafe workplaces characterized sweatshops a hundred years ago. These same conditions plague American trucking today. Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation exposes the dark side of government deregulation in America's interstate trucking industry. In the years since deregulation in 1980, median earnings have dropped 30% and most long-haul truckers earn less than half of pre-regulation wages. Work weeks average more than sixty hours. Today, America's long-haul truckers are working harder and earning less than at any time during the last four decades. Written by a former long-haul trucker who now teaches industrial relations at Wayne State University, Sweatshops on Wheels raises crucial questions about the legacy of trucking deregulation in America and casts provocative new light on the issue of government deregulation in general.

This monograph by Florian Röhrbein, Germano Veiga and Ciro Natale is an edited collection of 15 authoritative contributions in the area of robot technology transfer between academia and industry. It comprises three parts on Future Industrial Robotics, Robotic Grasping as well as Human-Centered Robots. The book chapters cover almost all the topics nowadays considered ‘hot’ within the robotics community, from reliable object recognition to dexterous grasping, from speech recognition to intuitive robot programming, from mobile robot navigation to aerial robotics, from safe physical human-robot interaction to body extenders. All contributions stem from the results of ECHORD – the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development, a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme from 2009 to 2013. ECHORD’s two main pillars were the so-called experiments, 52 small-sized industry-driven research projects, and the structured dialog, a powerful interaction instrument between the stakeholders. The results described in this volume are expected to shed new light on innovation and technology transfer from academia to industry in the field of robotics.

The need for current and better quality training materials was cited by both certification program instructors and coordinators. In recognition of these shortcomings, the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded a major project with Penn State University, The Ohio State University, and the National Safety Council to develop a National Safe Tractor and Machinery Operation Program (NSTMOP). The result is the NSTMOP Student Manual. This manual, including the task sheets, is the primary curriculum resource developed and designed to be used in a variety of instructional settings. The task sheets are divided into 6 sections: introduction; safety basics; agricultural hazards; the tractor; connecting and using implements with the tractor; and material handling (skid steers, ATV, and utility vehicles). There are a total of 77 task sheets, 48 are identified as core topics. Also included are a skills and driving test layout map and evaluation forms.