Purpose This study aims to understand households’ adoption of small-scale solar energy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause due to conventional energy consumptions. Design/methodology/approach This study is quantitative in nature and households were selected as unit of analysis. Online data has been collected from seven main cities of Pakistan to understand households’ intention to use small-scale solar energy for domestic consumption. A total of 370 valid data were analyzed through partial least square structural equation modeling. Findings The study findings reveal that publicity information, attitude green norm and perceived behavioral control are the strongest predictors of households’ intention to use small-scale solar energy. Practical implications The considered model practically contributes to the literature by understanding households’ intention to adopt solar technologies that are viable means to conserve conventional energy and preserve the environment through less emission of carbon dioxide. In addition to this, understanding the green norm of households is imperative in a developing country, Pakistan where climate risk is high. Understanding household’ green norms would help marketers and practitioners to design and introduce new and more efficient renewable technologies that maintain environmental sustainability. Originality/value This study has contributed to theory of planned behavior (TPB) by the inclusion of publicity information and green norms. Previous studies focused on the environmental benefits of using renewable energy sources. This study added novel antecedents into TPB that help to understand the adoption of small-scale solar energy for domestic consumption.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) fusion is an efficient method to resolve the uncertainties of UWB in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) situations because of signals refraction, the effect of multipath and inertial positioning error accumulation in indoor environments. Existing systems, however, are focused only on foot-mounted IMUs that restrict the system's implementation to particular real situations. In this research, using foot-mounted IMU, we suggest combining UWB ranging and IMU pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), which can provide a generic indoor positioning solution. The issues such as position and orientation drift, interferences and divergence in strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS) based orientation estimates could be addressed by a UWB ranging sensor fusing with an IMU using the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The main goal of this research is to investigate and compare two different sensor data fusion techniques. For instance, adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) and least-squares (LSs) incorporate a foot-mounted IMU tightly coupled to a 2D pedestrian positioning solution derived from UWB signals. Moreover, we consider the UWB NLOS and IMU error identification. A real-time ranging error compensation model based on the LS method and AKF positioning algorithm are used for fixing such problems. We propose a new tightly coupled inertial navigation system (INS) with a two-way ranging (TWR) fusion positioning algorithm to improve accuracy, integrating UWB and IMU sensors based on the EKF in pedestrian navigation. Experiments in dynamic indoor environment validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach that uses EKF to combine AKF and LS for error minimization.

A single technological advancement in the business sector tremendously changed customers’ lifestyles and consumption behavior. Drone technology is one of the main revolutions that increase business efficiency at a lower cost. However, the acceptance of emerging technologies is not rapid in developing markets. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate customers’ adoption of drone technology in the context of food delivery services. This study has used an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) to assess customers’ behavior. Product processing innovativeness, information processing innovativeness, and subjective norms have been added as additional constructs into TAM. The data of 354 customers from five different cities of Pakistan have been collected and analyzed through partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of the study revealed that all proposed hypotheses, except the positive influence of perceived ease of use on perceived usefulness, were accepted. Further, the results depict that perceived usefulness, subjective norms, and attitude were the major predictors of customers’ adoption of drone food delivery services. In addition to this, customers’ word of mouth has a greater influence and reach than other forms of marketing communication. Therefore, practitioners and marketers may consider hosting competition programs to experiment with drone food delivery systems to enhance the acceptance of this technology among the masses.

In an indoor environment, object identification and localization are paramount for human-object interaction. Visual or laser-based sensors can achieve the identification and localization of the object based on its appearance, but these approaches are computationally expensive and not robust against the environment with obstacles. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has a unique tag ID to identify the object, but it cannot accurately locate it. Therefore, in this paper, the data of RFID and laser range finder are fused for the better identification and localization of multiple dynamic objects in an indoor environment. The main method is to use the laser range finder to estimate the radial velocities of objects in a certain environment, and match them with the object’s radial velocities estimated by the RFID phase. The method also uses a fixed time series as “sliding time window” to find the cluster with the highest similarity of each RFID tag in each window. Moreover, the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is used in the update stage of the particle filter (PF) to estimate the moving path of each cluster in order to improve the accuracy in a complex environment with obstacles. The experiments were verified by a SCITOS G5 robot. The results show that this method can achieve an matching rate of 90.18% and a localization accuracy of 0.33m in an environment with the presence of obstacles. This method effectively improves the matching rate and localization accuracy of multiple objects in indoor scenes when compared to the Bray-Curtis (BC) similarity matching-based approach as well as the particle filter-based approach.

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