Reusable Software Components for Robots Using Fuzzy Abstractions

Mobile robots today, while varying greatly in design, often have a large number of similarities in terms of their tasks and goals. Navigation, obstacle avoidance, and vision are all examples. In turn, robots of similar design, but with varying configurations, should be able to share the bulk of their controlling software. Any changes required should be minimal and ideally only to specify new hardware configurations. However, it is difficult to achieve such flexibility, mainly due to the enormous variety of robot hardware available and the huge number of possible configurations. Monolithic controllers that can handle such variety are impossible to build. This paper will investigate these portability problems, as well as techniques to manage common abstractions for user-designed components. The challenge is in creating new methods for robot software to support a diverse variety of robots, while also being easily upgraded and extended. These methods can then provide new ways to support the operational and functional reuse of the same high-level components across a variety of robots

A new model-free design for vehicle control and its validation through an advanced simulation platform

A new model-free setting and the corresponding "intelligent" P and PD controllers are employed for the longitudinal and lateral motions of a vehicle. This new approach has been developed and used in order to ensure simultaneously a best profile tracking for the longitudinal and lateral behaviors. The longitudinal speed and the derivative of the lateral deviation, on one hand, the driving/braking torque and the steering angle, on the other hand, are respectively the output and the input variables. Let us emphasize that a "good" mathematical modeling, which is quite difficult, if not impossible to obtain, is not needed for such a design. An important part of this publication is focused on the presentation of simulation results with actual and virtual data. The actual data, used in Matlab as reference trajectories, have been obtained from a properly instrumented car (Peugeot 406). Other virtual sets of data have been generated through the interconnected platform SiVIC/RTMaps. It is a dedicated virtual simulation platform for prototyping and validation of advanced driving assistance systems. Keywords- Longitudinal and lateral vehicle control, model-free control, intelligent P controller (i-P controller), algebraic estimation, ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems).Comment: in 14th European Control Conference, Jul 2015, Linz, Austria. 201

Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think

This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think

RIOT OS Paves the Way for Implementation of High-Performance MAC Protocols

Implementing new, high-performance MAC protocols requires real-time features, to be able to synchronize correctly between different unrelated devices. Such features are highly desirable for operating wireless sensor networks (WSN) that are designed to be part of the Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, the operating systems commonly used in this domain cannot provide such features. On the other hand, "bare-metal" development sacrifices portability, as well as the mul-titasking abilities needed to develop the rich applications that are useful in the domain of the Internet of Things. We describe in this paper how we helped solving these issues by contributing to the development of a port of RIOT OS on the MSP430 microcontroller, an architecture widely used in IoT-enabled motes. RIOT OS offers rich and advanced real-time features, especially the simultaneous use of as many hardware timers as the underlying platform (microcontroller) can offer. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of these features by presenting a new implementation, on RIOT OS, of S-CoSenS, an efficient MAC protocol that uses very low processing power and energy.Comment: SCITEPRESS. SENSORNETS 2015, Feb 2015, Angers, France. http://www.scitepress.or