Enabling Micro-level Demand-Side Grid Flexiblity in Resource Constrained Environments

The increased penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy presents various resource and operational electric grid challenges. Micro-level (household and small commercial) demand-side grid flexibility could be a cost-effective strategy to integrate high penetrations of wind and solar energy, but literature and field deployments exploring the necessary information and communication technologies (ICTs) are scant. This paper presents an exploratory framework for enabling information driven grid flexibility through the Internet of Things (IoT), and a proof-of-concept wireless sensor gateway (FlexBox) to collect the necessary parameters for adequately monitoring and actuating the micro-level demand-side. In the summer of 2015, thirty sensor gateways were deployed in the city of Managua (Nicaragua) to develop a baseline for a near future small-scale demand response pilot implementation. FlexBox field data has begun shedding light on relationships between ambient temperature and load energy consumption, load and building envelope energy efficiency challenges, latency communication network challenges, and opportunities to engage existing demand-side user behavioral patterns. Information driven grid flexibility strategies present great opportunity to develop new technologies, system architectures, and implementation approaches that can easily scale across regions, incomes, and levels of development

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

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IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems

Today's IoT systems include event-driven smart applications (apps) that interact with sensors and actuators. A problem specific to IoT systems is that buggy apps, unforeseen bad app interactions, or device/communication failures, can cause unsafe and dangerous physical states. Detecting flaws that lead to such states, requires a holistic view of installed apps, component devices, their configurations, and more importantly, how they interact. In this paper, we design IoTSan, a novel practical system that uses model checking as a building block to reveal "interaction-level" flaws by identifying events that can lead the system to unsafe states. In building IoTSan, we design novel techniques tailored to IoT systems, to alleviate the state explosion associated with model checking. IoTSan also automatically translates IoT apps into a format amenable to model checking. Finally, to understand the root cause of a detected vulnerability, we design an attribution mechanism to identify problematic and potentially malicious apps. We evaluate IoTSan on the Samsung SmartThings platform. From 76 manually configured systems, IoTSan detects 147 vulnerabilities. We also evaluate IoTSan with malicious SmartThings apps from a previous effort. IoTSan detects the potential safety violations and also effectively attributes these apps as malicious.Comment: Proc. of the 14th ACM CoNEXT, 201