Scalable Approach to Uncertainty Quantification and Robust Design of Interconnected Dynamical Systems

Development of robust dynamical systems and networks such as autonomous aircraft systems capable of accomplishing complex missions faces challenges due to the dynamically evolving uncertainties coming from model uncertainties, necessity to operate in a hostile cluttered urban environment, and the distributed and dynamic nature of the communication and computation resources. Model-based robust design is difficult because of the complexity of the hybrid dynamic models including continuous vehicle dynamics, the discrete models of computations and communications, and the size of the problem. We will overview recent advances in methodology and tools to model, analyze, and design robust autonomous aerospace systems operating in uncertain environment, with stress on efficient uncertainty quantification and robust design using the case studies of the mission including model-based target tracking and search, and trajectory planning in uncertain urban environment. To show that the methodology is generally applicable to uncertain dynamical systems, we will also show examples of application of the new methods to efficient uncertainty quantification of energy usage in buildings, and stability assessment of interconnected power networks

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Advanced real-time indoor tracking based on the Viterbi algorithm and semantic data

A real-time indoor tracking system based on the Viterbi algorithm is developed. This Viterbi principle is used in combination with semantic data to improve the accuracy, that is, the environment of the object that is being tracked and a motion model. The starting point is a fingerprinting technique for which an advanced network planner is used to automatically construct the radio map, avoiding a time consuming measurement campaign. The developed algorithm was verified with simulations and with experiments in a building-wide testbed for sensor experiments, where a median accuracy below 2 m was obtained. Compared to a reference algorithm without Viterbi or semantic data, the results indicated a significant improvement: the mean accuracy and standard deviation improved by, respectively, 26.1% and 65.3%. Thereafter a sensitivity analysis was conducted to estimate the influence of node density, grid size, memory usage, and semantic data on the performance

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Hybrid Poisson and multi-Bernoulli filters

The probability hypothesis density (PHD) and multi-target multi-Bernoulli (MeMBer) filters are two leading algorithms that have emerged from random finite sets (RFS). In this paper we study a method which combines these two approaches. Our work is motivated by a sister paper, which proves that the full Bayes RFS filter naturally incorporates a Poisson component representing targets that have never been detected, and a linear combination of multi-Bernoulli components representing targets under track. Here we demonstrate the benefit (in speed of track initiation) that maintenance of a Poisson component of undetected targets provides. Subsequently, we propose a method of recycling, which projects Bernoulli components with a low probability of existence onto the Poisson component (as opposed to deleting them). We show that this allows us to achieve similar tracking performance using a fraction of the number of Bernoulli components (i.e., tracks).Comment: Submitted to 15th International Conference on Information Fusion (2012