SysMART Indoor Services: A System of Smart and Connected Supermarkets

Smart gadgets are being embedded almost in every aspect of our lives. From smart cities to smart watches, modern industries are increasingly supporting the Internet of Things (IoT). SysMART aims at making supermarkets smart, productive, and with a touch of modern lifestyle. While similar implementations to improve the shopping experience exists, they tend mainly to replace the shopping activity at the store with online shopping. Although online shopping reduces time and effort, it deprives customers from enjoying the experience. SysMART relies on cutting-edge devices and technology to simplify and reduce the time required during grocery shopping inside the supermarket. In addition, the system monitors and maintains perishable products in good condition suitable for human consumption. SysMART is built using state-of-the-art technologies that support rapid prototyping and precision data acquisition. The selected development environment is LabVIEW with its world-class interfacing libraries. The paper comprises a detailed system description, development strategy, interface design, software engineering, and a thorough analysis and evaluation.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figur

DESIGN AUTOMATION FOR LOW POWER RFID TAGS

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are small, wireless devices capable of automated item identification, used in a variety of applications including supply chain management, asset management, automatic toll collection (EZ Pass), etc. However, the design of these types of custom systems using the traditional methods can take months for a hardware engineer to develop and debug. In this dissertation, an automated, low-power flow for the design of RFID tags has been developed, implemented and validated. This dissertation presents the RFID Compiler, which permits high-level design entry using a simple description of the desired primitives and their behavior in ANSI-C. The compiler has different back-ends capable of targeting microprocessor-based or custom hardware-based tags. For the hardware-based tag, the back-end automatically converts the user-supplied behavior in C to low power synthesizable VHDL optimized for RFID applications. The compiler also integrates a fast, high-level power macromodeling flow, which can be used to generate power estimates within 15% accuracy of industry CAD tools and to optimize the primitives and / or the behaviors, compared to conventional practices. Using the RFID Compiler, the user can develop the entire design in a matter of days or weeks. The compiler has been used to implement standards such as ANSI, ISO 18000-7, 18000-6C and 18185-7. The automatically generated tag designs were validated by targeting microprocessors such as the AD Chips EISC and FPGAs such as Xilinx Spartan 3. The corresponding ASIC implementation is comparable to the conventionally designed commercial tags in terms of the energy and area. Thus, the RFID Compiler permits the design of power efficient, custom RFID tags by a wider audience with a dramatically reduced design cycle

Enabling Communication Technologies for Automated Unmanned Vehicles in Industry 4.0

Within the context of Industry 4.0, mobile robot systems such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one of the major areas challenging current communication and localization technologies. Due to stringent requirements on latency and reliability, several of the existing solutions are not capable of meeting the performance required by industrial automation applications. Additionally, the disparity in types and applications of unmanned vehicle (UV) calls for more flexible communication technologies in order to address their specific requirements. In this paper, we propose several use cases for UVs within the context of Industry 4.0 and consider their respective requirements. We also identify wireless technologies that support the deployment of UVs as envisioned in Industry 4.0 scenarios.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

A trust supportive framework for pervasive computing systems

Recent years have witnessed the emergence and rapid growth of pervasive comput- ing technologies such as mobile ad hoc networks, radio frequency identification (RFID), Wi-Fi etc. Many researches are proposed to provide services while hiding the comput- ing systems into the background environment. Trust is of critical importance to protect service integrity & availability as well as user privacies. In our research, we design a trust- supportive framework for heterogeneous pervasive devices to collaborate with high security confidence while vanishing the details to the background. We design the overall system ar- chitecture and investigate its components and their relations, then we jump into details of the critical components such as authentication and/or identification and trust management. With our trust-supportive framework, the pervasive computing system can have low-cost, privacy-friendly and secure environment for its vast amount of services

A mechatronic approach to develop the concept of a materials handling system for a reconfigurable manufacturing environment.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.People are unique and display a variety of preferences with regard to the products that ar

Development of a reconfigurable assembly system with enhanced control capabilities and virtual commissioning

Thesis (M. Tech. (Engineering: Electrical)) -- Central University of technology, Free State, 2013The South African (SA) manufacturing industry requires developing similar levels of sophistication and expertise in automation as its international rivals to compete for global markets. To achieve this, manufacturing plants need to be managed extremely efficiently to ensure the quality of manufactured products and these plants must also have the relevant infrastructure. Furthermore, this industry must also compensate for rapid product introduction, product changes and short product lifespan. To support this need, this industry must engage in the current trend in automation known as reconfigurable manufacturing. The aim of the study is to develop a reconfigurable assembly system with enhanced control capabilities by utilizing virtual commissioning. In addition, this system must be capable of assembling multiple different products of a product range; reconfigure to accommodate the requirements of these products; autonomously reroute the product flow and distribute workload among assembly cells; handle erroneous products; and implement enhanced control methods. To achieve this, a literature study was done to confirm the type of components to be used, reveal design issues and what characteristics such a system must adhere to. Software named DELMIA was used to create a virtual simulation environment to verify the system and simultaneously scrutinize the methods of verification. On completion, simulations were conducted to verify software functions, device movements and operations, and the control software of the system. Based on simulation results, the physical system was built, and then verified with a multi agent system as overhead control to validate the entire system. The final results showed that the project objectives are achievable and it was also found that DELMIA is an excellent tool for system verification and will expedite the design of a system. By obtaining these results it is indicated that companies can design and verify their systems earlier through virtual commissioning. In addition, their systems will be more flexible, new products or product changes can be introduced more frequently, with minimum cost and downtime. This will enable SA manufacturing companies to be more competitive, ensure increased productivity, save time and so ensure them an advantage over their international competition

Additively Manufactured Shape-changing RF Devices Enabled by Origami-inspired Structures

The work to be presented in this dissertation explores the possibility of implementing origami-inspired shape-changing structures into RF designs to enable continuous performance tunability as well as deployability. The research not only experimented novel structures that have unique mechanical behaviour, but also developed automated additive manufacturing (AM) fabrication process that pushes the boundary of realizable frequency from Sub-6 GHz to mm-wave. High-performance origami-inspired reconfigurable frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) and reflectarray antennas are realized for the first time at mm-wave frequencies via AM techniques. The research also investigated the idea of combining mechanical tuning and active tuning methods in a hybrid manner to realize the first truly conformal beam-forming phased array antenna that can be applied onto any arbitrary surface and can be re-calibrated with a 3D depth camera.Ph.D

RFID-enabled complex event processing application framework for manufacturing

In order to face up with classic manufacturing challenges such as high work in progress (WIP) inventories, complexity in production planning and scheduling, and low labour and machine utilisation, many manufacturing companies made their efforts in implementing RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) throughout the manufacturing workshops. Through this way, all production data in manufacturing fields can be obtained in real time, and it improves the flexibility and responsivity to the changing market for the companies. However, at the same time the RFID deployment also introduces a new challenge which requires an effective and efficient method to handle the large amounts of events. This paper proposes an application framework for a real-time Complex Event Management System (CEMS) based on RFID equipments deployment. With the use of Complex Event Processing (CEP) technologies, this system allows users to obtain interested and meaningful information from large numbers of primitive events captured from the RFID devices deployed in manufacturing shop-floor in real time. This paper presents the RFID deployment infrastructure first, and then system design of the CEMS is proposed. © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.postprin