1,404 research outputs found

    Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

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    The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

    A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter

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    Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings

    An Integrated Testbed for Cooperative Perception with Heterogeneous Mobile and Static Sensors

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    Cooperation among devices with different sensing, computing and communication capabilities provides interesting possibilities in a growing number of problems and applications including domotics (domestic robotics), environmental monitoring or intelligent cities, among others. Despite the increasing interest in academic and industrial communities, experimental tools for evaluation and comparison of cooperative algorithms for such heterogeneous technologies are still very scarce. This paper presents a remote testbed with mobile robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) equipped with a set of low-cost off-the-shelf sensors, commonly used in cooperative perception research and applications, that present high degree of heterogeneity in their technology, sensed magnitudes, features, output bandwidth, interfaces and power consumption, among others. Its open and modular architecture allows tight integration and interoperability between mobile robots and WSN through a bidirectional protocol that enables full interaction. Moreover, the integration of standard tools and interfaces increases usability, allowing an easy extension to new hardware and software components and the reuse of code. Different levels of decentralization are considered, supporting from totally distributed to centralized approaches. Developed for the EU-funded Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET) and currently available at the School of Engineering of Seville (Spain), the testbed provides full remote control through the Internet. Numerous experiments have been performed, some of which are described in the paper

    Intelligent Design for Real Time Networked Multi-Agent Systems

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    Past decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth in reasearch for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) both in military and nonmilitary fronts. They have become ubiquitous in almost every military operations which includes domestic and overseas missions. With rapidly advancing technology, open source nature of the flight controllers, and significantly lesser costs than before, companies around the world are delving into UAV market as one of the upcoming lucrative investments. Companies like Amazon Inc., Dominos Pizza Inc. have had some successful test runs which again solidifies the research opportunities. Delivery services and recreational uses seems to have increased in the past 3-4 years which has let the Federal Aviation Administration to update their rules and regulations. Mapping, Surveying and search/rescue mission are some of the applications of UAVs that are most appealing. Making these applications airborne cuts the time and cost at considerable and affordable levels. Using UAVs for operations has advantages in both response time and need of manpower compared to piloted aricrafts. Obtaining prior information of a person/people in distress can become a deciding factor for a successful mission. It can help in making critical decision as which location or type of helicopter / vehicle to be used for extraction, equipment to bring and how many crew members that are needed. The idea here is to make this system of UAVs automated to coordinate with each other without human intervention (other than high level commands like takeoff and land). Researchers and Military experts have recognized the use of drones for search and rescue missions to be of utmost importance. Year 2016 saw a first of its kind UAV search and rescue symposium held in Nevada. The objective was to give a platform for UAV enthusiasts and researchers and share their experiences and concerns while using UAVs as first responders. The biggest drawback of using an aerial vehicle for inspection/search/rescue mission is its airborne time. The batteries used are big and heavy which increases the weight and decreases the flight time. One can go about solving this issue by using a swarm of UAVs which would inspect/search a given area in less amount of time. This has advantage in both response time and need for lesser man power.The main challenges for Multiple Drone Control (MDC) includes 1) Address the periodic sampling frequency issue of information of assets so as to maintain stability; 2) Optimize the communication channel while providing minimum Quality of Service (QoS); 3) Optimal control strategy which includes non-linearity in state space model; 4) Optimal control in presence of uncertainties; 5) Admitting new agents for dynamic agents in the Networked Multi-Agent System (MAS) Scenario.This dissertation aims at building a hardware and a software platform for communication of multiple UAVs upon which additional control algorithms can be implementated. It starts with building a DJI S1000 octacopter from the ground up. The components used are specified in the following sections. The idea here is to make a drone that can autonomously travel to specified location with safety features like geofencing and land on emergency situations. The user has to provide the necessary commands like GPS locations and takeoff/land commands via a Radio Controller (RC) remote. At any point of the flight, the UAV should be able to receive new commands from the ground control stations (GCS). After successful implementation, the UAV would not be restricted to the range of RC remote. It would be able to travel greater distances given the GPS signal remains operational in the field. This is possible at a global scale with limitation of only the batteries and flight time

    GUARDIANS final report part 1 (draft): a robot swarm assisting a human fire fighter

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    Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire fighters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist re ghters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting re ghters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

    08451 Abstracts Collection -- Representation, Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects

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    From 02.11. to 07.11.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08451 ``Representation, Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

    FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

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    This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

    Mesh-Mon: a Monitoring and Management System for Wireless Mesh Networks

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    A mesh network is a network of wireless routers that employ multi-hop routing and can be used to provide network access for mobile clients. Mobile mesh networks can be deployed rapidly to provide an alternate communication infrastructure for emergency response operations in areas with limited or damaged infrastructure. In this dissertation, we present Dart-Mesh: a Linux-based layer-3 dual-radio two-tiered mesh network that provides complete 802.11b coverage in the Sudikoff Lab for Computer Science at Dartmouth College. We faced several challenges in building, testing, monitoring and managing this network. These challenges motivated us to design and implement Mesh-Mon, a network monitoring system to aid system administrators in the management of a mobile mesh network. Mesh-Mon is a scalable, distributed and decentralized management system in which mesh nodes cooperate in a proactive manner to help detect, diagnose and resolve network problems automatically. Mesh-Mon is independent of the routing protocol used by the mesh routing layer and can function even if the routing protocol fails. We demonstrate this feature by running Mesh-Mon on two versions of Dart-Mesh, one running on AODV (a reactive mesh routing protocol) and the second running on OLSR (a proactive mesh routing protocol) in separate experiments. Mobility can cause links to break, leading to disconnected partitions. We identify critical nodes in the network, whose failure may cause a partition. We introduce two new metrics based on social-network analysis: the Localized Bridging Centrality (LBC) metric and the Localized Load-aware Bridging Centrality (LLBC) metric, that can identify critical nodes efficiently and in a fully distributed manner. We run a monitoring component on client nodes, called Mesh-Mon-Ami, which also assists Mesh-Mon nodes in the dissemination of management information between physically disconnected partitions, by acting as carriers for management data. We conclude, from our experimental evaluation on our 16-node Dart-Mesh testbed, that our system solves several management challenges in a scalable manner, and is a useful and effective tool for monitoring and managing real-world mesh networks

    Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

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    In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
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