Autonomous real-time surveillance system with distributed IP cameras

An autonomous Internet Protocol (IP) camera based object tracking and behaviour identification system, capable of running in real-time on an embedded system with limited memory and processing power is presented in this paper. The main contribution of this work is the integration of processor intensive image processing algorithms on an embedded platform capable of running at real-time for monitoring the behaviour of pedestrians. The Algorithm Based Object Recognition and Tracking (ABORAT) system architecture presented here was developed on an Intel PXA270-based development board clocked at 520 MHz. The platform was connected to a commercial stationary IP-based camera in a remote monitoring station for intelligent image processing. The system is capable of detecting moving objects and their shadows in a complex environment with varying lighting intensity and moving foliage. Objects moving close to each other are also detected to extract their trajectories which are then fed into an unsupervised neural network for autonomous classification. The novel intelligent video system presented is also capable of performing simple analytic functions such as tracking and generating alerts when objects enter/leave regions or cross tripwires superimposed on live video by the operator

An Autonomous Observation and Control System Based on EPICS and RTS2 for Antarctic Telescopes

For an unattended telescopes in Antarctic, the remote operation, autonomous observation and control are essential. An EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) and RTS2(Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version) based autonomous observation and control system with remoted operation is introduced in this paper. EPICS is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments while RTS2 is an open source environment for control of a fully autonomous observatory. Using the advantage of EPICS and RTS2 respectively, a combined integrated software framework for autonomous observation and control is established that use RTS2 to fulfill the function of astronomical observation and use EPICS to fulfill the device control of telescope. A command and status interface for EPICS and RTS2 is designed to make the EPICS IOC (Input/Output Controller) components integrate to RTS2 directly. For the specification and requirement of control system of telescope in Antarctic, core components named Executor and Auto-focus for autonomous observation is designed and implemented with remote operation user interface based on Browser-Server mode. The whole system including the telescope is tested in Lijiang Observatory in Yunnan Province for practical observation to complete the autonomous observation and control, including telescope control, camera control, dome control, weather information acquisition with the local and remote operation.Comment: 20 pages,15 figure

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

A Unified Model For Developmental Robotics

We present the architecture and distributed algorithms of an implemented system called NeuSter, that unifies learning, perception and action for autonomous robot control. NeuSter comprises several sub-systems that provide online learning for networks of million neurons on machine clusters. It extracts information from sensors, builds its own representations of the environment in order to learn non-predefined goals

A parallel implementation of a multisensor feature-based range-estimation method

There are many proposed vision based methods to perform obstacle detection and avoidance for autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles. All methods, however, will require very high processing rates to achieve real time performance. A system capable of supporting autonomous helicopter navigation will need to extract obstacle information from imagery at rates varying from ten frames per second to thirty or more frames per second depending on the vehicle speed. Such a system will need to sustain billions of operations per second. To reach such high processing rates using current technology, a parallel implementation of the obstacle detection/ranging method is required. This paper describes an efficient and flexible parallel implementation of a multisensor feature-based range-estimation algorithm, targeted for helicopter flight, realized on both a distributed-memory and shared-memory parallel computer

Threefold Analysis of Distributed Systems: IMDS, Petri Net and Distributed Automata DA3

Integrated Model of Distributed Systems is used for specification and verification of distributed systems. In the formalism, a system is modeled as a set of servers' states and agents' messages. The operation of a system is modeled as actions converting global system configuration (a set of states and messages) to a new configuration. The formalism is used in Dedan verification environment, in which specification and verification of distributed systems is performed. Equivalent Petri nets are used for structural analysis. For the graphical specification and simulation of distributed systems, Distributed Autonomous and Asynchronous Automata (DA3) are invented. Such simulation does not require calculation of global configuration space of a system. Two forms of DA3 are shown: Server-DA3 (SDA3) for the server view and Agent-DA3 (ADA3) for the agent view.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl