3,589 research outputs found
Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes
Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work
Resource-aware IoT Control: Saving Communication through Predictive Triggering
The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects multiple physical devices in
large-scale networks. When the 'things' coordinate decisions and act
collectively on shared information, feedback is introduced between them.
Multiple feedback loops are thus closed over a shared, general-purpose network.
Traditional feedback control is unsuitable for design of IoT control because it
relies on high-rate periodic communication and is ignorant of the shared
network resource. Therefore, recent event-based estimation methods are applied
herein for resource-aware IoT control allowing agents to decide online whether
communication with other agents is needed, or not. While this can reduce
network traffic significantly, a severe limitation of typical event-based
approaches is the need for instantaneous triggering decisions that leave no
time to reallocate freed resources (e.g., communication slots), which hence
remain unused. To address this problem, novel predictive and self triggering
protocols are proposed herein. From a unified Bayesian decision framework, two
schemes are developed: self triggers that predict, at the current triggering
instant, the next one; and predictive triggers that check at every time step,
whether communication will be needed at a given prediction horizon. The
suitability of these triggers for feedback control is demonstrated in hardware
experiments on a cart-pole, and scalability is discussed with a multi-vehicle
simulation.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, accepted article to appear in IEEE Internet of
Things Journal. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0753
Distributed video coding for wireless video sensor networks: a review of the state-of-the-art architectures
Distributed video coding (DVC) is a relatively new video coding architecture originated from two fundamental theorems namely, Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv. Recent research developments have made DVC attractive for applications in the emerging domain of wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs). This paper reviews the state-of-the-art DVC architectures with a focus on understanding their opportunities and gaps in addressing the operational requirements and application needs of WVSNs
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
Multiple Loop Self-Triggered Model Predictive Control for Network Scheduling and Control
We present an algorithm for controlling and scheduling multiple linear
time-invariant processes on a shared bandwidth limited communication network
using adaptive sampling intervals. The controller is centralized and computes
at every sampling instant not only the new control command for a process, but
also decides the time interval to wait until taking the next sample. The
approach relies on model predictive control ideas, where the cost function
penalizes the state and control effort as well as the time interval until the
next sample is taken. The latter is introduced in order to generate an adaptive
sampling scheme for the overall system such that the sampling time increases as
the norm of the system state goes to zero. The paper presents a method for
synthesizing such a predictive controller and gives explicit sufficient
conditions for when it is stabilizing. Further explicit conditions are given
which guarantee conflict free transmissions on the network. It is shown that
the optimization problem may be solved off-line and that the controller can be
implemented as a lookup table of state feedback gains. Simulation studies which
compare the proposed algorithm to periodic sampling illustrate potential
performance gains.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems
Technolog
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