First experiences with Personal Networks as an enabling platform for service providers

By developing demonstrators and performing small-scale user trials, we found various opportunities and pitfalls for deploying personal networks (PNs) on a commercial basis. The demonstrators were created using as many as possible legacy devices and proven technologies. They deal with applications in the health sector, home services, tourism, and the transportation sector. This paper describes the various architectures and our experiences with the end users and the technology. We conclude that context awareness, service discovery, and content management are very important in PNs and that a personal network provider role is necessary to realize these functions under the assumptions we made. The PNPay Travel demonstrator suggests that PN service platforms provide an opportunity to develop true trans-sector services

New Can Bus Communication Modules for Digitizing Forest Machines Functionalities in the Context of Forestry 4.0

In line with the context of Industry 4.0, forestry, and in particular the entire ecosystem around it, also needs digitalization solutions in order to allow better interaction between all agents that work and live from the forest. It is important for a better management of forest resources allowing productivity gains, more sustainability and resilience. One of the agents that can benefit, but also contribute to better forestry, are machine producers.With digitalization, the machinery is now equipped with new and better sensors that can be used not only for machine operations but also for forest management, through LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) or RGB (Red, Green, Blue) cameras for example. On the other hand, there are new needs for predictive maintenance or solutions for remote assistance of machines operating in the forest, typically in isolated areas with great limitations in access to communications. Thinking about these technological challenges, this work seeks to provide answers with communication solutions in forest machines, enabling the digitalization of functionalities, also allowing remote access to machine controllers in order to provide them with connectivity in an IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) scenarios. New hardware modules designed in partnership and according to the prerequisites of a forest machine manufacturer are presented. These modules are a step towards digitizing the machines and opening up the scalability of new requirements, as well as remote access through additional gateways. The results already obtained in real scenarios show that these modules can be a concrete solution for the current and emerging needs of industrial machine manufacturers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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