Low-cost Sensor Glove with Force Feedback for Learning from Demonstrations using Probabilistic Trajectory Representations

Sensor gloves are popular input devices for a large variety of applications including health monitoring, control of music instruments, learning sign language, dexterous computer interfaces, and tele-operating robot hands. Many commercial products as well as low-cost open source projects have been developed. We discuss here how low-cost (approx. 250 EUROs) sensor gloves with force feedback can be build, provide an open source software interface for Matlab and present first results in learning object manipulation skills through imitation learning on the humanoid robot iCub.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Workshop paper of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015

A Fault Injection Environment for Microprocessor-based Board

Evaluating the faulty behaviour of low-cost microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their usage in many safety critical systems. To address this issue, the paper describes a software-implemented fault injection system based on the trace exception mode available in most microprocessors. The architecture of the complete fault injection environment is proposed, integrating modules for generating a fault list, for performing their injection and for gathering the results, respectively. Data gathered from some sample benchmark applications are presented The main advantages of the approach are low cost, good portability, and high efficienc

The Application of Minicomputers to Problems of Information Retrieval

Although minicomputers can be used in many types of information retrieval facilities, this paper deals primarily with bibliographic reference re- trieval systems. There are two main reasons why it is attractive to consider using a minicomputer for on-line applications: (1) the relatively low cost and (2) the hardware and software provided.published or submitted for publicatio

KRATOS: An Open Source Hardware-Software Platform for Rapid Research in LPWANs

Long-range (LoRa) radio technologies have recently gained momentum in the IoT landscape, allowing low-power communications over distances up to several kilometers. As a result, more and more LoRa networks are being deployed. However, commercially available LoRa devices are expensive and propriety, creating a barrier to entry and possibly slowing down developments and deployments of novel applications. Using open-source hardware and software platforms would allow more developers to test and build intelligent devices resulting in a better overall development ecosystem, lower barriers to entry, and rapid growth in the number of IoT applications. Toward this goal, this paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of KRATOS, a low-cost LoRa platform running ContikiOS. Both, our hardware and software designs are released as an open- source to the research community.Comment: Accepted at WiMob 201

Biometric Authentication System on Mobile Personal Devices

We propose a secure, robust, and low-cost biometric authentication system on the mobile personal device for the personal network. The system consists of the following five key modules: 1) face detection; 2) face registration; 3) illumination normalization; 4) face verification; and 5) information fusion. For the complicated face authentication task on the devices with limited resources, the emphasis is largely on the reliability and applicability of the system. Both theoretical and practical considerations are taken. The final system is able to achieve an equal error rate of 2% under challenging testing protocols. The low hardware and software cost makes the system well adaptable to a large range of security applications

Going on-line on a shoestring: An experiment in concurrent development of requirements and architecture

A number of on-line applications were built for a small university using a micro-sized development team. Four ideas were tested during the project: the Twin Peaks development model, using fully functional prototypes in the requirements elicitation process, some core practices of Extreme Programming, and the use of open-source software in a production environment. Certain project management techniques and their application to a micro-sized development effort were also explored. These ideas and techniques proved effective in developing many significant Internet and networked applications in a short time and at very low cost

EXFI: a low cost Fault Injection System for embedded Microprocessor-based Boards

Evaluating the faulty behavior of low-cost embedded microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their adoption in many safety critical systems. The architecture of a complete Fault Injection environment is proposed, integrating a module for generating a collapsed list of faults, and another for performing their injection and gathering the results. To address this issue, the paper describes a software-implemented Fault Injection approach based on the Trace Exception Mode available in most microprocessors. The authors describe EXFI, a prototypical system implementing the approach, and provide data about some sample benchmark applications. The main advantages of EXFI are the low cost, the good portability, and the high efficienc

Low-Cost Sensors and Biological Signals

Many sensors are currently available at prices lower than USD 100 and cover a wide range of biological signals: motion, muscle activity, heart rate, etc. Such low-cost sensors have metrological features allowing them to be used in everyday life and clinical applications, where gold-standard material is both too expensive and time-consuming to be used. The selected papers present current applications of low-cost sensors in domains such as physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and affective technologies. The results cover various aspects of low-cost sensor technology from hardware design to software optimization