Moving-baseline localization for mobile wireless sensor networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-98).The moving-baseline localization (MBL) problem arises when a group of nodes moves through an environment in which no external coordinate reference is available. When group members cannot see or hear one another directly, each node must employ local sensing and inter-device communication to infer the spatial relationship and motion of all other nodes with respect to itself. We consider a setting in which nodes move with piecewise-linear velocities in the plane, and any node can exchange noisy range estimates with certain sufficiently nearby nodes. We develop a distributed solution to the MBL problem in the plane, in which each node performs robust hyperbola fitting, trilateration with velocity constraints, and subgraph alignment to arrive at a globally consistent view of the network expressed in its own "rest frame." Changes in any node's motion cause deviations between observed and predicted ranges at nearby nodes, triggering revision of the trajectory estimates computed by all nodes. We implement and analyze our algorithm in a simulation informed by the characteristics of a commercially available ultra-wideband (UWB) radio, and show that recovering node trajectories, rather than just locations, requires substantially less computation at each node. Finally, we quantify the minimum ranging rate and local network density required for the method's successful operation.by Jun-geun Park.S.M

Cooperative algorithms for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Fine-grained containment domains for throughput processors

Continued scaling of semiconductor technology has made modern processors rely on large design margins to guarantee correct operation under worst case conditions. Design margins appear in the form of higher supply voltage or lower clock frequency, leading to inefficiency. In practice, it is rare to observe such worst-case conditions and the processor can run at a reduced voltage or higher frequency experiencing only few infrequent errors. Recent proposals have used hardware error detectors and recovery mechanisms to detect and re- cover from these rare errors, a technique known as timing speculation. While this is effective for out-of-order processors with inherent capability to recover from misspeculation, implementing similar hardware for throughput processors such as the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is prohibitively costly due to the massive amount of thread context that needs to be preserved. Further- more, recovery overhead is much higher since the SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) execution model of GPUs require multiple threads to roll back together in case of an error. In this dissertation, I develop a hardware/software co-design approach to enable reduced-margin operation on GPUs that overcomes the limitations of existing techniques. The proposed scheme leverages the hierarchical programming model of GPUs to provide hierarchical and uncoordinated local checkpoint-recovery. By decomposing a program into a hierarchically nested tree of code blocks which I refer to as containment domains (CDs), the pro- gram becomes amenable to automatic analysis and tuning, and an optimum trade-off can be made between preservation and recovery overhead. To aid this optimization process, an analytical model is developed to estimate the performance efficiency of a given application setting at a given error rate. With the analytical model, an exhaustive search can be performed to find the optimal solution. The tunability also allows the proposed scheme to easily adapt to a wide range of error rates making it future proof against emerging uncertainties in semiconductor design. The proposed scheme combines software and hardware components to achieve the highest efficiency in preservation, restoration, and recovery. The software components include: 1) an API and runtime that lets the programmers describe the hierarchy of containment domains within an application and preserve the state required for rollback recovery, and 2) a compiler analysis that automatically inserts preservation routines for register variables. The hardware components include: 1) a stack structure to keep track of recovery program counters (PC), 2) a set of error containment mechanisms to guarantee that no erroneous data is propagated outside of a containment domain and 3) an error reporting architecture that keeps track of affected threads and initiate recovery of them.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Emerging Trends in Mechatronics

Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary branch of engineering combining mechanical, electrical and electronics, control and automation, and computer engineering fields. The main research task of mechatronics is design, control, and optimization of advanced devices, products, and hybrid systems utilizing the concepts found in all these fields. The purpose of this special issue is to help better understand how mechatronics will impact on the practice and research of developing advanced techniques to model, control, and optimize complex systems. The special issue presents recent advances in mechatronics and related technologies. The selected topics give an overview of the state of the art and present new research results and prospects for the future development of the interdisciplinary field of mechatronic systems