Arctic HYCOS – 1st Workshop on Improved Monitoring, Accuracy and Data Availability in the Arctic Drainage Basin: Meeting Summary Report and Implementation Plan

The World Hydrological Cycle Observing System (WHYCOS) is a global programme, developed in response to the scarcity or absence of accurate, timely and accessible data and information in real or near real time on freshwater resources in many parts of the world. The programme is implemented through various components (HYCOSs) at the regional and/or basin scale. It is guided by the WHYCOS International Advisory Group (WIAG). The Arctic-HYCOS program is being promoted through this Workshop. For more information on the WHYCOS, please see http://www.whycos.org/cms/. The main goal of the Arctic-HYCOS program is to improve monitoring, data accuracy, availability and dissemination of information in the pan-arctic drainage basin. This project is science-driven and is aimed at monitoring freshwater fluxes and pollutants into the Arctic Ocean with the objective of improving climate predictions in the Northern Hemisphere and assessing the pollution of the Arctic coastal areas and the open Arctic Ocean. Arctic-HYCOS is currently organized along three main activities. 1. Develop and optimal design fro hydro-meteorological monitoring networks to capture the essential variability of the Arctic hydrological system and to enable accurate and efficient assessment of change 2. Estimate uncertainty of available in situ and possible remote sensing data including analysis of accuracy and systematic errors of new observation technology 3. Develop an integrated pan-arctic data consolidation and analysis system for the water cycle uniting data from various in-situ and other sources

Design of a wrist and operator interface for an agricultural manipulator : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Engineering and Automation at Massey University

Roadside mowing and tree pruning has always been a job that most people would consider as unpleasant. This project is concerned with the development of a system to make these tasks simpler, safer and more pleasant for the operator. 1.1 Software This project is involved with the design of a complex mechanical system, which could be done using a modern CAD package. To achieve this, research into what modelling package was best was necessary. Several contenders were considered. These include SolidWorks [1], Mechanical Desktop [2] and CADKEY [3]. CADKHY was disregarded early as it is not as expandable as the other two. Both SolidWorks and Mechanical Desktop have additional software packages that allow for motion, force and stress analysis. The major difference between SolidWorks and Mechanical Desktop, is that SolidWorks is a true three dimensional modelling package, whereas Mechanical Desktop is based on the two dimensional AutoCAD system with a three dimensional toolbox. The choice was finalised to SolidWorks as it handles three dimensional modelling more efficiently. Massey University also uses SolidWorks. This allowed the project to continue while studying at the Turitea campus. 1.2 Overview This project is involved with the development of a wrist mechanism and hydraulic control system for an agricultural manipulator. The manipulator is called the Hydra Trim and was developed by Pivot Engineering Ltd. Napier [4]. The wrist mechanism is an integral part of making the Hydra Trim a success. The hydraulic control requires not only the valves but also an interface between the operator and the valves

Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Lubricant degradation, transport and the effect of extended oil drain intervals on piston assembly tribology

There are ever increasing demands on lubricant manufacturers to meet governmental legislation and customer needs by improving fuel economy, engine durability and exhaust system compatibility as shown by the introduction of GF4 and move towards GF5 specification oils. This has created an ever increasing need to understand how oil degrades in an engine and how this degraded oil affects piston assembly tribology. This review conference paper will give an overview of a collaborative project that has been undertaken to further enhance the understanding of how lubricant degrades in an operating engine, its transport through the engine and effect upon piston assembly tribology

The Chameleon Architecture for Streaming DSP Applications

We focus on architectures for streaming DSP applications such as wireless baseband processing and image processing. We aim at a single generic architecture that is capable of dealing with different DSP applications. This architecture has to be energy efficient and fault tolerant. We introduce a heterogeneous tiled architecture and present the details of a domain-specific reconfigurable tile processor called Montium. This reconfigurable processor has a small footprint (1.8 mm$^2$ in a 130 nm process), is power efficient and exploits the locality of reference principle. Reconfiguring the device is very fast, for example, loading the coefficients for a 200 tap FIR filter is done within 80 clock cycles. The tiles on the tiled architecture are connected to a Network-on-Chip (NoC) via a network interface (NI). Two NoCs have been developed: a packet-switched and a circuit-switched version. Both provide two types of services: guaranteed throughput (GT) and best effort (BE). For both NoCs estimates of power consumption are presented. The NI synchronizes data transfers, configures and starts/stops the tile processor. For dynamically mapping applications onto the tiled architecture, we introduce a run-time mapping tool