Smart Monitoring and Control in the Future Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and related technologies have the promise of realizing pervasive and smart applications which, in turn, have the potential of improving the quality of life of people living in a connected world. According to the IoT vision, all things can cooperate amongst themselves and be managed from anywhere via the Internet, allowing tight integration between the physical and cyber worlds and thus improving efficiency, promoting usability, and opening up new application opportunities. Nowadays, IoT technologies have successfully been exploited in several domains, providing both social and economic benefits. The realization of the full potential of the next generation of the Internet of Things still needs further research efforts concerning, for instance, the identification of new architectures, methodologies, and infrastructures dealing with distributed and decentralized IoT systems; the integration of IoT with cognitive and social capabilities; the enhancement of the sensing–analysis–control cycle; the integration of consciousness and awareness in IoT environments; and the design of new algorithms and techniques for managing IoT big data. This Special Issue is devoted to advancements in technologies, methodologies, and applications for IoT, together with emerging standards and research topics which would lead to realization of the future Internet of Things

Hardware-software design of embedded systems for intelligent sensing applications

This Thesis wants to highlight the importance of ad-hoc designed and developed embedded systems in the implementation of intelligent sensor networks. As evidence four areas of application are presented: Precision Agriculture, Bioengineering, Automotive and Structural Health Monitoring. For each field is reported one, or more, smart device design and developing, in addition to on-board elaborations, experimental validation and in field tests. In particular, it is presented the design and development of a fruit meter. In the bioengineering field, three different projects are reported, detailing the architectures implemented and the validation tests conducted. Two prototype realizations of an inner temperature measurement system in electric motors for an automotive application are then discussed. Lastly, the HW/SW design of a Smart Sensor Network is analyzed: the network features on-board data management and processing, integration in an IoT toolchain, Wireless Sensor Network developments and an AI framework for vibration-based structural assessment

Real-time automatic integrated monitoring of barn environment and dairy cattle behaviour: Technical implementation and evaluation on three commercial farms

Due to increasing herd sizes and automation on dairy farms there is an important need for automated monitoring of cow production, health, and welfare. Despite much progress in automatic monitoring techniques, there is still a need to integrate data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive overview and accurate diagnosis of a cow’s state. To aid the technological development of data integration, a prototype of an open and customizable automatic system that integrates data from multiple sensors relating to barn environment and cow behaviour was developed. The system integrates data from sensors that measure barn climate (e.g., temperature, humidity, wind speed), air quality (e.g., CO2 concentration), water use and temperature, the moisture and temperature of the litter and cow behaviour (e.g., lying, eating, ruminating). An external weather system and video recording system are also included. The system’s architecture consists of four main elements: sensors, nodes, gateways, and backend. The data are recorded by sensors, then locally processed on custom-developed sensor nodes, and then transmitted via radio channels to local gateways that combine the data from multiple nodes and transmit them to distributed digital storage (“the cloud”) via a 3G/4G cellular network. On the cloud, the data are further processed and stored in a database. The data are then presented to the user continuously and in real time on a dashboard that can be accessed via the internet. In the design of the local wireless network, care was taken to avoid data packet collision and thus to minimize data loss. To test the system’s performance, the system was installed and operated on three commercial dairy cattle farms for one year. The system provided high data stability with minimal loss and outliers, showing that the system is reliable and suitable for long term application on commercial dairy farms. The system’s architecture, communication network, and data processing and visualization applications form an open framework for research and development purposes, allowing it to be customized and fine-tuned before being deployed as a management assistant on commercial dairy farms. Missing elements that should be added in the future are the integration of the data from the milking parlour and cow identification. Algorithms to integrate information from multiple sensors can be added to provide a comprehensive system that monitors all aspects related to cow welfare, health, and production automatically, remotely and in real time, thereby supporting farmers in important management decision-making

Advancing automation and robotics technology for the Space Station and for the US economy, volume 2

In response to Public Law 98-371, dated July 18, 1984, the NASA Advanced Technology Advisory Committee has studied automation and robotics for use in the Space Station. The Technical Report, Volume 2, provides background information on automation and robotics technologies and their potential and documents: the relevant aspects of Space Station design; representative examples of automation and robotics; applications; the state of the technology and advances needed; and considerations for technology transfer to U.S. industry and for space commercialization

Taylor Place- Fire Life Safety Report

This document is a Fire and Life Safety Report on the Taylor Place Dormitory located in Phoenix, Arizona as part of the Arizona State University (ASU) downtown campus. The building was evaluated on a prescriptive basis based on the current City of Phoenix building codes and further evaluated on using performance based methods from the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) Handbook and National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 101 Life Safety Code®. These building features and systems were evaluated using prescriptive methods: General construction, fire resistive construction and fire resistive separations Occupancy, Life safety features and building egress Smoke management systems and features Fire protection systems, fire sprinkler, suppression systems, fire alarm Emergency and standby power, elevators, communication systems, and lighting A performance-based analysis of the South Tower and Ground Floor Cafeteria and Assembly space using NFPA 101 Life Safety Code® Chapter 5 as a guide. The analysis of the South Tower was based on NFPA 5.5.3.1 and a typical fire for the occupancy accounting for occupants, number and location, room sizes, contents, fuel properties, ventilations, and identifying the location of the item ignited. The analysis of the Ground Floor Cafeteria and Assembly Area was based on NFPA 5.5.3.2 and an ultra-fast fire in the primary means of egress reducing the overall means of egress by two double door exits. These scenarios are analyzed using tenability criteria to determine if with the given the design fire, all occupants can exit safely. Taylor Place generally meets or exceeds the prescriptive requirements for the system described above provided in the building code. Two specific areas were identified requiring further analysis: the corridor and two-story vertical opening separation is not provided in the South Tower per PBC Section 712, and the reduction in the door size of the south egress corridor on the ground floor. Both of these issues were addressed in conjunction with the performance based analysis and found to be acceptable with the current set of performance based recommendations. The performance-based analysis was largely successful. The analysis of the ground floor egress given an ultrafast fire located near the southwest corner of the assembly space found occupants Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) was greater than the Available Safe Egress Time (ASET) meaning all occupants egressed safely. The visibility was lost in the cafeteria which caused the failure of the tenability criteria and the determination of the ASET. The second analysis of the two-story vertical common area in the south tower failed the tenability criteria for visibility during the first two evaluations. It was determined that the two furniture standards as part of the ASU design guidelines varied greatly in fire behavior and smoke production. As a result, the furniture in the common areas meet the recommended requirements, the corridors will not require separation from the common area. As part of the evaluation process, there are additional recommendations in the report including the addition low level egress signage in the corridors to aid egress, a smoke barrier in the entrance lobby, and the reasons are discussed in more detail in the report. Comments and recommendations can be found at the end of each section providing additional detail in specific areas. The end of the report focuses on Commissioning of fire protection and building systems. A team is needed to effectively test all of the fire protection systems in accordance with their performance requirements. Functional tests performed on each system to ensure each systems were installed correctly. For example, stair pressurization systems can rely on several fans to pressurize each stairwell. A functional test will typically quickly reveal problem areas and you may even find a motor running backwards. Valuable information is provided from this stage in the project to identify maintenance requirements and finalize documentation. Fire fighter operation overviews need to be assembled, operation and maintenance manuals need to be created for building staff, and fire safety plans need to be implemented. It is very much a documentation and punch list phase of the project

Exploiting radio interference for human sensing and communications

Wireless devices are now widely deployed in all indoor spaces including homes, offices, shopping malls, etc. In these spaces, we are ubiquitously enveloped by radio spectrum. The presence of various objects such as furniture, walls and human bodies influences the radio wave propagations in numerous ways owing to reflection and diffraction of the wireless signals. As a result, the signals from multiple propagation paths may overlap in constructive and destructive ways which results in radio interference. Interference is normally construed to be undesirable, since it adversely affects the signal quality at the receiver node. Thus various techniques have been proposed in literature to minimise the effects of interference. In this thesis, on the contrary, we show that radio interference can be used to our advantage in the context of two distinct application domains: (i) device-free human sensing and (ii) multi-hop communications. First, we show that WiFi signals can be used to uniquely identify people. There is strong evidence to suggest that all humans have unique gait patterns. While walking in vicinity of WiFi devices, an individual will interfere with the radio propagations and create unique perturbations in the WiFi spectrum. The unique features that are representative of the gait of the individual are extracted to identify the person. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the proposed system can uniquely identify people with an average accuracy of 93% to 77% from a group comprised of 2 to 6 people. Second, we propose a system that is able to monitor breathing rate in a natural setting where the individual can perform actions such as reading, writing, using their phone, etc. We observe breathing and accompanying actions create both constructive and destructive interference. Certain specific subcarriers carry strong imprints of the subtle chest motions that occur during breathing because of the frequency and spacial diversity of MIMO technology that is employed in the state-of-the-art WiFi devices. Our proposed methods are used to identify those subcarriers and precisely isolate the breathing signals. We implement both previous works on commercial off-the-shelf WiFi devices and exploit Channel State Information (CSI) of WiFi signals to extract the patterns for human identification and breath rate monitoring in RF spectrum. Third, we propose a novel point-to-point communication protocol, which exploit the benefits of constructive interference in order to enhance communication reliability and reduce energy consumption. The proposed protocol attempts to discover the most reliable and energy efficient route between a source and a destination. To achieve this objective, the proposed algorithm identifies direct routes and selects helper nodes to ensure reliable communications while allowing all other devices in the network to power down. During data transmissions, the selected nodes can exploit the benefits of constructive interference to increase received signal strength and enhance reliability. Extensive experiments show the proposed method can save energy consumption by up to 82.5% compared to a state-of-the-art approach whilst achieving similar end-to-end transmission reliability

A five-cycle living visual taxonomy of learning interactions

This paper describes my development of a useful, descriptive model that one-to-one practitioners could use to analyse transcripts of their sessions, design new strategies and even test them out. Further, this work has the potential to offer a framework that students, patients, clients and colleagues could use to communicate the types of interactions they prefer. The narrative in my educational life around the domain of heuristic generates a living-educational-theory as a values-based explanation for my educational influences as a tutor. The living contradictions I encounter, and praxes I make up to help me imagine solutions, are portrayed visually and verbally; and this leads to my proposal of a five-cycle living visual taxonomy of learning interactions. I consider the application of my living-educational-theory to other domains, for example, confidence; and to power dynamics, autism support, student engagement, expert behaviour, external influences, understanding negative feedback, and remoteness in heuristics. Interestingly, one future possibility is to use my taxonomy to develop a ‘positivist/scientific flavoured’ quantitative instrument to support learning analytics and educational data-mining; to optimise learning, and the environment in which it takes place