A short curriculum of the robotics and technology of computer lab

Our research Lab is directed by Prof. Anton Civit. It is an interdisciplinary group of 23 researchers that carry out their teaching and researching labor at the Escuela Politécnica Superior (Higher Polytechnic School) and the Escuela de Ingeniería Informática (Computer Engineering School). The main research fields are: a) Industrial and mobile Robotics, b) Neuro-inspired processing using electronic spikes, c) Embedded and real-time systems, d) Parallel and massive processing computer architecture, d) Information Technologies for rehabilitation, handicapped and elder people, e) Web accessibility and usability In this paper, the Lab history is presented and its main publications and research projects over the last few years are summarized.Nuestro grupo de investigación está liderado por el profesor Civit. Somos un grupo multidisciplinar de 23 investigadores que realizan su labor docente e investigadora en la Escuela Politécnica Superior y en Escuela de Ingeniería Informática. Las principales líneas de investigaciones son: a) Robótica industrial y móvil. b) Procesamiento neuro-inspirado basado en pulsos electrónicos. c) Sistemas empotrados y de tiempo real. d) Arquitecturas paralelas y de procesamiento masivo. e) Tecnología de la información aplicada a la discapacidad, rehabilitación y a las personas mayores. f) Usabilidad y accesibilidad Web. En este artículo se reseña la historia del grupo y se resumen las principales publicaciones y proyectos que ha conseguido en los últimos años

Evolvable Hardware Based Optimal Position Control of Quadcopter

Trading off performance metrics in control design for position tracking is unavoidable. This has severe consequences in mission-critical systems such as quadcopter applications. The controller area and propulsion energy are conflicting design parameters, whereas the reliability and tracking speed are related metrics to be optimized. In this research, a switching-based position controller was co-simulated with the quadcopter model. Performance analysis of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based controller validates a better scheme for tracking speed, propulsion energy, and reliability optimization under similar error performance. To improve the computation power and controller area, the dynamic partial reconfiguration(DPR) approach has been adapted and implemented on FPGA using the Vivado Integrated Development Environment (IDE), where a ranking-based approach brings into action either proportional derivative, sliding mode, or model predictive controllers for each dimension of position tracking. It is verified by analyzing the cumulative tracking speed, reliability, controller area, and propulsion energy metrics that the proposed controller can optimize all these metrics within three successive iterations of tracking either in the same direction or in any combination of directions. Concerning the implementation results of the controller with the switching-based controller, there is 6 % computation power and 30 % resource savings due to DPR

Design of Interactive Service Robots applying methods of Systems Engineering and Decision Making

Interaktive Service Roboter werden heute bereits in einigen Anwendungsszenarien eingesetzt, in denen sie beispielsweise Menschen durch Gebäude geleiten oder bei häuslichen Aufgaben unterstützen. Dennoch gibt es bislang kein System, das den erwarteten Marktdurchbruch geschafft hat. Die hohe Komplexität solcher Systeme und vielfältige Anforderungen durch Benutzer und Betreiber erschweren die Entwicklung von erfolgreichen Service Robotern. In dieser Arbeit wurden zwei interaktive Service Roboter entwickelt, die das Potential haben, die beschriebenen Hinderungsgründe für einen breiten Einsatz zu überwinden. Das erste Robotersystem wurde als Shopping Roboter für Baumärkte entwickelt, in denen es Kunden zu gesuchten Produkten führt. Das zweite System dient als interaktiver Pflegeroboter älteren Menschen in häuslicher Umgebung bei der Bewältigung täglicher Aufgaben. Diese Arbeit beschreibt die Realisierung der Embedded Systems beider Robotersysteme und umfasst insbesondere die Entwicklung der Low-Level System Architekturen, Energie Management Systeme, Kommunikationssysteme, Sensorsysteme, sowie ausgewählte Aspekte der mechanischen Umsetzung. Die Entwicklung einer Vielzahl von Steuerungsmodulen, notwendig für die Realisierung interaktiver Service Roboter, wird beschrieben. Die vorliegende Arbeit verwendet und erweitert Methoden des Systems Engineerings, um die hohe Systemkomplexität von interaktiven Service Robotern sowie die vielfältigen Anforderungen an deren späteren Einsatz beherrschen zu können. Der Entwicklungsprozess der beiden Roboter basiert auf dem V-Model, welches einen strukturierten Entwurfsablauf unter Berücksichtigung aller Systemanforderungen erlaubt. Es zwingt ferner zur frühzeitigen Spezifikation von Prüfabläufen, was die Qualität und Zuverlässigkeit der Entwicklungsergebnisse verbessert. Für die Unterstützung von Entscheidungen im Entwicklungsprozess schlägt diese Arbeit eine Kombination aus dem V-Model und dem Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) vor. Der AHP hilft bei der Auswahl verfügbarer technischer Alternativen unter Berücksichtigung von Prioritäten im Entwicklungsprozess. Diese Arbeit spezifiziert sieben Kriterien, die Service Roboter charakterisieren: Anpassbarkeit, Laufzeit, Benutzbarkeit, Robustheit, Sicherheit, Features und Kosten. Die Prioritäten dieser Kriterien im Entwicklungsprozess werden für jeden Roboter individuell bestimmt. Der AHP ermittelt die beste Lösung basierend auf diesen gewichteten Kriterien und den bewerteten technischen Alternativen. Die Einbindung des AHP in den V-Model Prozess wurde am Entwurf des Shopping Roboter entwickelt und geprüft. Die Allgemeingültigkeit dieser Methode wurde während der Entwicklung des Pflegeroboters verifiziert.Interactive service robots have already been developed and operate as example installations taking over guidance tasks or serving as home assistants. However, none of these systems have become an off-the-shelf product or have achieved the predicted breakthrough so far. The challenges of the design of such systems are, on the one hand, the combination of cutting edge technologies to a complex product; on the other hand, the consideration of requirements important for the later marketing during the design process. In the framework of this dissertation, two interactive service robot systems are developed that have the potential to overcome current market entry barriers. These robots are designed to operate in two different environments: one robot guides walked-in users in large home improvement stores to requested product locations and interacts with the customer to provide product information; the other robot assists elderly people to stay longer in their homes and takes over home-care tasks. This work describes the realization of the embedded systems of both robots. In particular, the design of low-level system architectures, energy management systems, communication systems, sensor systems, and selected aspects of mechanical implementations are carried out in this work. Multiple embedded system modules are developed for the control of the robots' functionalities; the development processes as well as the composition and evaluation of these modules are presented in this work. To cope with the complexity and the various factors that are important for the design of the robots, this thesis applies and further develops system engineering methods. The development process is based on the V-Model system design method. The V-Model helps to structure the design process under consideration of all system requirements. It involves evaluation procedures at all design levels, and thus increases the quality and reliability of the development outputs. To support design decisions, this thesis proposes to combine the V-Model with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The AHP helps to evaluate technical alternatives for design decisions according to overall criteria, a system has to fulfill. This thesis defines seven criteria that characterize a service robot: Adaptability, Operation Time, Usability, Robustness, Safeness, Features, and Costs. These criteria are weighted for each individual robot application. The AHP evaluates technical design alternatives based on the weighted criteria to reveal the best technical solution. The integration of the AHP into the V-Model development is tested and improved during the design process of the shopping robot system. The generality of this combined systematic design approach is validated during the design of the home-care robot system

Industrial applications of the Kalman filter:a review

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FPGA design methodology for industrial control systems—a review

This paper reviews the state of the art of fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) design methodologies with a focus on industrial control system applications. This paper starts with an overview of FPGA technology development, followed by a presentation of design methodologies, development tools and relevant CAD environments, including the use of portable hardware description languages and system level programming/design tools. They enable a holistic functional approach with the major advantage of setting up a unique modeling and evaluation environment for complete industrial electronics systems. Three main design rules are then presented. These are algorithm refinement, modularity, and systematic search for the best compromise between the control performance and the architectural constraints. An overview of contributions and limits of FPGAs is also given, followed by a short survey of FPGA-based intelligent controllers for modern industrial systems. Finally, two complete and timely case studies are presented to illustrate the benefits of an FPGA implementation when using the proposed system modeling and design methodology. These consist of the direct torque control for induction motor drives and the control of a diesel-driven synchronous stand-alone generator with the help of fuzzy logic

The Impact of Single Event Effect Reliability of Convolution Neural Network Architectures and Hardening Approaches Implemented on SRAM FPGA

Convolution neural networks (CNNs) have powerful data processing and learning capabilities, which have been widely applied to image processing related applications, especially in autonomous driving, medical image classification, space exploration and military applications. Due to the low power consumption, high flexibility, and parallel characteristics of modern field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), they are frequently used in CNN implementation as a hardware acceleration platform. Two architectures are mainly used to implement CNNs on FPGAs: the streaming architecture and single computation engines (SCEs) architecture. In the streaming architecture of a CNN, each layer is implemented with one distinct hardware block and each block can be optimized separately. On the other hand, the single computation engine architecture uses a systolic array of processing elements or a matrix multiplication unit as a computation engine to execute the CNN layers sequentially. The control of the hardware and the scheduling of operations is performed by a control unit and associated software. The advantage of this design paradigm is that it consists of a fixed architectural template that can be scaled based on the input of CNNs and the available FPGA resources. Therefore, it is suitable to implement modern complex CNNs that may not fit into the streaming architecture. SRAM-based FPGAs are sensitive to radiation effects, which can generate single event effects (SEEs) in the system. Designs are required to reduce the radiation effects in FPGA-based CNNs for many applications. Previous radiation effects studies mainly focused on streaming architecture and explored triple-modular redundancy (TMR) or selective hardening techniques. As far as the authors know, there are very few radiation effects studies on the CNNs implemented with SCEs architecture on FPGAs and no radiation effects evaluation between the two architectures with proton irradiation. In this thesis, we implement a Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) CNN with two mainstream architectures, both streaming architecture and SCEs architecture, on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ multiprocessor system on a chip (MPSoC) ZCU-102 evaluation kit. Then we evaluate their error, hang, and total failure rate with proton irradiation test at Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF). The cross-section results for different architectures showed that the SCEs design has higher error cross-sections and total failure cross-sections than that of the streaming architecture, even though SCEs architecture uses much fewer hardware resources in FPGA. In addition, two resilience techniques for SCEs architecture named spatial TMR and temporal TMR are designed and adopted for the SCEs architecture with the same hardware structure and utilization by reusing process elements (PEs) or using multiple PEs to carry out each calculation. As a result, the cross-sections of the spatial TMR and temporal TMR SCEs architecture designs are reduced by 34.9% and 59.2%, with an execution time overhead of 14.2% and 21.4% compared with non-harden one, respectively. Thus, the study shows that SCEs architecture for FPGA acceleration has excellent potential for applications in a radiation environment with minimal overhead due to its scalability and flexibility, and spatial TMR and temporal TMR could effectively reduce the error rate and total failure rate with no extra hardware resources. This suggests that spatial TMR and temporal TMR propose in my project seems to be generic for SCEs architecture, and it could be a better redundancy choice for complex CNNs implement with not enough hardware resources

End-to-end congestion control protocols for remote programming of robots, using heterogeneous networks: A comparative analysis

There are many interesting aspects of Internet Telerobotics within the network robotics context, such as variable bandwidth and time-delays. Some of these aspects have been treated in the literature from the control point of view. Moreover, only a little work is related to the way Internet protocols can help to minimize the effect of delay and bandwidth fluctuation on network robotics. In this paper, we present the capabilities of TCP, UDP, TCP Las Vegas, TEAR, and Trinomial protocols, when performing a remote experiment within a network robotics application, the UJI Industrial Telelaboratory. Comparative analysis is presented through simulations within the NS2 platform. Results show how these protocols perform in two significant situations within the network robotics context, using heterogeneous wired networks: (1) an asymmetric network when controlling the system through a ADSL connection, and (2) a symmetric network using the system on Campus. Conclusions show a set of characteristics the authors of this paper consider very important when designing an End-to-End Congestion Control transport protocol for Internet Telerobotics

A Survey on FPGA-Based Sensor Systems: Towards Intelligent and Reconfigurable Low-Power Sensors for Computer Vision, Control and Signal Processing

The current trend in the evolution of sensor systems seeks ways to provide more accuracy and resolution, while at the same time decreasing the size and power consumption. The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provides specific reprogrammable hardware technology that can be properly exploited to obtain a reconfigurable sensor system. This adaptation capability enables the implementation of complex applications using the partial reconfigurability at a very low-power consumption. For highly demanding tasks FPGAs have been favored due to the high efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility (parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and superb performance in the development of algorithms. FPGAs have improved the performance of sensor systems and have triggered a clear increase in their use in new fields of application. A new generation of smarter, reconfigurable and lower power consumption sensors is being developed in Spain based on FPGAs. In this paper, a review of these developments is presented, describing as well the FPGA technologies employed by the different research groups and providing an overview of future research within this field.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Government and European FEDER funds (DPI2012-32390), the Valencia Regional Government (PROMETEO/2013/085) and the University of Alicante (GRE12-17)