Proposal of a hybrid and hierarchical sensor/actuator network architecture for application in metropolitan scenarios

Orientador: Leonardo de Souza MendesDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Os avanços nas áreas de comunicação sem fio e microeletrônica têm motivado o desenvolvimento de aplicações utilizando equipamentos sem fio, especialmente dispositivos sensores e atuadores, permitindo assim, a criação de uma ponte tecnológica para conectar o mundo físico com o mundo digital. Com essa interação surge uma demanda crescente por sistemas de monitoramento e controle em ambientes industriais, residenciais e também municipais. Algumas tecnologias já se encontram no mercado, destinadas a este tipo de aplicação e dentre elas destaca-se a especificação ZigBee. Entretanto, aplicações em cenários metropolitanos exigem um paradigma de comunicação com alta capacidade e de larga escala. Este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura híbrida e hierárquica de rede de sensores/atuadores para aplicação em cenários metropolitanos. A arquitetura proposta faz uso do potencial da especificação ZigBee e da capacidade das Redes Metropolitanas de Acesso Aberto. Baseado em tal arquitetura, um estudo de caso foi desenvolvido na cidade de Pedreira, interior do estado de São Paulo, onde foi implementado um sistema para supervisão do fluxo de pessoas, monitoramento do ambiente e controle de dispositivos em um prédio do setor público.Abstract: The advances in wireless communication technology and microelectronics have enable interesting new application for wireless devices, especially sensor and actuator devices, allowing to have an interaction between digital and physical worlds. With this interaction appeared an increasing demand for remote monitoring and control systems in industrial, residential and also municipal environments. Some technologies are already met in the market, destined to this type of application and amongst them the ZigBee specification is distinguished. However, these application applied in metropolitan scenarios require a large scale communication paradigm with high capacity. This work presents a hybrid hierarchical architecture to design a sensor and actuator network to operate in metropolitan scenarios. The architecture combines ZigBee specification with Open Access Metropolitan Area Networks. Based on the proposed architecture a case study was developed in the city of Pedreira-SP, where a people-counting system and an environmental monitoring and control prototype were designed in a public building.MestradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Critical technology elements (WP1)

The overall objective of the DigiMon project is to “accelerate the implementation of CCS by developing and demonstrating an affordable, flexible, societally embedded and smart Digital Monitoring early warning system”, for monitoring any CO2 storage reservoir and subsurface barrier system. Within the project the objective of WP1 was to develop individual technologies, data acquisition, analysis techniques and workflows in preparation for inclusion in the DigiMon system. The technologies and data processing techniques developed as part of WP1 include distributed fibre-optic sensing (DFOS) for seismic surveys and chemical sensing, 4D gravity and seafloor deformation measurements, a new seismic source and seismic monitoring survey design. For these technologies the key targets for WP1 were • Develop individual components of the system to raise individual technology readiness levels (TRLs), • Validate and optimise processing software for individual system components, • Develop an effective Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data interpretation workflow. This work was performed with the expected outcomes of • Raising the DAS TRL for passive seismic monitoring, • An assessment the feasibility of using Distributed Chemical Sensing (DCS) for CO2 detection, • Reducing the cost of 4D gravity and seafloor deformation measurements

Accessing Space: A Catalogue of Process, Equipment and Resources for Commercial Users, 1990

A catalogue is presented which is intended for commercial developers who are considering, or who have in progress, a project involving the microgravity environment of space or remote sensing of the Earth. An orientation is given to commercial space activities along with a current inventory of equipment, apparatus, carriers, vehicles, resources, and services available from NASA, other government agencies and U.S. industry. The information describes the array of resources that commercial users should consider when planning ground or space based developments. Many items listed have flown in space or been tested in labs and aboard aircraft and can be reused, revitalized, or adapted to suit specific requirements. New commercial ventures are encouraged to exploit existing inventory and expertise to the greatest extent possible

Deep learning for internet of underwater things and ocean data analytics

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging technological ecosystem developed for connecting objects in maritime and underwater environments. IoUT technologies are empowered by an extreme number of deployed sensors and actuators. In this thesis, multiple IoUT sensory data are augmented with machine intelligence for forecasting purposes

Gestionando datos heterogéneos provenientes de sensores para medir la calidad del aire de Bogotá

El avance tecnológico y científico actual, ha impulsado el desarrollo de sistemas que mejoren la calidad de vida de las personas, aportando bienestar a la comunidad mediante el suministro de información relevante y pertinente para la toma de decisiones. En el contexto tecnológico de Internet de las Cosas (IoT), estos sistemas suponen la medición y el monitoreo de diversas variables del entorno. (Karnouskos, 2012) La heterogeneidad propia de los datos capturados y los instrumentos de medición utilizados, dificulta la interoperabilidad entre los diversos componentes de IoT. Tales problemas han generado interés en el desarrollo de métodos y herramientas que soporten la heterogeneidad de los datos de sensores, de las mediciones y de los dispositivos de medición. Existen herramientas privadas que han resuelto algunos de estos problemas de interoperabilidad pero restringen a los desarrolladores de proyectos IoT a utilizar sensores de marcas específicas, limitando el uso generalizado en la comunidad. Adicionalmente, se requiere resolver el reto de integrar protocolos diversos en un mismo proyecto IoT. Con el propósito de subsanar esas dificultades, se plantea una arquitectura basada en redes de sensores y software inspirados en la cultura libre, que permita la comunicación mediante protocolos diversos en un escenario de aplicación donde se monitorea la calidad del aire para informar a los usuarios, y que mediante la generación de alertas favorezca la toma de decisiones en su vida cotidiana, teniendo en cuenta los datos provenientes de los sensores.Abstract: The current technological and scientific progress has promoted the development of systems that improve people's quality of life, providing well-being to the community by the supply of relevant information for decision-making. In the technological context of the Internet of Things (IoT), these systems involve the measurement and monitoring of various environmental variables. The inherent heterogeneity of the captured data and the measurement instruments used makes it difficult to interoperate between the various IoT components. Such problems have generated interest in the development of methods and tools that support the heterogeneity of sensor data, measurements and measurement devices. There are private tools that have solved some of these interoperability issues but restrict IoT project developers to use proprietary sensors, limiting widespread use in the community. In addition, it is necessary to solve the challenge of integrating diverse protocols in the same IoT project. In order to overcome these difficulties, an architecture based on networks of sensors and software inspired by the free culture is proposed, allowing communication through various protocols in an application scenario where air quality is monitored to inform users, and that through the generation of alerts favor the decision making in their daily lives, taking into account the data coming from sensors.Maestrí

Behaviour Based Simulated Low-Cost Multi-Robot Exploration

Institute of Perception, Action and BehaviourThe use of multiple robots for exploration holds the promise of improved performance over single robot systems. To exploit effectively the advantage of having several robots, the robots must be co-ordinated which requires communication. Previous research relies on a fixed communication network topology, a single lead explorer, and flat communication. This thesis presents a novel architecture to keep a group of robots as a single connected and adaptable communication network to explore and map the environment. This architecture, BERODE (BEhavioural ROle DEcentralized), aims to be robust, efficient and scalable to large numbers of robots. The network is adaptable, the number of explorers variable, and communications hierarchical (local/global). The network is kept connected by an MST (Minimum Spanning Tree) control network, a subnetwork containing only the minimum necessary links to be a fully connected network. As the robots explore, the MST control network is updated either partially (local network) or globally to improve signal quality. The local network for a robot is formed by the robots that are within a certain retransmission distance in the MST control network. BERODE implements a hierarchic approach to distributing information to improve scalability with respect to the number of robots. The robots share information at two levels: frequently within their local network and less frequently to the entire robot network. The robots coordinate by assuming behaviours depending on their connections in the MST control network. The behavioural roles balance between the tasks of exploration and network maintenance where the Explorer role is the most focused on the exploration task. This improves efficiency by allowing varying number of robots to take the Explorer role depending on circumstances. The roles generate reactive plans that ensure the connectivity of the network. These plans are based on the imposition of heterogeneous virtual spring forces. Our simulations show that BERODE is more efficient, scalable and robust with respect to communications than the previous approaches that rely on fixed control networks. BERODE is more efficient because it required less time to build a complete map of the environment than the fixed control networks. BERODE is more scalable because it keeps the robots as a single connected network for more time than the fixed control networks. BERODE is more robust because it has a better success rate at finishing the exploration

Collaborative Localization and Mapping for Autonomous Planetary Exploration : Distributed Stereo Vision-Based 6D SLAM in GNSS-Denied Environments

Mobile robots are a crucial element of present and future scientific missions to explore the surfaces of foreign celestial bodies such as Moon and Mars. The deployment of teams of robots allows to improve efficiency and robustness in such challenging environments. As long communication round-trip times to Earth render the teleoperation of robotic systems inefficient to impossible, on-board autonomy is a key to success. The robots operate in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments and thus have to rely on space-suitable on-board sensors such as stereo camera systems. They need to be able to localize themselves online, to model their surroundings, as well as to share information about the environment and their position therein. These capabilities constitute the basis for the local autonomy of each system as well as for any coordinated joint action within the team, such as collaborative autonomous exploration. In this thesis, we present a novel approach for stereo vision-based on-board and online Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for multi-robot teams given the challenges imposed by planetary exploration missions. We combine distributed local and decentralized global estimation methods to get the best of both worlds: A local reference filter on each robot provides real-time local state estimates required for robot control and fast reactive behaviors. We designed a novel graph topology to incorporate these state estimates into an online incremental graph optimization to compute global pose and map estimates that serve as input to higher-level autonomy functions. In order to model the 3D geometry of the environment, we generate dense 3D point cloud and probabilistic voxel-grid maps from noisy stereo data. We distribute the computational load and reduce the required communication bandwidth between robots by locally aggregating high-bandwidth vision data into partial maps that are then exchanged between robots and composed into global models of the environment. We developed methods for intra- and inter-robot map matching to recognize previously visited locations in semi- and unstructured environments based on their estimated local geometry, which is mostly invariant to light conditions as well as different sensors and viewpoints in heterogeneous multi-robot teams. A decoupling of observable and unobservable states in the local filter allows us to introduce a novel optimization: Enforcing all submaps to be gravity-aligned, we can reduce the dimensionality of the map matching from 6D to 4D. In addition to map matches, the robots use visual fiducial markers to detect each other. In this context, we present a novel method for modeling the errors of the loop closure transformations that are estimated from these detections. We demonstrate the robustness of our methods by integrating them on a total of five different ground-based and aerial mobile robots that were deployed in a total of 31 real-world experiments for quantitative evaluations in semi- and unstructured indoor and outdoor settings. In addition, we validated our SLAM framework through several different demonstrations at four public events in Moon and Mars-like environments. These include, among others, autonomous multi-robot exploration tests at a Moon-analogue site on top of the volcano Mt. Etna, Italy, as well as the collaborative mapping of a Mars-like environment with a heterogeneous robotic team of flying and driving robots in more than 35 public demonstration runs