11,752 research outputs found
Decentralized event-triggered control over wireless sensor/actuator networks
In recent years we have witnessed a move of the major industrial automation
providers into the wireless domain. While most of these companies already offer
wireless products for measurement and monitoring purposes, the ultimate goal is
to be able to close feedback loops over wireless networks interconnecting
sensors, computation devices, and actuators. In this paper we present a
decentralized event-triggered implementation, over sensor/actuator networks, of
centralized nonlinear controllers. Event-triggered control has been recently
proposed as an alternative to the more traditional periodic execution of
control tasks. In a typical event-triggered implementation, the control signals
are kept constant until the violation of a condition on the state of the plant
triggers the re-computation of the control signals. The possibility of reducing
the number of re-computations, and thus of transmissions, while guaranteeing
desired levels of performance makes event-triggered control very appealing in
the context of sensor/actuator networks. In these systems the communication
network is a shared resource and event-triggered implementations of control
laws offer a flexible way to reduce network utilization. Moreover reducing the
number of times that a feedback control law is executed implies a reduction in
transmissions and thus a reduction in energy expenditures of battery powered
wireless sensor nodes.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, journal submissio
Probabilistic Model Checking for Energy Analysis in Software Product Lines
In a software product line (SPL), a collection of software products is
defined by their commonalities in terms of features rather than explicitly
specifying all products one-by-one. Several verification techniques were
adapted to establish temporal properties of SPLs. Symbolic and family-based
model checking have been proven to be successful for tackling the combinatorial
blow-up arising when reasoning about several feature combinations. However,
most formal verification approaches for SPLs presented in the literature focus
on the static SPLs, where the features of a product are fixed and cannot be
changed during runtime. This is in contrast to dynamic SPLs, allowing to adapt
feature combinations of a product dynamically after deployment. The main
contribution of the paper is a compositional modeling framework for dynamic
SPLs, which supports probabilistic and nondeterministic choices and allows for
quantitative analysis. We specify the feature changes during runtime within an
automata-based coordination component, enabling to reason over strategies how
to trigger dynamic feature changes for optimizing various quantitative
objectives, e.g., energy or monetary costs and reliability. For our framework
there is a natural and conceptually simple translation into the input language
of the prominent probabilistic model checker PRISM. This facilitates the
application of PRISM's powerful symbolic engine to the operational behavior of
dynamic SPLs and their family-based analysis against various quantitative
queries. We demonstrate feasibility of our approach by a case study issuing an
energy-aware bonding network device.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review
This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied
to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied
evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough
description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents
a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception
(1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In
particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a
parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to
embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing
collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a
discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past
and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl
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