Mechatronics & the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy

Microservices: Granularity vs. Performance

Microservice Architectures (MA) have the potential to increase the agility of software development. In an era where businesses require software applications to evolve to support software emerging requirements, particularly for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, we examine the issue of microservice granularity and explore its effect upon application latency. Two approaches to microservice deployment are simulated; the first with microservices in a single container, and the second with microservices partitioned across separate containers. We observed a neglibible increase in service latency for the multiple container deployment over a single container.Comment: 6 pages, conferenc

Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications