Enhancing smart environments with mobile robots

Sensor networks are becoming popular nowadays in the development of smart environments. Heavily relying on static sensor and actuators, though, such environments usually lacks of versatility regarding the provided services and interaction capabilities. Here we present a framework for smart environments where a service robot is included within the sensor network acting as a mobile sensor and/or actuator. Our framework integrates on-the-shelf technologies to ensure its adaptability to a variety of sensor technologies and robotic software. Two pilot cases are presented as evaluation of our proposal.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Unbiased Rounding for HUB Floating-point Addition

Copyright (c) 2018 IEEE doi:10.1109/TC.2018.2807429Half-Unit-Biased (HUB) is an emerging format based on shifting the represented numbers by half Unit in the Last Place. This format simplifies two’s complement and roundto- nearest operations by preventing any carry propagation. This saves power consumption, time and area. Taking into account that the IEEE floating-point standard uses an unbiased rounding as the default mode, this feature is also desirable for HUB approaches. In this paper, we study the unbiased rounding for HUB floating-point addition in both as standalone operation and within FMA. We show two different alternatives to eliminate the bias when rounding the sum results, either partially or totally. We also present an error analysis and the implementation results of the proposed architectures to help the designers to decide what their best option are.TIN2013-42253-P, TIN2016-80920-R, JA2012P12-TIC-169

Fast HUB Floating-point Adder for FPGA

Several previous publications have shown the area and delay reduction when implementing real number computation using HUB formats for both floating-point and fixed-point. In this paper, we present a HUB floating-point adder for FPGA which greatly improves the speed of previous proposed HUB designs for these devices. Our architecture is based on the double path technique which reduces the execution time since each path works in parallel. We also deal with the implementation of unbiased rounding in the proposed adder. Experimental results are presented showing the goodness of the new HUB adder for FPGA.TIN2016- 80920-R, JA2012 P12-TIC-1692, JA2012 P12-TIC-147

Accurate Stereo Visual Odometry with Gamma Distributions

Point-based stereo visual odometry systems typically estimate the camera motion by minimizing a cost function of the projection residuals between consecutive frames. Under some mild assumptions, such minimization is equivalent to maximizing the probability of the measured residuals given a certain pose change, for which a suitable model of the error distribution (sensor model) becomes of capital importance in order to obtain accurate results. This paper proposes a robust probabilistic model for projection errors, based on real world data. For that, we argue that projection distances follow Gamma distributions, and hence, the introduction of these models in a probabilistic formulation of the motion estimation process increases both precision and accuracy. Our approach has been validated through a series of experiments with both synthetic and real data, revealing an improvement in accuracy while not increasing the computational burden.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Project "PROMOVE: Advances in mobile robotics for promoting independent life of elders", funded by the Spanish Government and the "European Regional Development Fund ERDF" under contract DPI2014-55826-R

Improvement of the sensory and autonomous capability of robots through olfaction: the IRO Project

Proyecto de Excelencia Junta de Andalucía TEP2012-530Olfaction is a valuable source of information about the environment that has not been su ciently exploited in mobile robotics yet. Certainly, odor information can contribute to other sensing modalities, e.g. vision, to successfully accomplish high-level robot activities, such as task planning or execution in human environments. This paper describes the developments carried out in the scope of the IRO project, which aims at making progress in this direction by investigating mechanisms that exploit odor information (usually coming in the form of the type of volatile and its concentration) in problems like object recognition and scene-activity understanding. A distinctive aspect of this research is the special attention paid to the role of semantics within the robot perception and decisionmaking processes. The results of the IRO project have improved the robot capabilities in terms of efciency, autonomy and usefulness.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Analyzing interference between RGB-D cameras for human motion tracking

Multi-camera RGB-D systems are becoming popular as sensor setups in Computer Vision applications but they are prone to cause interference between them, compromising their accuracy. This paper extends previous works on the analysis of the noise introduced by interference with new and more realistic camera configurations and different brands of devices. As expected, the detected noise increases as distance and angle grows, becoming worse when interference is present. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions of using DC vibration motors to mitigate them. The results of this study are being used to assess the effect of interference when applying these setups to human motion tracking.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Plan Propio de Investigación de la UMA. Junta de Andalucía, proyecto TEP2012-53

Calidad de transmisión de vídeo en redes de comunicaciones submarinas

La adquisición de imágenes submarinas plantea en la actualidad importantes dificultades especialmente en términos de coste y/o retardo en la disponibilidad de la información. Las transmisiones de vídeo a través de redes submarinas permitirían reducir de manera notable ambos problemas, sin embargo, la tecnología existente para el despliegue de este tipo de redes está basada en módems acústicos que poseen capacidades de transmisión muy limitadas debidas a las adversas características de propagación del entorno submarino. El estudio de la calidad alcanzable en esas condiciones es un aspecto clave en el análisis de estos servicios de vídeo pues permite evaluar su viabilidad y establecer una relación entre las aplicaciones y los recursos de red necesarios para su ejecución.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Analysis of M2M Capabilities in 4G

M2M (Machine to Machine) communications enable many new applications that reduce the costs of maintenance and operation via remote monitoring and control. The forecasts for this type of communications predict traffic increases associated with these devices of about 100% in the coming years. However, the behaviour of M2M devices is different from the human user, which causes stress on the networks due to the overload of the signalling procedures. This paper reviews the literature on the current scenario, projections for the decade, and improvements that LTE (Long Term Evolution) will offer for this segment of devices.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

High-speed TCP flow record extraction using GPUs

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1478-9Traffic analysis is an essential part of capacity planning, quality of service assurance, and reinforcement of security in current telecommunication networks. Traffic volume increases with network speed and the analysis of large traffic traces is computationally intensive. The paper presents, for the first time ever, a flow extraction software that allows to obtain complex TCP-aware flow records at 4.4 millions of packets per second in a single GPU. Such TCP flow records include number of retransmissions and duplicates per flow, whose calculation is very challenging to obtain at high-speed. Our software significantly increases the processing performance of the recently proposed high-speed sniffers based on commodity hardware and demonstrates the advantages of applying massively parallel processing devices for traffic analysis

Optimal Fair Scheduling in S-TDMA Sensor Networks for Monitoring River Plumes

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are a promising technology to provide oceanographers with environmental data in real time. Suitable network topologies to monitor estuaries are formed by strings coming together to a sink node.This network may be understood as an oriented graph. A number of MAC techniques can be used in UWSNs, but Spatial-TDMA is preferred for fixed networks. In this paper, a scheduling procedure to obtain the optimal fair frame is presented, under ideal conditions of synchronization and transmission errors. The main objective is to find the theoretical maximum throughput by overlapping the transmissions of the nodes while keeping a balanced received data rate from each sensor, regardless of its location in the network. The procedure searches for all cliques of the compatibility matrix of the network graph and solves a Multiple-Vector Bin Packing (MVBP) problem. This work addresses the optimization problem and provides analytical and numerical results for both the minimum frame length and the maximum achievable throughput