Design of a Wireless Drone Recharging Station and a Special Robot End Effector for Installation on a Power Line

Drone autonomous operations near power lines are growing steadily and require innovative techniques to keep them on air. This paper presents a novel electromechanical recharging station that can be mounted on energized AC power line to charge the drone battery wirelessly without a need to modify the electrical infrastructure. The work shows a thorough analysis of the electrical and mechanical core components to build a flexible, lightweight and efficient recharging station that can be attached to a robotic arm. The work also discusses the recharging station design and its special robot end effector that mechanically couples the station with an aerial manipulator. Finally, the recharging station has been tested in the lab and in a real power line setup to validate its design and efficiency. The total achieved mass is 2300 grams with a harvesting efficiency of 77% at 250 A primary current

Virtual Platform-Based Design Space Exploration of Power-Efficient Distributed Embedded Applications

Networked embedded systems are essential building blocks of a broad variety of distributed applications ranging from agriculture to industrial automation to healthcare and more. These often require specific energy optimizations to increase the battery lifetime or to operate using energy harvested from the environment. Since a dominant portion of power consumption is determined and managed by software, the software development process must have access to the sophisticated power management mechanisms provided by state-of-the-art hardware platforms to achieve the best tradeoff between system availability and reactivity. Furthermore, internode communications must be considered to properly assess the energy consumption. This article describes a design flow based on a SystemC virtual platform including both accurate power models of the hardware components and a fast abstract model of the wireless network. The platform allows both model-driven design of the application and the exploration of power and network management alternatives. These can be evaluated in different network scenarios, allowing one to exploit power optimization strategies without requiring expensive field trials. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via experiments on a wireless body area network application

Safe local aerial manipulation for the installation of devices on power lines: Aerial-core first year results and designs

Article number 6220The power grid is an essential infrastructure in any country, comprising thousands of kilometers of power lines that require periodic inspection and maintenance, carried out nowadays by human operators in risky conditions. To increase safety and reduce time and cost with respect to conventional solutions involving manned helicopters and heavy vehicles, the AERIAL-CORE project proposes the development of aerial robots capable of performing aerial manipulation operations to assist human operators in power lines inspection and maintenance, allowing the installation of devices, such as bird flight diverters or electrical spacers, and the fast delivery and retrieval of tools. This manuscript describes the goals and functionalities to be developed for safe local aerial manipulation, presenting the preliminary designs and experimental results obtained in the first year of the project.European Union (UE). H2020 871479Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España FPI 201

The TeamPlay project : analysing and optimising time, energy, and security for cyber-physical systems

Funding: This work was supported by the EU Horizon-2020 project TeamPlay (https://www.teamplay-h2020.eu), grant #779882.Non-functional properties, such as energy, time, and security (ETS) are becoming increasingly important for the programming of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This paper describes TeamPlay, a research project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme between January 2018 and June 2021.TeamPlay aimed to provide the system designer with a toolchain for developing embedded applications where ETS properties are first-class citizens, allowing the developer to reflect directly on energy, time and security properties at the source code level. In this paper we give an overview of the TeamPlay methodology, introduce the challenges and solutions of our approach and summarise the results achieved. Overall, applying our TeamPlay methodology led to an improvement of up to 18% performance and 52% energy usage over traditional approaches.Postprin

Modeling and Synthesis of the Network in Distributed Embedded Systems

Progettazione di applicazioni embedded distribuiti è un compito impegnativo romanzo e richiede di aumentare il livello di astrazione di superare la complessità del disegno . In particolare , linguaggi di modellazione e le specifiche semantiche sono necessarie per affrontare descrizione della rete a questo livello di astrazione . Al fine di verificare il modello di progettazione di rete e raggiungere l'effettiva attuazione , la manipolazione del modello e la generazione di codice sono necessarie non solo per la simulazione e l'analisi delle prestazioni del modello di design, ma anche per affinare il modello e ridurre il livello di astrazione . In questo lavoro , io propongo l'uso di diagrammi UML in combinazione con un modello di calcolo formale come soluzione chiave per generare il codice , risolvere il problema progettazione della rete, e manipolare ogni soluzione per generare diverse alternative di rete. Questa tesi propone un quadro formale e strumenti di supporto per acquisire i requisiti di applicazione , la biblioteca dei componenti di rete , la descrizione dell'ambiente , e le regole per comporre loro . Il framework consente di generare codice per la convalida design by simulazione e fornisce schiena meccanismo di annotazione dei risultati della simulazione per perfezionare il modello originale . Il codice risultante è utilizzato nella realizzazione finale della rete . Inoltre , gli astratto quadro IP eterogenee esistenti per il riutilizzo dei componenti .Design of distributed embedded applications is a novel challenging task and it requires to raise the level of abstraction to overcome the complexity of the design. In particular, modeling languages and semantic specification are necessary to address network description at this level of the abstraction. In order to verify the network design model and reach the actual implementation, model manipulation and code generation are needed not only for simulation and performance analysis of the design model but also to refine the model and reduce the level of abstraction. In this work, I propose the use of UML diagrams combined with a formal computational model as a key solution to generate code, solve the network design problem, and manipulate each solution to generate different network alternatives. This thesis proposes a formal framework and supporting tools to capture the application requirements, the library of network components, the environment description, and the rules to compose them. The framework allows to generate code for design validation by simulation and provides back annotation mechanism of the simulation results to refine the original model. The resulting code is used in the final implementation of the network. Moreover, the framework abstracts existing heterogeneous IPs for component reuse

HDL Code Generation From UML/MARTE Sequence Diagrams For Verification and Synthesis

Design of Embedded Systems is becoming more and more complex in terms of verify that requirements are fulfilled at different design levels. This requires the simulation of the system and the checking of its timing and functional properties. Model-Driven Design and UML give a reasonable solution to cope with such complexity since they have mechanisms to model and verify embedded systems. This paper presents a methodology which starts from UML/MARTE sequence diagrams with timing constraints and the automatic generation of executable SystemC/TLM and VHDL code with checkers from such diagrams. The simulation of the generated model allows to verify the specified sequence of exchanged information between components while checkers allow to verify that properties and timing constraints are met. Three case studies are used to show the validity of the approach and a less than linear increase of execution time overhead due to time observation and assertion checkers

Deducing Energy Consumer Behavior from Smart Meter Data

The ongoing upgrade of electricity meters to smart ones has opened a new market of intelligent services to analyze the recorded meter data. This paper introduces an open architecture and a unified framework for deducing user behavior from its smart main electricity meter data and presenting the results in a natural language. The framework allows a fast exploration and integration of a variety of machine learning algorithms combined with data recovery mechanisms for improving the recognition’s accuracy. Consequently, the framework generates natural language reports of the user’s behavior from the recognized home appliances. The framework uses open standard interfaces for exchanging data. The framework has been validated through comprehensive experiments that are related to an European Smart Grid project

Generation of SystemC/TLM code from UML/MARTE sequence diagrams for verification

Verification of real time embedded systems at high level of abstraction is a challenging task that requires the simulation of the system and the checking of its timing and functional properties as well as constraints. The paper presents a methodology which starts from UML sequence diagrams with MARTE timing constraints and generates a SystemC/TLM model with checkers. The execution of the model allows to verify the specified sequence of exchanged information between components while checkers allow to verify that properties and timing constraints are met. The application of the methodology to the design of a wireless sensor node shows the validity of the approach and its simulation overhead