A Distributed Management Scheme for supporting energy-harvested I/O devices

Current wireless technologies for industrial application, such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, are not designed to support harvester-powered input/output (I/O) devices, where energy availability varies in a non-deterministic manner. The centralized management approach of these standards makes it difficult and costly for harvester-powered I/O devices (sensor/actuators) to re-join in the network in case of power failure. The communication overhead and delay to cope with the dynamic environment of a large-scale industrial network are also very high for an I/O device. In this paper, we therefore propose a Distributed Management scheme for Hybrid networks to provide Real-time communication (D-MHR) based on the IEEE 802.15.4e and Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standards, which can address the requirements of energy constrained I/O devices. In D-MHR, the routers can dynamically reserve communication resources and manage the I/O devices in the local star sub-networks. We demonstrate that D-MHR achieves higher network management efficiency compared to IS100.11a standard, without compromising the latency and reliability requirements of industrial wireless networks

An Echo State Network based pedestrian counting system using wireless sensor networks

A pedestrian counter has a lot of applications like effective resource utilization, planning of service activities and ensuring safety and convenience. The design and implementation of a new intelligent pedestrian counter is presented in this paper. The counter is publicly usable, low cost, easily deployable and scalable. We used off-the-shelf components for our design and the overall cost is less than 200 euro. The counter works in distributed mode and has wireless communication facilities. The hardware platform consists of PIR sensor units that detect the pedestrian movements, the wireless sensor nodes that handle the sensor data acquisition and transmission and the base station computer that process the data. We have trained an echo state network and this recurrent neural network functions as the brain for the the pedestrian counter. A system model was constructed using Simulink for generating the training data for the neural network. A modular layered software framework was designed for processing the pedestrian counter data. The echo state network successfully learned the various motion patterns and the pedestrian counter gave a reasonably good performance of 80.4%. To improve the performance further, redesigning the systems using low cost Active IR distance sensor is suggested

Self-organized cooperation in swarm robotics

Cooperation is a key concept used in multi-robot systems for performing complex tasks. In swarm robotics, a self-organized cooperation is applied, where robots with limited intelligence cooperate and interact locally to build up the desired global behavior. In this paper, we are studying a mobile object tracking scenario performed by a swarm of robots. The robustness, scalability and flexibility of swarm robots make it an attractive approach for missions like object tracking in complex and dynamic environments. As the individual robot capabilities are limited in swarm systems, the robots may not be able to track the mobile object continuously. This limitation is overcome using the robots communication capability. In order to increase the probability of object detection, we propose a greedy self-deployment strategy, where the robots are spread uniformly in the environment to be monitored. For detecting a moving target, the robots use a biologically inspired algorithm for collecting robots currently located in other regions to track the target. In such cooperative tasks the robots normally need to be time synchronized for simultaneous activation. A new proposal for time synchronization in swarm robots is introduced which exploits the mobility of the robots for handling possible disconnections in the network and synchronize them at the beginning of tracking time slots

Swarm robotic time synchronization for object tracking

Wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks have been integrated into many self-organized tasks, including self-organized real-time tasks. Swarm robotics is a new field of research, which offers a set of advantages like motion, redundancy, flexibility, etc. compared to both sensor networks and ad-hoc ones. On the other hand, there are some difficulties in directly using swarm robotics for these kinds of tasks without modifying or even extending some of the strategies and protocols used in wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks. Time synchronization may serve as a prominent example of extensions needed to fit swarm systems. Our article focuses on employing swarm robotics in self-organized object tracking tasks. We develop a new strategy for overcoming the effect of the high degree of motion in swarm robotics via applying time synchronization protocols

Efficient I/O joining and reliable data publication in energy harvested ISA100.11a network

Energy harvesting technologies have brought a paradigm shift in the industrial automation sector by procreating self-powered wireless input/output (I/O) devices. Unfortunately, current wireless technologies for industrial applications, such as ISA100.11a and WirelessHART, are yet far from supporting harvester powered I/O devices. Although several works have been conducted to address the requirements of energy harvested I/O devices, most of those have focused on minimizing the I/O energy consumption during the steady-state phase of the network. However, a very important aspect, the energy consumption during network joining that consumes a significant amount of energy, is overlooked in these works. In this paper, we therefore analyze the I/O energy consumption in ISA100.11a network during the joining phase in addition to that in normal operation to better understand the challenges of energy harvesting communications. Then, we propose an energy efficient network joining scheme to support harvester powered I/O devices in ISA100.11a network. The proposed scheme significantly reduces the joining delay when compared with the traditional ISA100.11a joining scheme. We also propose a reliable data transmission scheme for energy harvested I/O devices by utilizing spatial diversity that can outperform ISA100.11a data publication through significant improvement in packet reception

The Internet of Lights: An Open Reference Architecture and Implementation for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up new services and is stimulating changes in industries. The lighting industry is also embracing this change by establishing an Internet of Lights (IoL). This article highlights the main benefits and the challenges to face while going towards IoL. To address these challenges and cater to the specific requirements of lighting networks, an IoL reference architecture, Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems (OpenAIS), has been proposed. This article provides an overview of the OpenAIS architecture and explains how one can design specific systems based on this architecture. It also zooms into the configurations and design choices made in a pilot system in a real office building showing the validity of the architecture. A comparison of the OpenAIS system with a state-of-the-art commercial solution shows that IoL systems can exceed proprietary systems in several key performance indicators, such as security, interoperability, extensibility and openness

The internet of lights:an open reference architecture and implementation for intelligent solid state lighting systems

\u3cp\u3eThe Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up new services and is stimulating changes in industries. The lighting industry is also embracing this change by establishing an Internet of Lights (IoL). This article highlights the main benefits and the challenges to face while going towards IoL. To address these challenges and cater to the specific requirements of lighting networks, an IoL reference architecture, Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems (OpenAIS), has been proposed. This article provides an overview of the OpenAIS architecture and explains how one can design specific systems based on this architecture. It also zooms into the configurations and design choices made in a pilot system in a real office building showing the validity of the architecture. A comparison of the OpenAIS system with a state-of-the-art commercial solution shows that IoL systems can exceed proprietary systems in several key performance indicators, such as security, interoperability, extensibility and openness.\u3c/p\u3