CEL-based integration policy for critical multi-layered applications

Tomorrow, advanced mobile robotic applications have to be able to cope with various situations and perform tasks in a dynamic environment. Furthermore, finding concrete applications in a wide range of user oriented industrial products, such systems, embedding several computing units, have to support both increasing demand of interactivity and number of non-critical pieces of hardware and software. To this aim not only advanced programming techniques, but also appropriate control architectures are required. This paper proposes a generic methodology, actually in use for our own products, that offers both the possibility to model such internally competing systems and the capability to coordinate them. A special parallel is drawn between our approach and the SynDEx1 software methodology, developed by INRIA, on which our current implementation relies.

With the advent of various context sensors on mobile devices, context-aware mobile computing is emerging. Consequently, a number of advanced mobile applications utilizing contexts are expected to grow. However, there remain a number of research issues unresolved, reasoning for group of users, reasoning with contexts for past behavior and future trends and indications, visualizing various types of mobile contexts effectively for better comprehension. We present a design of an advanced context visualizer which provides unique and noble features which are required in developing advanced context-aware mobile applications. We present the design and implementation, and present context reasoning methods as well.

Understanding the Design of Mobile Social Networking

User context recognition using smartphone sensors and classification models

Manufacturing companies across multiple industries face an increasingly dynamic and unpredictable environment. This development can be seen on both the market and supply side. To respond to these challenges, manufacturing companies must implement smart manufacturing systems and become more flexible and agile. The flexibility in operational planning regarding the scheduling and sequencing of customer orders needs to be increased and new structures must be implemented in manufacturing systems’ fundamental design as they constitute much of the operational flexibility available. To this end, smart and more flexible solutions for production planning and control (PPC) are developed. However, scheduling or sequencing is often only considered isolated in a predefined stable environment. Moreover, their orientation on the fundamental logic of the existing IT solutions and their applicability in a dynamic environment is limited. This paper presents a conceptual model for a task-based description logic that can be applied to factory planning, technology planning, and operational control. By using service-oriented architectures, the goal is to generate smart manufacturing systems. The logic is designed to allow for easy and automated maintenance. It is compatible with the existing resource and process allocation logic across operational and strategic factory and production planning.

Package on package (POP) technologies are advancing to finer pitches to account for technology advances in mobile applications along with leaving memory flexibility to the customer. As POP technology advances to finer pitches, more emphasis is placed on the top and bottom packages to reduce the overall height, physical dimensions, and package complexity. An area of main concern is for the top package pitch reduction moving away from 0.5 mm to 0.4 mm to achieve the desired POP package. This paper discusses the technical achievements developed for 0.4 mm POP SMT builds as it relates to reflow conditions along with warpage characteristics. We also discuss the development of the 0.4 mm bottom package in relation to top ball processing by means of laser ablation and associated solder attached to the top package. We also provide information on 0.4 mm SMT build characteristics and the associated board level reliability (BLR) for the combined package. The BLR data includes temperature cycling of -40°C to 125°C for 2000 cycles at 10 minute dwells, 200 drop shocks, and 100,000 cyclic bend tests on JEDEC designed daisy chain boards.

Systems composed of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots are among the most complex control systems. This control complexity is at a high level especially when those robots navigate in hazardous and dynamic environments such as chemical analysis laboratories. These systems include different dangerous and harmful products (toxic, flammable, explosive...) with different quantity. In order to perform its mission on a regular basis, this multi-robot system can be controlled according to multiple architectures. We propose, firstly, to apply the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) on two selected control architectures, namely distributed and hybrid architectures in order to obtain a set of loss scenarios for each kind of architecture. For further assessment, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to choose the best architecture. The proposed approach provides a risk analysis and a more practical comparison between the two control architectures of a mobile multi-robot system and facilitates decision-making, even in complex situations.

The study of systems involving fluid flow, heat transfer and associated phenomena using computers is termed as computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The governing equations that define fluid flow phenomena are solved for specific problems using CFD codes. CFD codes comprise three main elements which are preprocessor, solver and postprocessor. The main concern of this research is the solver element. The solver uses information from the preprocessing stage to approximate unknown flow variables by means of functions, discretize governing flow equations and solving the equations. Unstructured meshes are preferred for solving complex geometry problems. Boundedness of the discretization technique is ensured by using High Resolution (HR) scheme which has its roots in Normalized Variable Formulation (NVF). Turbulent flows present new issues such as intermittency, separation and recirculation. These are some phenomena which must be accounted for in extending the current 3D solver to handle turbulent flows. The research methodology involves literature review on CFD equations and turbulent flow theories, numerical discretization and advanced programming techniques. A review of existing 3D code and test runs are necessary to understand the structure of the source code and incorporate extensions. The output from the solver can then be analysed using Techplot 360 which is a postprocessor.

Robotic systems are increasingly present in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a hierarchical control structure wherein a behavior tree (BT) is used to improve the flexibility and adaptability of an omni-directional mobile robot for point stabilization. Flexibility and adaptability are crucial at each level of the sense–plan–act loop to implement robust and effective robotic solutions in dynamic environments. The proposed BT combines high-level decision making and continuous execution monitoring while applying non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) for the point stabilization of an omni-directional mobile robot. The proposed control architecture can guide the mobile robot to any configuration within the workspace while satisfying state constraints (e.g., obstacle avoidance) and input constraints (e.g., motor limits). The effectiveness of the controller was validated through a set of realistic simulation scenarios and experiments in a real environment, where an industrial omni-directional mobile robot performed a point stabilization task with obstacle avoidance in a workspace.

Recent empirical studies in the area of mobile application testing indicate the need for specific testing techniques and methods for mobile applications. This is due to mobile applications being significantly different than traditional web and desktop applications, particularly in terms of the physical constraints of mobile devices and the very different features of their operating systems. In this paper, we presented a multiple case-study involving four software development companies in the area of mobile and smartphones application. We aimed to identify testing techniques currently being applied by developers and challenges that they are facing. Our principle results are that many industrial teams seem to lack sufficient knowledge on how to test mobile applications, particularly in the areas of mobile application life-cycle conformance, context-awareness, and integration testing. We also found that there is no formal testing approach or methodology that can facilitate a development team to systematically test a critical mobile application.

Mobile robots have been making a significant contribution to the advancement of many sectors including automation of mining, space, surveillance, military, health, agriculture and many more. Safe and efficient navigation is a fundamental requirement of mobile robots, thus, the demand for advanced algorithms rapidly increased. Mobile robot navigation encompasses the following four requirements: perception, localization, pathplanning and motion control. Among those, path-planning is a vital part of a fast, secure operation. During the last couple of decades, many path-planning algorithms were developed. Despite most of the mobile robot applications being in dynamic environments, the number of algorithms capable of navigating robots in dynamic environments is limited. This paper presents a qualitative comparative study of the up-to-date mobile robot pathplanning methods capable of navigating robots in dynamic environments. The paper discusses both classical and heuristic methods including artificial potential field, genetic algorithm, fuzzy logic, neural networks, artificial bee colony, particle swarm optimization, bacterial foraging optimization, ant-colony and Agoraphilic algorithm. The general advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. Furthermore, the commonly used state-of-the-art methods are critically analyzed based on six performance criteria: algorithm's ability to navigate in dynamically cluttered areas, moving goal hunting ability, object tracking ability, object path prediction ability, incorporating the obstacle velocity in the decision, validation by simulation and experimentation. This investigation benefits researchers in choosing suitable path-planning methods for different applications as well as identifying gaps in this field.

This paper investigates the formation control problem of multiple mobile agents with second-order nonlinear dynamics in complex environments containing multiple obstacles. By employing the null-space-based behavioral (NSB) control architecture, a novel fast terminal sliding mode based adaptive control strategy is designed combining the fuzzy logic systems (FLS), which can guarantee each individual agent to achieve the predesigned desired position within the formation, and more importantly guide the overall systems to achieve desired formation while avoiding obstacles. Finally, simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms, performed by Matlab numerically and Pioneer 3-AT mobile robots in practice, respectively.

In this work we propose a behaviour-based architecture, which can also be seen as a multi-agent architecture, to control a situated and embodied autonomous mobile robot, under a close sensing action relationship. Pre-existing knowledge can play a meta-level role, being used in order to provide an adviser capability which is combined with the basic reactive feature of the robot. One of the challenges of the behaviour-based approach is the integration and coordination of multiple different behaviours. This problem was faced using combination operators applied to lower level behaviours and producing useful and coherent higher level behaviours. Our autonomous mobile robot also exhibits learning capabilities, namely the ability to learn new behaviours in an autonomous way. In this context it was designed to the elementary behaviours a connectionist architecture that encompasses the capabilites of building specific basic competences.Through the exploration of the proposed control architecture a mobile platform has become an useful autonomous mobile robot It is able to deal with dynamic environments, evolving in a coherent, relevant and adequate way according to both the current situation as well as with its assigned missions.

This paper presents the control platform design for a self-developing mobile robot. In addition to the introduction of the robot's whole framework its control architecture, motion controller design and velocity loop servo controller are also described. Modular, open, distributed control architecture is utilized in the robot as well as advanced intelligent control strategies such as cross-coupling control and fuzzy logic control. Therefore, the robot has quick reactivity, precise motion control and excellent robustness under various dynamic environments.

We have proposed an advanced android crime tracker mobile application which will track the status of the investigation as well as it also tracks complaints reported by the public. The main purpose of the application is to help higher authorities like CBI and police to speed up their investigation process and track status of multiple cases at a time. In this application, public will help them to get the crime details quickly and then they can take action immediately. It will help the police to know the crime ratio in the society. This application will show all the updated crime post and once case is solved then admin can delete the post and can also update the status of investigation. Public can upload photos of crime spot and location of crime spot and photos of items found on scene. User can also post their missing person details by doing same procedure. User can also check the status updated by the admin and incase of any query or emergency; the user can chat with the police with the help of chat box. For women safety, we have provided a SOS button which will call police by clicking on that button. This application is designed in such a way that all the post which is uploaded by peoples can be seen by police also. After that they can take action immediately on it and they can write the status of the crime. This system will speed up the crime investigation process.