Hardware in a loop-a system prototyping platform for MIMO-approaches

A hardware and software platform is presented enabling the design, and realisation via printing, of smart fabrics. The cultural and creative industries are an important economic area within which designers frequently utilise fabrics. Smart fabrics offer further creative opportunities to the cultural and creative industries, but designers often lack the required specialist knowledge, in electronics, software and materials, to produce smart fabrics. The software platform offers the ability to perform design, layout and visualisation of a smart fabric using a library of standard smart fabric functions (e.g. electroluminescence) so specialist expertise is not needed. Operation of the smart fabric can be simulated, and parameters can be set for smart fabric control electronics, which consists of standard circuit board modules. The software also provides driver code for the hardware platform to print the smart fabric. The hardware platform consists of a bespoke dispenser printer; functional inks are deposited via a pneumatic syringe controlled by the driver software, allowing bespoke rapid prototyped smart fabrics to be printed. Operation of the software and hardware system is demonstrated by the realisation of an interactive smart fabric consisting of electroluminescent lamps controlled by a proximity sensor. The modular electronics are used to control the smart fabric operation using embedded code generated by the software platform. For example, the blink rate of the electroluminescent lamp can be adjusted by the proximity of a hand. This control is achieved by the use of intuitive drop-down menus and input/output selections by the creative user. At present, the platform allows the design, print and implementation of smart fabrics incorporating the functions of colour change, electroluminescence, sound emission and proximity sensing. The platform can be expanded to add additional functions in the future and the printer will be compatible with new inks developed for screen and inkjet printing.

The evolution of software testing technologies has significantly reduced software testing execution times, but the test design and generation are still often implemented with slow manual-oriented methods. Model-based testing (MBT) offers automation to test design and generation, and different MBT solutions are familiar from research, but more effort needs to be done to adopt MBT for industrial use. Hardware in the loop (HIL) is a simulation and testing technique used in the development and testing of embedded systems. HIL is a challenging application field for MBT due to complex and non-deterministic nature of some embedded systems. To tackle this problem, the authors present a novel prototype platform in which online and offline MBT is applied to HIL environment. MBT in general has been introduced for HIL in scientific literature before, but the application of online MBT in HIL is a novel approach. The whole novel MBT in HIL prototype platform along with the used MBT tool, platform architecture and MBT process are presented accompanied by experimental results and analysis of two case studies with an example embedded system under test.

Aim. Threats of a non-physical nature have a significant effect on the security of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). They may have the form of unlawful interference in the development and implementation of ITS. The creation of a trusted framework for the development and implementation of ITS is examined as in the case of intelligent water transportation systems (IWTS). Problems. By decree of the President of the Russian Federation, ITS, telecommunications and security of information processing are among the priority areas of scientific and technological development. ITS technologies, as well as those involved in the creation of trusted, secure system and application software are among the most important critical high technologies. The operation of ITS involves wide use of computerised systems that implement the latest information and telecommunication technologies, automated and automatic control technologies, artificial intelligence that can pose security threats. ITS are to be developed and operated in a trusted environment. Methods. The paper used the methodology for ensuring the security of IWTS, development of secure hardware and software platforms for secure automated systems, methods of system analysis, dependability theory, information protection, and law. Results. The paper defines the problem of creating a trusted framework for the development and implementation of IWTS, the applicable terminology is developed. The author examined the effect of IWTS on the security of critical information infrastructure (CII) and national security, developed a model of relationships between the IWTS security domains taking into account threats of physical and non-physical origin. Examples of computer incidents within IWTS that caused consequences at the national and international levels are given. The composition of the IWTS facilities attributed to CII is defined, critical processes implemented by standard CII facilities as part of the IWTS are set forth. The author lists conceptual problems of IWTS security, defines the principles of creating a trusted framework for the development and implementation of IWTS. Conclusion. Ensuring the security of IWTS against modern threats requires solving a number of problems associated with the creation of a trusted framework for the development and implementation of IWTS. For the purpose of improving the timeliness and quality of their solution, the paper proposes an intuitive terminology that reflects the subject area and helps finding a common understanding of the security domain by experts from various industries. IWTS facilities have an effect on CII security and national security in general. That is taken into account in the model of relationships between IWTS security domains, demonstrated using cases of computer incidents within IWTS that caused consequences at the national and international level. Given the above, the paper lists IWTS facilities attributed to CII and sets forth examples of critical processes implemented by standard CII facilities as part of the IWTS. The defined list of conceptual IWTS security problems take into account the growing landscape of IWTS security threats that includes insecure software, hardware and software platforms, software and hardware systems and emerging technologies. When developing the principles for the creation of a trusted IWTS development and implementation framework, the author took into account the best practice of implementing the methodology for creating national secure hardware and software platforms of CII facilities that enables the creation of secure automated systems for various applications that are based on domestically-developed solutions. The examined matters are of a systemic nature, which allows using the findings in the development and implementation of ITS in other modes of transportation.

QI2S is a project financed in the frame of the European FP7 funding programme, developing the prototype of a lightweight low-power on-board processing platform that operates with a massively parallel many-core technology based on Ramon Chips ITAR free RC64 architecture. This technology will be able, in the future, of reaching performances of hundreds of GOPS and tens of GFLOPS, although for demonstrational purposes it is now implemented on a downscaled FPGA. The hardware platform is demonstrated for real-time on-board analysis of hyperspectral data. QI2S was developed to ensure parallel computational capabilities and an easily reconfigurable architecture, able to generate on-board products in real-time or near real-time. QI2S is a prototype developed and validated in laboratory with a TRL 4.

We propose an autonomous landing scheme for Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (VTOL UAV) on a moving ship at sea and this scheme is embedded in a hardware platform - Companion Computer. This mission requires determining the ship’s location, speed, and trajectory, which are significant challenges in the marine environment. This research applies a non-contact method, it is combined deep-learning and visual servoing techniques for real-time measuring of the parameters just mentioned above and tightly coupling with modern navigation logic to ensure the UAV follows a fast and optimal landing trajectory. No prior information about a moving ship’s location and landing pad is needed during the entire VTOL UAV’s landing process. The method aims to improve the performance of the landing. The proposed technique has been evaluated in a hardware in the loop simulation system using Jetson Nano and X-Plane.

The management system of battery plays an important role in prolong the service time of battery, improve the vehicle driving dynamic economy, reduce the using cost of hybrid electric vehicles and guarantee the safe, reliable operation. This article introduce a system of simulation and experience of based on ABIN company's computer hardware platform and software package. The system using distributed two levels control structure, upper computer is strong process PC, hypogenous computer has microprocessor, logic circuit control unit MC and channel measure unit constitute separate measure control system, PC-MC using 485 bus connect, MC can connect to several channels unit, every channel can measure the voltage and current separate. The additional temperature control component, temperature sensor, measure component and measure unit are make up battery management system's hardware system. The test system can simulate hybrid electric vehicle battery management system and complete dynamic test and battery experiment by program, so as to evaluate the performance of the power battery and battery management of hybrid electric vehicle provides an effective way.

Cyber-Physical Systems-on-Chip (CPSoC) are a new class of sensor- and actuator-rich multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) whose operations are monitored, coordinated, and controlled using a computing-communication-control (C3) centric core with additional on-chip and cross-layer sensing and actuation capabilities that enable self-awareness within the observe-decide-act (ODA) paradigm. In order to build, evaluate, and illustrate the effectiveness of various features of this new MPSoC paradigm in a fast and cost effective way, a rapid prototyping and emulation platform along with the tool chains is absolutely necessary. In this paper, we present a design library and an FPGA emulation and prototyping platform to build and investigate self-aware adaptive computing using CPSoC paradigm. Our example implementation of CPSoC prototyping using Xilinx FPGAs includes ring-oscillator (RO) based multipurpose sensors integrated with a sensor network-on-chip (sNoC) which in turn is interfaced either to a bus based shared memory architecture or to a communication and computation network-on- chip (cNoC) distributed fabric supporting several actuation mechanism in the software and hardware stack. We also briefly discuss few applications of the CPSoC design library and the platform.

Making full uses of the processing performance and peripheral features of DSP TMS320DM6437 chip, we innovatively designed a vehicle collision avoidance system with low-cost, high reliability. The system can achieve functions of vehicle detection, vehicle distance measurement and auto-assisted control. Through simulations and experiments, we verified the correctness of the system's hardware platform, the improved algorithms we selected, and the feasibility of entire system.

In order to solve the problems caused by using traditional materials in the experiments, such as complicated operation process, poor control, low testing accuracy, inconvenience of recording test data, lack of timely data processing and so on, the control of the tensile test must be improved. This paper in details analyzes the operational principle of the tensile test machine, on which a tensile test machine control program is proposed based on MCGS. By selecting the appropriate sensor and using PCI_1716 data acquisition card, a tensile testing machine control system's hardware platform is founded. The control system software based on MCGS, can monitor the process of tensile testing, display and record real-time testing data. Practice has proved that the tensile testing machine control system has many advantages of high accuracy, good real-time, stability, easy operation etc, which can meet the needs of practical applications.

Many intensive and real-time signal processing applications for example in control, speech synthesis/recognition and image processing, have computational requirements which are too high for implementation on single DSP processors. Parallel implementation on multiple DSP processors provides an attractive solution to this problem. This paper presents a code generator which is capable of automatically producing parallel code for a multiprocessor hardware platform. The generator makes use of special code skeletons to abstract away from the hardware platform being used, and hence providing a high degree of flexibility in the choice of platforms. By using a consistent interface to these skeletons one can easily retarget the same signal processing application to different hardware systems. The design philosophy and architecture of the code generator as well as the types of multiprocessor hardware platforms used are presented and discussed. (10 pages)

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is a popular internet access technology, and researchers are continuously working on the quality of service (QoS) improvement by proposing new and efficient schemes. Performance analysis and benchmarking are an integral part of WLAN research. In most of the cases, this is done through computer simulation using popular network simulators such as Network Simulator - 2 (NS-2) or OPNET. The computer simulation of a dynamic system such as a communication network heavily depends upon a set of stochastic models for capturing the real-time behaviors of the system. The choice of a set of stochastic models that represent the most practical scenario is often debated and there is no universal consensus on the choice of these models. This is why, for proper assessment of the merits of a proposal, and any associated commercialization activities, a validation on a hardware platform is highly recommended. Researchers have developed few Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and System-on-Chip (SoC) based hardware, but most of these development platforms are expensive and/or have limited support for networking layers software. This letter proposes an Atheros SoC based hardware platform, and an open-source Linux software stack, called OpenWrt, for WLAN research. The proposed hardware is available off-the-shelf as a WLAN access point (AP), and is a cost-effective way of generating results on a hardware system. A new MAC protocol is implemented on one such WLAN access point to prove the platform.

Recently, solid-state drives (SSDs) have been used in a wide range of emerging data processing systems. Essentially, an SSD is a complex embedded system that involves both hardware and software design. For the latter, firmware modules such as the flash translation layer (FTL) orchestrate internal operations and flash management, and are crucial to the overall I/O performance of an SSD. Despite the rapid development of new features of SSDs in the market, the research of flash firmware has been mostly simulation-based due to the lack of a realistic and extensible SSD development platform. In this paper, we propose SoftSSD, a software-defined SSD development platform for rapid flash firmware prototyping. The core of SoftSSD is a novel framework with an event-driven programming model. With the programming model, new FTL algorithms can be implemented and integrated into a full-featured flash firmware in a straightforward way. The resulting flash firmware can be deployed and evaluated on a hardware development board, which can be connected to a host system via PCIe and serve as a normal NVMe SSD. Different from existing hardware-oriented development platforms, SoftSSD implements the majority of SSD components (e.g., host interface controller) in software so that data flows and internal states that were once confined in the hardware can now be examined with a software debugger, providing the observability and the extensibility that are critical to the rapid prototyping and research of flash firmware. This paper describes the programming model and hardware design of SoftSSD. We also perform experiments with real application workloads on a prototype board to demonstrate the performance and usefulness of SoftSSD and released the open-source code of SoftSSD for public access.

The research and development of novel user experience concepts in well-regulated industrial domains face different challenges. Systems in these domains often require backward compatibility and integration with legacy sub-systems and protocols. They must comply with well-defined procedures and standards, and must pass through stringent evaluation processes involving actual users under realistic conditions and scenarios. As a consequence, prototyping and simulations are extensively used. During product development, the level of fidelity of a simulation prototype will directly impact the quality of end-user feedback, minimizing expensive rework of UX in later stages of a project. This paper describes the Distributed Industrial Simulation Platform (DISP), a simulation framework developed within GE that facilitates the rapid prototyping and evaluation of novel industrial UX systems. We present the DISP design and main services showing how it has been used in support of the development and simulation of two UX prototypes in the railroad transportation domain.

Nowadays, automotive user interface research strives towards investigating automated vehicles. To test user concepts, especially pertaining to fully automated vehicles, several methods are evolving, such as Virtual Reality studies, simulator studies, or Wizard-of- Oz experiments. In all of these methods, researchers need to find an appropriate driving environment which is often created through a driving simulator or a real-life driving video. There is a lack of tools which give researchers the opportunity to rapidly create prototypes for their evaluation. To solve this issue for the case of investigating interactions with windshield displays and dashboards, we design a tool that can be used to support these studies and interfaces in various context. The experimenter can develop a virtual user interface through our platform. The interface can be deployed either in a lab setting where the driving context is provided through simulation or recorded driving videos, or it can be easily deployed in a Wizardof- Oz car. In this position paper, we present the framework of the tool and foster the discussion for such an idea and its use cases.

Performance comparison for the computer system under different hardware platform & system structure is of vital importance in the study of the performance evaluation. The Performance Analysis for Embedded Systems by using statistics methods based on the randomized complete block designs was proposed. Using the randomized block design, the differences between conditions can be separated from the difference in the processing, and be separated from the experimental bias. A case study of automatic gate machines used in the automatic fare collection system of Shanghai Metro is presented. The obtained assessment results show that our approach is helpful and effective. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i7.2864 Full Text: PDF