Dans la plupart des applications de robotique, un système de vision apporte une amélioration significative de la perception de l’environnement. La vision panoramique est particulièrement intéressante car elle rend possible une perception omnidirectionnelle. Elle est cependant rarement utilisée en pratique à cause des limitations technologiques découlant des méthodes la permettant. La grande majorité de ces méthodes associent des caméras, des miroirs, des grands angles et des systèmes rotatifs ensembles pour créer des champs de vision élargis. Les principaux défauts de ces méthodes sont les importantes distorsions des images et l’hétérogénéité de la résolution. Certaines autres méthodes permettant des résolutions homogènes, prodiguent un flot de données très important qui est difficile à traiter en temps réel et sont soit trop lents soit manquent de précision. Pour résoudre ces problèmes, nous proposons la réalisation d’une caméra panoramique intelligente qui présente plusieurs améliorations technologiques par rapport aux autres caméras linéaires rotatives. Cette caméra capture des panoramas cylindriques homogènes avec une résolution de 6600 × 2048 pixels. La synchronisation de la capture avec la position angulaire est possible grâce à une plateforme rotative de précision. Nous proposons aussi une solution au problème que pose le gros flot de données avec l’implémentation d’un extracteur de primitives qui sélectionne uniquement les primitives invariantes des images pour donner un système panoramique de vision qui ne transmet que les données pertinentes. Le système a été modélisé et une méthode de calibrage spécifiquement conçue pour les systèmes cylindriques rotatifs est présentée. Enfin, une application de localisation et de reconstruction 3D est décrite pour montrer une utilisation pratique dans une application de type Simultaneous Localization And Mapping ( SLAM ). / In most robotic applications, vision systems can significantly improve the perception of the environment. The panoramic view has particular attractions because it allows omnidirectional perception. However, it is rarely used because the methods that provide panoramic views also have significant drawbacks. Most of these omnidirectional vision systems involve the combination of a matrix camera and a mirror, rotating matrix cameras or a wide angle lens. The major drawbacks of this type of sensors are in the great distortions of the images and the heterogeneity of the resolution. Some other methods, while providing homogeneous resolutions, also provide a huge data flow that is difficult to process in real time and are either too slow or lacking in precision. To address these problems, we propose a smart panoramic vision system that presents technological improvements over rotating linear sensor methods. It allows homogeneous 360 degree cylindrical imaging with a resolution of 6600 × 2048 pixels and a precision turntable to synchronize position with acquisition. We also propose a solution to the bandwidth problem with the implementation of a feature etractor that selects only the invariant feaures of the image in such a way that the camera produces a panoramic view at high speed while delivering only relevant information. A general geometric model has been developped has been developped to describe the image formation process and a caligration method specially designed for this kind of sensor is presented. Finally, localisation and structure from motion experiments are described to show a practical use of the system in SLAM applications.

Security issues appearing in one or another form become a requirement for an increasing number of embedded systems. Those systems, which will be used to capture, store, manipulate, and access data with a sensitive nature, have posed several unique and urgent challenges. The challenges to those embedded system require new approaches to security covering all aspects of embedded system design from architecture, implementation to the methodology. However, security is always treated by embedded system designer as the addition of features, such as specific cryptographic algorithm or other security protocol. This paper is intended to draw both the SW and HW designer attention to treat the security issues as a new mainstream during the design of embedded system. We intend to show why hardware option issues have been taken into consideration and how those hardware mechanisms and key features of processor architecture could be implemented in the hardware level (through modification of processor architecture, for example) to deal with various potential attacks unique to embedded systems.

Progress

The company Sensefarm develops in the field of precision agriculture, more specifically a product for measuring and logging information on local environmental conditions. The collected data is transmitted to a remote server using GSM technology. They are looking into ways to improve their product. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the M66 GSM module and the accompanied OpenCPU technology. In the current product the GSM module is only used for the communication with the server. All other processing is done by a dedicated processor. The OpenCPU technology allows for running customized firmware on the GSM module, possibly allowing it to take over the responsibilities of the dedicated processor. An application implementing all the necessary functionality was developed to test this capability. The finished application was able to fulfill all the requirements specified, although it was not able to be tested in the field.

Dans le contexte automobile actuel, le standard pour les calculateurs enfouis est AUTOSAR. L'un des inconvénients majeurs de cette architecture est son manque de flexibilité. Cependant, les mises à jour et la personnalisation des systèmes embarqués sont de plus en plus, non seulement plébiscités, mais également nécessaires. En effet, la complexité grandissante des systèmes exige à présent de déployer des moyens supplémentaires pour permettre leur maintenance et leur évolution de manière plus aisée. Ainsi, partant de ces constats, ce travail étudie les possibilités de faire des mises à jour dans le contexte d'AUTOSAR. Les modifications nécessaires se retrouvent non seulement dans l'architecture, mais également au sein du processus de développement et des considérations temps-réel. Tous ces aspects sont donc regardés en détails pour permettre les mises à jour partielles dans le cadre du standard AUTOSAR. Cette thèse décrit donc le processus de développement logiciel AUTOSAR et propose certaines améliorations mises en place au cours de ce travail. Un certain nombre de concepts sont également définis, afin d'aménager des espaces d'adaptation logiciels. Ces espaces sont ensuite utilisés pour intégrer des mises à jour partielles dans le calculateur embarqué. Le processus de développement est également modifié pour intégrer ces concepts ainsi que les mécanismes nécessaires à la mise à jour. Les aspects temps-réel concernant la mise à jour partielle dans les systèmes embarqués automobiles sont également traités ici. Un modèle de tâches approprié est mis en place dans le cadre d'AUTOSAR. De plus l'analyse de sensibilité est utilisée spécifiquement pour déterminer la flexibilité disponible dans un système donné. Les aspects d'implémentation sont également détaillés. En particulier, la création de mises à jour dans un contexte donné, la gestion des différentes versions possibles pour une application, l'utilisation et l'écriture dans la mémoire embarquée et enfin, les moyens nécessaires à la prise en compte des aspects de sûreté de fonctionnement. Pour terminer, tous les concepts développés dans ce travail sont appliqués à une preuve de concept reposant sur une application embarquée fournie par Renault. L'approche proposée est donc appliquée de manière pratique. / Currently the standard for embedded ECUs (Electronic Control Unit) in the automotive industry is AUTOSAR. One of the drawbacks of this architecture lies in its lack of flexibility. However, updates and customization of embedded systems are increasingly demanded and necessary. Indeed, systems are more and more complex and therefore require new methods and means to ease maintenance. Thus, from these observations, we study the possibilities for updates and resulting modifications (both on an architectural level and within the development process, and from a real-time point of view) in order to integrate within the AUTOSAR standard partial updates. This PhD thesis describes the software development process in an AUTOSAR context with a number of improvement we designed in this work. We also define concepts that allow to introduce placeholders for further updates within the embedded ECU. The development process has to be subsequently modified for integrating spaces for the updates along with the necessary mechanisms. Real-time problematic regarding partial updates in automotive systems is also considered here. In particular, we deal with sensitivity analysis that helps determine flexibility within the system. A number of implementation aspects are also detailed. In particular, the creation of the updates, versions management, use of embedded memory and dependability. All these concepts are finally applied on a proof of concept using an embedded application from Renault. We present here in details how the proposed approach can be used in practice.

Material handling and logistics are fundamental parts of today’s global societyand forklifts are a crucial part of the material handling process. Making these asefficient and reliable as possible are therefore of great interest. In this master thesis, an effort has been made to improve the control of the hydraulic lowering function of a specific forklift. Today the lowering function iscontrolled through an open-loop control scheme making the control performancesensitive to disturbances and system changes. One disturbance of special interestis the temperature of the hydraulic fluid. The goal of this thesis was therefore todesign a controller with improved robustness as well as improved performance. To solve this a model-based control design approach was used and a nonlineargrey-box model was derived, implemented and validated. The model parameterswere estimated using a nonlinear least-squares optimisation problem. The resulting model captures most of the system dynamics and the model fit is higher than 70% which was deemed good enough to use for control design. A PID controller was designed based on the estimated model and the controllerparameters were optimised. Furthermore, the controller was evaluated in simulations and implemented in a real forklift. The proposed controller was compared to the original controller for various scenarios. The results reveal improvedsteady state behaviour with enhanced temperature robustness compared to theoriginal controller. / Materialhantering och logistik är viktigt för att dagens globala samhälle ska fungera. En grundläggande del i materialhanteringsprocessen är gaffeltruckar, därför är det av intresse att göra gaffeltruckar så effektiva och pålitliga som möjligt. I det här examensarbetet har ett försök gjorts till att förbättra styrningen av den hydrauliska sänkningsfunktionen hos en specifik gaffeltruck. Dagens lösning använder sig av öppen styrning vilket gör reglerprestandan känslig för störningar och systemförändringar. En störning av extra intresse är temperaturen av hydraulvätskan. Målet med detta arbete var därför att designa en regulator med ökad robusthet och prestanda. För att lösa detta har en modellbaserad metod för regulatordesign använts där en olinjär gray-box modell härleddes, implementerades och validerades. Modellparametrarna skattades genom att ställa upp och lösa ett ickelinjärt minsta-kvadrat optimeringsproblem. Den resulterande modellen fångar det mesta av systemdynamiken och modellpassningen till uppmätt data var högre än 70\% vilket ansågs bra nog för att kunna använda modellen som en bas för regulatordesign. En PID regulator designades och regulatorparametrarna optimerades med hjälp av modellen. Regulatorn utvärderades i simuleringar och för att sedan implementeras den på en riktig gaffeltruck. Den föreslagna regulatorn jämfördes med den ursprungliga regulatorn i flera olika testfall. Resultaten visade ett bättre steady-state beteende och ökad robusthet mot temperaturförändringar för den designade regulatorn jämfört med den ursprungliga regulatorn.

The term verification can mean different things to different people based on their background and the context of research. Comparably the term runtime might bring about similar disarray with lesser confusion. Whilst a software application executes on a system, there are libraries and codes that facilitates the execution of that binary, these processes and libraries make up the runtime environment, and verification in this context refers to the concrete techniques that verify a run and checks if it satisfies or defies the specified requirements. This study is specifically concerned with runtime verification systems, and how to make use of them in a limited-resource environment such as embedded systems or Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). It is of utmost importance to validate the conformance of a system, specially those in automotive and transportation industry. Vehicles such as trains are responsible to transport millions of people everyday which makes safety and reliability of the system the most prime component of bunch. Many manufacturers employs state of the art technologies and processes to endure the safety of the final product. Since most of the parts in vehicles (including trains) are computer controlled, the system (OS, application, control system, etc.) should undergo proper and comprehensive tests to single out even the smallest anomalies and misbehaviour. While traditional software testing can detect most of the anomalies, runtime verification can be used as a complementary method to passively monitor the running system and point out those behaviours and malfunctioning that are otherwise close to impossible to be caught. This thesis investigates runtime verification in train manufacturing, and propose a structured, contemporary process and system to monitor the train control system for conformance. Furthermore several methods of formal specification to be used for declaration of specification were explored and a suitable choice for this case study was suggested, in addition a proof of concept tool to demonstrate the entire process is developed as well.

Orientador: Alice Maria B. H. Tokarnia / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-07T23:40:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silva_RogerioSigrist_M.pdf: 816659 bytes, checksum: 206ce45bc9176489805fd6c7f8f0e260 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Este trabalho descreve três algoritmos para a síntese de sistemas embutidos atendendo à restrição de desempenho representada pela taxa de chegada dos dados, através de uma estrutura de pipeline de processadores para execução das tarefas, ao mesmo tempo em que minimizam diferentes parâmetros de qualidade dos sistemas: número de processadores; custo e latência total. Os algoritmos realizam o particionamento hardware-software das tarefas, a alocação dos processadores, o mapeamento e escalonamento das tarefas. A alocação de processadores e o mapeamento e escalonamento de tarefas são problemas classificados como NP-Completo e, portanto, foram aplicados métodos heurísticos para suas resoluções. Como exemplos de aplicação são apresentados os pipelines sintetizados pelos algoritmos para grafos sintéticos e para um compressor de áudio digital (AC3). Os pipelines sintetizados atingem métricas de qualidade superiores a outros algoritmos publicados / Abstract: This work presents three heuristics for sinthesizing pipelined embedded systems that satisfy a throughput constraint derived from the maximum input data are adopting a pipeline structure of processors while minimizing system quality parameters: cost, number of processors, or number of stages. The algorithms perform tasks hardware-software partitioning, processors allocation and task mapping and scheduling. Since processors allocation and task mapping and scheduling are NP-Complete problems, heuristics methods were applied. The examples present the pipelines synthesized by the algorithms for large synthetic systems comparing the quality parameters minimization results and for a real audio compressor (AC3) application. The pipelines reached quality metrics higher than other published algorithms / Mestrado / Engenharia de Computação / Mestre em Engenharia Elétrica

The master's thesis deals with the design and realization of embedded control system and software of the autonomous mobile robot DACEP. The research section focuses on the selection of sensory equipment. Moreover, the design of the embedded control system and the communication interface between this system and the master PC is described in detail, followed by the design of localization and navigation software that uses ROS framework. The section is written as instructive as possible for the development of robots of similar construction. Finally the development of a graphical interface for robot diagnostics and remote control is depicted.

In the modern society, mobile is gradually going to become all about video streaming. The main reasons of video growth are mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets which enable people to have access to videos they would like to watch at anywhere and anytime. However, due to the large video data size and intensive computation, video processing leads to a huge power consumption. Mobile system designers typically focus on hardware-level power optimization techniques without considering how hardware performance interfaces with viewer experience. In my research, I investigated how viewing context factors affect mobile viewing experience. Furthermore, a viewer-aware intelligent mobile video system was designed to optimize power efficiency automatically in real-time according to the viewing context and maintain the same viewing experience. Our research opened a door for developments of future viewer-aware mobile system design, accelerating low-cost mobile devices with longer battery life.