Thesis (Ph. D.)--Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. / Vincent Mooney, Committee Chair; John Barry, Committee Member; James Hamblen, Committee Member; Karsten Schwan, Committee Member; Linda Wills, Committee Member. Includes bibliography.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-77).

This paper discusses the design of an autonomous remote-controlled racecar to play a one-on-one match of capture the flag. A competition was held, and the results are presented and conclusions are made.

This rapport describes how a security and control system has been developed for moveable diesel tanks. Enormous amounts of diesel in Sweden are stolen every year and the tank that is most vulnerable is the moveable tank in other words tanks that can be moved around with diesel inside. The report proposes methods how to measure fluid amount in a tank and how to measure if diesel is disappearing from the tank. The report also describes a tank monitoring system prototype.

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Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have proven their effectiveness in many domains, but very few attempts have been made to embed them with existing systems. This area of research has a lot of potential in providing life-long learning and work place training. This PhD project makes several significant contributions. This is the first attempt to embed a Constraint-Based Tutor (CBT) with an existing system, in order to investigate the benefits of providing on-the-job training. We also propose a framework for embedded ITSs, and develop DM-Tutor (Decision-Making Tutor) embedded with the MIS for palm oil. DM-Tutor is the first ITS for the domain of oil palm plantation decision making, and was developed in the ASPIRE authoring system. Our hypothesis was that DM-Tutor embedded with the MIS for palm oil would provide effective instruction and training for oil palm plantation decision making. We also wanted to investigate the role of feedback messages in helping to provide effective training.

The objective of this work was to evaluate and implement a number of energy saving functions for a specific embedded system. The functions were then grouped into a number of energy levels with known properties in terms of functionality, energy consumption, and transition time between the levels. The embedded system consisted of an AT91 ARM9 processor, GSM/GPRS modem, display, Ethernet and other peripheral units. Some energy saving methods that were considered were suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, frequency scaling, and methods for saving energy in the modem, Ethernet, USB and display backlight. The functions were grouped into levels and an interface was specified for controlling the energy level. It proved possible to get known properties within the defined energy levels, even though the paritioning of functions into these levels proved to be sub-optimal in a typical application usage scenario because it was designed for mainly energy consumption, not usage. The final result is a number of energy saving functions grouped into levels, which are controllable via an application interface. Each of the levels have a known energy consumption in both loaded and un-loaded mode.

From mid-2000s, the realm of portable and embedded computing has expanded to include a wide variety of applications. Data mining is one of the many applications that are becoming common on these devices. Many of today’s data mining applications are compute and/or data intensive, requiring more processing power than ever before, thus speed performance is a major issue. In addition, embedded devices have stringent area and power requirements. At the same time manufacturing cost and time-to-market are decreasing rapidly. To satisfy the constraints associated with these devices, and also to improve the speed performance, it is imperative to incorporate some special-purpose hardware into embedded system design. In some cases, reconfigurable hardware support is desirable to provide the flexibility required in the ever-changing application environment. Our main objective is to provide chip-level and reconfigurable hardware support for data mining applications in portable, handheld, and embedded devices. We focus on the most widely used data mining tasks, clustering and classification. Our investigation on the hardware design and implementation of similarity computation (an important step in clustering/classification) illustrates that the chip-level hardware support for data mining operations is indeed a feasible and a worthwhile endeavour. Further performance gain is achieved with hardware optimizations such as parallel processing. To address the issue of limited hardware foot-print on portable and embedded devices, we investigate reconfigurable computing systems. We introduce dynamic reconfigurable hardware solutions for similarity computation using a multiplexer-based approach, and for principal component analysis (another important step in clustering/classification) using partial reconfiguration method. Experimental results are encouraging and show great potential in implementing data mining applications using reconfigurable platform. Finally, we formulate a design methodology for FPGA-based dynamic reconfigurable hardware, in order to select the most efficient FPGA-based reconfiguration method(s) for specific applications on portable and embedded devices. This design methodology can be generalized to other embedded applications and gives guidelines to the designer based on the computation model and characteristics of the application. / Graduate

The Universal Serial Bus, USB, is widely used for connecting peripheral devices to a computer. Through the years devices that use USB has evolved and more and more complicated communication protocols have been developed using the USB standard. There are many different ways to set up communication between a USB device and a host computer. The USB standard does not include any security and this poses risks when designing communication over such a connection. This thesis investigates how a USB-based picture transfer protocol can be designed between a small camera running embedded Linux and a host computer. The USB functionality in Windows and Mac OS/X operating systems are investigated. Solutions to create a secure USB communication are also investigated. One of three the methods of creating a USB connection with a USB device running embedded Linux are chosen based on the investigations. A protocol is then designed and an implementation developed. The protocol designed in the thesis uses existing USB functionality in the host computer operating systems Windows and Mac OS/X. The designed protocol is evaluated for performance and security. The evaluation is made on an evaluation platform for the camera. The transfer speed of the protocol is measured to around 18 MB/s in an ideal environment. The designed protocol could be improved by using one of the security methods found in the investigations.