In networked robot systems (NRS), robots and robotic devices are distributed in the environment; typically tasks are performed by cooperation and coordination of such multiple networked components. NRS offer advantages over monolithic systems in terms of modularity, flexibility and cost effectiveness, and they are thus becoming a mainstream approach to the inclusion of robotic solutions in everyday environments. The components of a NRS are usually robots and sensors equipped with rich computational and communication facilities. In this thesis, we argue that the capabilities of a NRS would greatly increase if it could also accommodate among its nodes simpler entities, like small ubiquitous sensing and actuation devices, home appliances, or augmented everyday objects. For instance, a domestic robot needs to manipulate food items and interact with appliances. Such a robot would benefit from the ability to exchange information with those items and appliances in a direct way, in the same way as with other networked robots and sensors. Combining such highly heterogeneous devices inside one NRS is challenging, and one of the major challenges is to provide a common communication and collaboration infrastructure. In the field of NRS, this infrastructure is commonly provided by a shared middleware. Unfortunately, current middlewares lack the generality needed to allow heterogeneous entities such as robots, simple ubiquitous devices and everyday objects to coexist in the same system. In this thesis we show how an existing middleware for NRS can be extended to include three new types of “citizens” in the system, on peer with the other robots. First, we include computationally simple embedded devices, like ubiquitous sensors and actuators, by creating a fully compatible tiny version of the existing robotic middleware. Second, we include augmented everyday objects or home appliances which are unable to run the middleware on board, by proposing a generic design pattern based on the notion of object proxy. Finally,we go one step further and include humans as nodes in the NRS by defining the notion of human proxy. While there exist a few other NRS which are able to include both robots and simple embedded devices in the same system, the use of proxies to include everyday objects and humans in a generic way is a unique feature of this work. In order to verify and validate the above concepts, we have implemented them in the Peis-Ecology NRS model. We report a number of experiments based on this implementation, which provide both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of its performance, reliability, and interoperability.

Software quality ensures that applications that are developed are failure free. Some modern systems are intricate, due to the complexity of their information processes. Software fault prediction is an important quality assurance activity, since it is a mechanism that correctly predicts the defect proneness of modules and classifies modules that saves resources, time and developers’ efforts. In this study, a model that selects relevant features that can be used in defect prediction was proposed. The literature was reviewed and it revealed that process metrics are better predictors of defects in version systems and are based on historic source code over time. These metrics are extracted from the source-code module and include, for example, the number of additions and deletions from the source code, the number of distinct committers and the number of modified lines. In this research, defect prediction was conducted using open source software (OSS) of software product line(s) (SPL), hence process metrics were chosen. Data sets that are used in defect prediction may contain non-significant and redundant attributes that may affect the accuracy of machine-learning algorithms. In order to improve the prediction accuracy of classification models, features that are significant in the defect prediction process are utilised. In machine learning, feature selection techniques are applied in the identification of the relevant data. Feature selection is a pre-processing step that helps to reduce the dimensionality of data in machine learning. Feature selection techniques include information theoretic methods that are based on the entropy concept. This study experimented the efficiency of the feature selection techniques. It was realised that software defect prediction using significant attributes improves the prediction accuracy. A novel MICFastCR model, which is based on the Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) was developed to select significant attributes and Fast Correlation Based Filter (FCBF) to eliminate redundant attributes. Machine learning algorithms were then run to predict software defects. The MICFastCR achieved the highest prediction accuracy as reported by various performance measures. / School of Computing / Ph. D. (Computer Science)

Este trabalho propõe uma nova abordagem para o desenvolvimento de sistemas embarcados, através da combinação da abstração e propriedades de verificação de modelos da linguagem declarativa Alloy com a ampla aceitação de Java na indústria. A abordagem surge no contexto de que a automação de software no domínio embarcado tornou-se extremamente necessária, uma vez que atualmente a maior parte do tempo de desenvolvimento é gasta no projeto de software de produtos tão restritos em termos de recursos. As ferramentas de automação de software embarcado devem atender a demanda por produtividade e manutenibilidade, mas respeitar restrições naturais deste tipo de sistema, tais como espaço de memória, potência e desempenho. As ferramentas de automação de projeto lidam com produtividade e manutenibilidade ao permitir especificações de alto nível, tarefa difícil de atender no domínio embarcado devido ao comportamento misto de muitas aplicações embarcadas. Abordagens que promovem meios para verificação formal também são atrativas, embora geralmente sejam difíceis de usar, e por este motivo não são de grande auxílio na tarefa de reduzir o tempo de chegada ao mercado do produto. Através do uso de Alloy, baseada em lógica de primeira-ordem, é possível obter especificações em altonível e verificação formal de modelos com uma única linguagem. Este trabalho apresenta a poderosa abstração proporcionada pela linguagem Alloy em aplicações embarcadas, assim como regras para obter automaticamente código Java a partir de modelos Alloy. A geração de código Java a partir de modelos Alloy, combinada a uma ferramenta de estimativa, provê exploração de espaço de projeto, atendendo assim as fortes restrições do projeto de software embarcado, o que normalmente não é contemplado pela engenharia de software tradicional. / This work proposes a new approach for embedded software development, by combining the abstraction and model verification properties of the Alloy declarative language with the broad acceptance in industry of Java. The approach comes into play since software automation in the embedded domain has become a major need, as currently most of the development time is spent designing software for such hardconstrained resources products. Design automation tools for embedded systems must meet the demand for productivity and maintainability, but constraints such as memory, power and performance must still be considered. Design automation tools deal with productivity and maintainability by allowing high-level specifications, which is hard to accomplish on the embedded domain due to the mixed behavior nature of many embedded applications. Approaches that provide means for formal verification are also attractive, but their usage is usually not straightforward, and for this reason they are not that helpful in dealing with time-tomarket constraints. By using Alloy, based in first-order logic, it is possible to obtain high-level specifications and formal model verification with a single language. This work shows the powerful abstraction provided by the Alloy language for embedded applications, as well as rules for obtaining automatically Java code from Alloy models. The Java source code generation from Alloy models, combined with an estimation tool, provides design space exploration to match tight embedded software design constraints, what is usually not taken into account by standard software engineering techniques.

A demonstration robot for conferences and fairs has been built from scratch. The demonstration robot is meant to create lasting impressions at the company booth at conferences or fairs. Thus, the robot needs traits that attract people to the booth and makes sure they remember that company. In this project, traits such as being able to move, do facial expressions and play audio have been developed. The robot has also been designed to draw as much attention as possible to the booth. This was achieved by building a robot that consists of a rolling sphere with a head that always remains on top. All movements are carried out from inside the sphere by four different motors. One motor moves the robot back and forth, two motors spin a flywheel to turn the robot and the last motor rotates the head. These motors are mounted at different places on an internal structure. The internal structure is connected to the sphere at two points, one on each side of the robot. At the top of the internal structure, magnets are placed. Thus, it can attach the head at the outside of the sphere by mounting magnets in the head. All movements of the robots are controlled by a hand controller, which has been made in this project. The head has a built-in display simulating two eyes. The display is driven by a Raspberry Pi. An internal speaker is built-in inside the head, connected to the Raspberry Pi. Each simulated eye consists of 64 squares that can be programmed to be in different colours, thus making it possible to express a wide range of facial expressions.Two PCBs were designed and manufactured to control the robot. One was placed inside the robot, and the other inside the hand controller. The PCBs can communicate over Bluetooth, which makes it possible to control the robot from the outside.All parts of the robot have been designed in a CAD program and subsequently 3D printed. 3D design in CAD was learned from a novice level, since there was no previous knowledge of this in the project group.In addition, a registration form has been developed that allows visitors to register at the booth. Making it easier for the company to connect with visitors after the conference or fair. The registration form is connected with the Raspberry Pi in the head of the robot via Wi-Fi. Thus, when new registrations occur, the robot can print the names of them while audio is played.

Este trabalho propõe uma nova abordagem para o desenvolvimento de sistemas embarcados, através da combinação da abstração e propriedades de verificação de modelos da linguagem declarativa Alloy com a ampla aceitação de Java na indústria. A abordagem surge no contexto de que a automação de software no domínio embarcado tornou-se extremamente necessária, uma vez que atualmente a maior parte do tempo de desenvolvimento é gasta no projeto de software de produtos tão restritos em termos de recursos. As ferramentas de automação de software embarcado devem atender a demanda por produtividade e manutenibilidade, mas respeitar restrições naturais deste tipo de sistema, tais como espaço de memória, potência e desempenho. As ferramentas de automação de projeto lidam com produtividade e manutenibilidade ao permitir especificações de alto nível, tarefa difícil de atender no domínio embarcado devido ao comportamento misto de muitas aplicações embarcadas. Abordagens que promovem meios para verificação formal também são atrativas, embora geralmente sejam difíceis de usar, e por este motivo não são de grande auxílio na tarefa de reduzir o tempo de chegada ao mercado do produto. Através do uso de Alloy, baseada em lógica de primeira-ordem, é possível obter especificações em altonível e verificação formal de modelos com uma única linguagem. Este trabalho apresenta a poderosa abstração proporcionada pela linguagem Alloy em aplicações embarcadas, assim como regras para obter automaticamente código Java a partir de modelos Alloy. A geração de código Java a partir de modelos Alloy, combinada a uma ferramenta de estimativa, provê exploração de espaço de projeto, atendendo assim as fortes restrições do projeto de software embarcado, o que normalmente não é contemplado pela engenharia de software tradicional. / This work proposes a new approach for embedded software development, by combining the abstraction and model verification properties of the Alloy declarative language with the broad acceptance in industry of Java. The approach comes into play since software automation in the embedded domain has become a major need, as currently most of the development time is spent designing software for such hardconstrained resources products. Design automation tools for embedded systems must meet the demand for productivity and maintainability, but constraints such as memory, power and performance must still be considered. Design automation tools deal with productivity and maintainability by allowing high-level specifications, which is hard to accomplish on the embedded domain due to the mixed behavior nature of many embedded applications. Approaches that provide means for formal verification are also attractive, but their usage is usually not straightforward, and for this reason they are not that helpful in dealing with time-tomarket constraints. By using Alloy, based in first-order logic, it is possible to obtain high-level specifications and formal model verification with a single language. This work shows the powerful abstraction provided by the Alloy language for embedded applications, as well as rules for obtaining automatically Java code from Alloy models. The Java source code generation from Alloy models, combined with an estimation tool, provides design space exploration to match tight embedded software design constraints, what is usually not taken into account by standard software engineering techniques.

Cette thèse présente comment l’intégration de systèmes multi-agents au sein de systèmes embarqués peut permettre d’optimiser la gestion des tâches. Nous relevons un manque de flexibilité pour les systèmes embarqués et posons l’hypothèse d’une solution multi-agents permettant la prise en compte dynamique du contexte d’évolution du système. Les systèmes embarqués, intégrés à l’environnement utilisateur, sont contraints en termes d’espace physique et donc de ressources matérielles. Ces limites impliquent un besoin d’optimisation des ressources. Nous proposons d’expérimenter des algorithmes de négociation multi-agents pour déléguer des tâches entre les différentes ressources. Pour valider nos hypothèses, nous détaillons les caractéristiques des systèmes multi-agents, leurs comportements, leurs modèles,les plateformes sur lesquelles ils évoluent, leurs standards de communication et leurs algorithmes sociaux. Nous avons constaté que la majorité des travaux du domaine agent se concentraient sur d’autres problématiques. Par conséquent, nous avons proposé la formalisation de systèmes multiagents embarqués et d’une plateforme multi-agents adaptée. Nous avons ensuite expérimenté cette plateforme au sein de systèmes embarqués avec le cas d’étude du traitement d’images, notamment avec le calcul d’une interpolation de pixels. Nous avons mené des études de performances pour estimer le coût administratif d’une solution multiagents,puis avons considéré ces résultats au regard des gains de capacité de nos systèmes embarqués. Nos dernières expérimentations mettent à l’épreuve notre solution de délégation de tâches entre plusieurs cartes embarquées dans un contexte hétérogène. / This thesis shows how the integration of multi-agents systems within embedded systems can optimize tasks management. We notice a lack of flexibility for embedded systems and hypothesize that a multi-agents solution will allow the dynamic consideration of the system context of evolution. Embedded systems, being integrated into the user environment, are limited in terms of physical space and thus hardware resources. These limits involve the necessity to optimize the resources. We suggest experimenting multi-agents negotiation algorithms to delegate tasks between several resources. To validate our hypotheses, we detail the characteristics of multi-agents systems, their behavior, their models, the platforms on which they evolve, their communication standards and their social algorithms.We observed that the majority of the works of the multi-agents domain concentrated on other problems. Therefore, we proposed the formalization of embedded multi-agents systems and of anadapted multi-agents platform. We then experimented this platform within embedded systems with the case study of image processing, especially the calculation of a pixels interpolation.We led performance studies to estimate the administrative cost of a multi-agents solution, then considered these results in relation to the capacity earnings of our embedded systems. Our last experiments put to the test our solution of tasks delegation between several embedded cards within a heterogeneous context.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:56:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JailtonCP_DISSERT.pdf: 2190503 bytes, checksum: ee26df46d54432b596d1d87d4b66b75c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-27 / In practically all vertical markets and in every region of the planet, loyalty marketers have adopted the tactic of recognition and reward to identify, maintain and increase the yield of their customers. Several strategies have been adopted by companies, and the most popular among them is the loyalty program, which displays a loyalty club to manage these rewards. But the problem with loyalty programs is that customer identification and transfer of loyalty points are made in a semiautomatic. Aiming at this, this paper presents a master's embedded business automation solution called e-Points. The goal of e-Points is munir clubs allegiances with fully automated tooling technology to identify customers directly at the point of sales, ensuring greater control over the loyalty of associate members. For this, we developed a hardware platform with embedded system and RFID technology to be used in PCs tenant, a smart card to accumulate points with every purchase and a web server, which will provide services of interest to retailers and customers membership to the club / Em praticamente todos os mercados verticais e em cada regi?o do planeta, os comerciantes de fidelidade adotaram a t?tica de reconhecimento e recompensa para identificar, manter e aumentar o rendimento de seus clientes. V?rias estrat?gias t?m sido adotadas pelas empresas, e a mais popular entre elas ? o programa de fidelidade, que exibe um clube de fidelidade para gerenciar essas recompensas. Mas o problema com os programas de fidelidade ? que a identifica??o dos clientes e a transmiss?o dos pontos de fidelidade s?o feitas de forma semiautom?tica. Visando isto, o presente trabalho de mestrado apresenta uma solu??o embarcada de automa??o comercial intitulada e-Pontos. O objetivo do e-Pontos ? munir os clubes de fidelidades com ferramental tecnol?gico totalmente automatizado para identificar os clientes diretamente nos pontos de vendas, garantindo um maior controle dos pontos de fidelidade dos membros associados. Para isso, foi desenvolvida uma plataforma de hardware com sistema embarcado e tecnologia RFID que ser? utilizada nos PCs dos lojistas, um smart card para acumular os pontos a cada compra e um servidor web, o qual disponibilizar? servi?os de interesse para os lojistas e os clientes conveniado ao clube

Many embedded systems are complex, and it is often required that the firmware in these systems are updatable by the end-user. For economical and confidentiality reasons, it is important that these systems only accept firmware approved by the firmware producer. This thesis work focuses on creating a security enhanced firmware update procedure that is suitable for use in embedded systems. The common elements of embedded systems are described and various candidate algorithms are compared as candidates for firmware verification. Patents are used as a base for the proposal of a security enhanced update procedure. We also use attack trees to perform a threat analysis on an update procedure. The results are a threat analysis of a home office router and the proposal of an update procedure. The update procedure will only accept approved firmware and prevents reversion to old, vulnerable, firmware versions. The firmware verification is performed using the hash function SHA-224 and the digital signature algorithm RSA with a key length of 2048. The selection of algorithms and key lengths mitigates the threat of brute-force and cryptanalysis attacks on the verification algorithms and is believed to be secure through 2030.

Software systems in the automotive domain are generally safety critical and subject to strict timing requirements. Systems of this character are often constructed utilizing periodically executed tasks, that have a hard deadline. In addition, these systems may have additional deadlines that can be specified on cause-effect chains, or simply task chains. They are defined by existing tasks in the system, hence the chains are not stand alone additions to the system. Each chain provide an end-to-end timing constraint targeting the propagation of data through the chain of tasks. These constraints specify the additional timing requirements that need to be fulfilled, when searching for a valid schedule. In this thesis, an offline non-preemptive scheduling method is presented, designed for single core systems. The scheduling problem is defined and formulated utilizing Constraint Programming. In addition, to ensure that end-to-end timing requirements are met, job-level dependencies are considered during the schedule generation. Utilizing this approach can guarantee that individual task periods along with end-to-end timing requirements are always met, if a schedule exists. The results show a good increase in schedulability ratio when utilizing job-level dependencies compared to the case where job-level dependencies are not specified. When the system utilization increases this improvement is even greater. Depending on the system size and complexity the improvement can vary, but in many cases it is more than double. The scheduling generation is also performed within a reasonable time frame. This would be a good benefit during the development process of a system, since it allows fast verification when changes are made to the system. Further, the thesis provide an overview of the entire process, starting from a system model and ending at a fully functional schedule executing on a hardware platform.

With an imminent future of fully autonomous heavy duty vehicles in offroad applications, the need for advanced control system will increase accordingly. By implementing a raster map with tiles and pixels, to which a vehicle can record slope and position data while driving, it is possible to map earth's surface. By adding a heat parameter to every pixel, i.e. the number of passings through it historically, it is possible in future visits of the same are to generate a route prediction made up by the "hottest" pixels. By fetching the slope values in the hottest pixels, it is possible to generate a slope horizon that can be utilized by control systems, e.g. when planning gear shifts in hilly offroad terrain. To mange the incrementally growing map, a memory management system was implemented. It buffers the relevant map data from the database, i.e. the vehicles closest surroundings, which is then used for route prediction and horizon generation. As the vehicle moves into other areas, new data is read from the database, and the recently passed area is written back to the database, however updated from the recent passing. The system is implemented so that it runs through another application in the telematics electrical controller unit (ECU) in a Scania vehicle. The ECU contains a GNSS module from which the vehicle fetches satellite positioning data. Slope data is fetched from a slope sensor mounted on the truck. Due to implications during testing and debugging of the resulting application developed and implemented during this thesis project, the application's performance couldn't be assessed properly. However, it is concluded that the background the application is built on is reliable, although tweaks to get the application fit for usage in offroad terrain had to be made. Mainly, the horizon length and map building techniques should not be the same as in similar applications for onroad driving.