Hardware Andsoftware Research Articles

Software analysis for mobile robots control programs

The use of the software allows the mobile robot to control the working parameters: turn on and off the mechanisms and devices, monitor the indicators of the sensors, perform various technological operations (cutting, welding, painting, etc.), calculate the trajectory of movement depending on the working surface, etc. Research in the field of robotics testifies to the high activity of scientific works on the creation of high-precision and energy-efficient robotic systems in general for autonomous mobile robots by improving control programs. The work is devoted to the review and analysis of the software for creating control programs for mobile robots. The work presents a generalized structural diagram of a hierarchical mobile robot control system, in which decentralized software processing of information takes place, and separate software and hardware components are remote from each other. When building a mobile robot control system, various robot programming environments are considered, which represent a wide range of tools for creating various models and systems. Moreover, the issues of using graphic and text software environments with high-level programming languages are considered. Development environments are considered among the software complexes: LabView; NXT-G; Robolab; EV3-G; MRDS; Scratch; 12Blocks; Simulink; ROBO Pro; Arduino Studio and TRIK Studio. The following are considered the most common programming languages at work: C++, Python, Pascal, JAVA and Scratch. All software is analyzed according to the following criteria: mathematical expressions, computational model, interpretation, stand-alone use, code generation, modeling, debugging, tutorials, free, platforms, designers, license and development prospects. Among the software, EV3 and Arduino text tools stand out for their capabilities, and Simulink and LabView among graphic tools, as these software tools have proven themselves to be powerful development environments with fairly universal approaches to creating programs in mobile robotics.

The Bug (Up Close and Personal)

This essay is a subjective reflection on the nature of the computer bug. Using a statement-driven writing style that is inspired by the structure of code, I propose a new categorisation of bugs based on why and where they occur. What are the particular failures that lead to software and hardware errors? What do they tell us about the constitution of the digital world? And what can they teach us about ourselves and our relationship to machines? Drawing on my professional experience as both a software developer and an artist, I try to capture the bug not just as the technical problem it is most often described as but instead as a multi-layered phenomenon and a personal experience.

Training industrial end‐user programmers with interactive tutorials

AbstractNewly released robot programming tools have made it feasible for end‐users to program industrial robots by combining block‐based languages and lead‐through programming. To use these systems effectively, end‐users, who usually have limited or no programming experience, require training. To train users, tutoring systems are often used for block‐based programming—some even for lead‐through programming—but no tutorial system combines these two types of programming. We present CoBlox Interactive Tutorials (CITs), a novel tutoring approach that teaches how to use both the hardware and software components that comprise a typical end‐user robot programming environment. As users switch between the two programming styles, CITs provide them with extensive scaffolding, give users immediate feedback on missteps, and provide guidance on next steps. To evaluate CITs, we conducted a study with 79 industrial end‐users using a programming environment released by ABB Robotics that compares our approach to training with training videos, the most commonly used training in industry. This study, one of the largest to date on training professional end‐users, found that CIT‐trained users authored more correct programs in less time than video‐trained users. This shows that a tight integration of hardware and software concepts is crucial to training end‐users to program industrial robots.

Target Chase, Wall Building, and Fire Fighting: Autonomous UAVs of Team NimbRo at MBZIRC 2020

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 posed diverse challenges for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We present our four tailored UAVs, specifically developed for individual aerial-robot tasks of MBZIRC, including custom hardwareand software components. In Challenge 1, a target UAV is pursued using a high-efficiency, onboard object detection pipeline to capture a ball from the target UAV. A second UAV uses a similar detection method to find and pop balloons scattered throughout the arena. For Challenge 2, we demonstrate a larger UAV capable of autonomous aerial manipulation: Bricks are found and tracked from camera images. Subsequently, they are approached, picked, transported, and placed on a wall. Finally, in Challenge 3, our UAV autonomously finds fires using LiDAR and thermal cameras. It extinguishes the fires with an onboard fire extinguisher. While every robot features task-specific subsystems, all UAVs rely on a standard software stack developed for this particular and future competitions. We present our mostly open-source software solutions, including tools for system configuration, monitoring, robust wireless communication, highlevel control, and agile trajectory generation. For solving the MBZIRC 2020 tasks, we advanced the state of the art in multiple research areas like machine vision and trajectory generation. We present our scientific contributions that constitute the foundation for our algorithms and systems and analyze the results from the MBZIRC competition 2020 in Abu Dhabi, where our systems reached second place in the Grand Challenge. Furthermore, we discuss lessons learned from our participation in this complex robotic challenge.

Development of a low-resource wearable continuous gesture-to-speech conversion system

Purpose Mild to profound hearing impairment places limits on effective communication and day-to-day interaction. Sign language, being the primary mode of communication for people with hearing loss, lacks communicative efficacy. A wearable assistive device that aims to convert sign language into speech is proposed to facilitate communication between the unimpaired population (untrained in sign language) and the hearing impaired population. However, the wide use of geo-centric sign languages in India has resulted in the lack of standardised sign-language datasets. In the proposed work, a compact, low-resource, motion sensor-based, wireless, single and double hand-gesture recognition module is designed to address this issue. Material and methods The proposed module is designed to perform a two-step process with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based gesture-to-text conversion and a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis. Multi-threading based parallel processing is implemented to enable simultaneous working of the two systems to reduce the delay. In the proposed continuous-gesture recognition system, non-gesture hand motions are modelled using ergodic HMMs that are trained by concatenating all the states of gesture models, allowing equiprobable transitions. The proposed system is modelled and tested for American Sign Language (ASL) and user-defined gestures. Results The maximum performance of the proposed system in recognising single-handed and double-handed gestures in terms of F1-score is 98.17% and 84.85%, respectively. Further, the proposed system achieves a maximum F1-score of 98% and 83% in recognising isolated and continuous gestures, respectively. Conclusion The gesture-to-speech conversion system is ported on Raspberry Pi making the proposed system wireless, and highly mobile. Implications for rehabilitation The research work proposes to develop a gesture-to-speech conversion system to enable the deaf-mute population in communication. The major implications of the proposed work are: •A light-weight raspberry pi 3B + module hosts the entire hardware andsoftware, and is sufficient to train and test the gesture-to-speech conversion system, thereby ensuring greater mobility. •The proposed system can be customised to recognise user-defined gestures with just 5 examples of the new gesture. •The proposed system can be expanded to control home appliances (IoT applications) by combining the output of the proposed gesture recognition system with appropriate control interfaces.

A THING SPEAK IOT BASED VIBRATION MEASUREMENT AND MONITORING SYSTEM USING AN ACCELEROMETER SENSOR

this paper presents the development of a Thing Speak IoT on a Real-Time Vibration measurement System using the accelerometer Sensor. Many systems have been designed previously but some lack systems are identified where it does not provide adaptively connections and alert to web pages on logging data collections. Thus, understanding the previous system model is important to compare the importance of new build parameters in designing the new system. An evaluation of the current model, hardware, and software is important before a new architecture is developed. This research has developed a prototype system to monitor and measure the vibration of a system remotely and setting up threshold and alert accordingly. The designed system assisted with an internet as vibration monitoring system for the machines. Research methods consist of two parts involved hardware and software development. The hardware development covers the connections of the accelerometer sensor and the software involved in constructed coding using the C language program. The program then is compiled and uploaded into the Node MCU to display the acceleration of the system. An open-source Internet of Things called Thing Speak is used as a platform to retrieve and display the collected data. Real-time monitoring can be accessed through Smartphone and web applications. This study has been considered successfully implemented and it is a significant study that performs on new IoT platforms and adaptively ready to monitor a vibration remotely

MODELS AND METHODS FOR DIAGNOSING ZERO-DAYTHREATS IN CYBERSPACE

The article is devoted to the development of models and methods for detectingZero-Daythreats in cyberspace to improve the efficiency of detecting high-level malicious complexes that are using polymorphic mutators. Themethod for detecting samplesby antivirus solutions using a public and local multiscanneris proposed. Themethod for diagnosing polymorphic malware using Yara rules is being developed. The multicomponent service that allows organizing a free malware analysis solution with a hybrid deploy-ment architecture in public and private clouds is described. The cloud service for detecting malware based on open-source sandboxes and MAS, allowing horizontal scalability in hybrid clouds, and showing high capacity during malicious and non-maliciousobjectprocessing is designed. The main task of the service is to collect artifacts after dynamic and static object analysis to detect zero-daythreats. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions is shown.Scientific novelty and originality consist in the creation of the follow-ing methods:1) detecting the sample by preinstalled antivirus solutions that allow static scanning in separate threads without requests restrictions for increasing the malware processing speed and restrict public access to confidential files;2) diagnosing polymorphic malware using Yara rules, that allows detecting new modifications that are not detected by available solutions.The proposed hybrid system architecture allows to perform a retrospective search by families, tracking changes in destructive components, collect the malicious URLs database to block traffic to C&C servers, collect dropped and downloaded files, analyze phishing emails attach-ments, integrate with SIEM, IDS, IPS, antiphishing and Honeypot systems, improve the quality of the SOC analyst, decrease the incidents response times and block new threats that are not detected by available antivirus solutions. The practical significance of the results is in the cloud service development that combines MAS Sandbox and a modified distributed Cuckoo sandbox, which allows to respond to Zero-Day threats quickly, store a knowledge base for artifacts correlation between polymorphic malware samples, actively search for new malware samples and integrate with cyber protection hardwareand software systems that support the Cuckoo API.

Evaluation of the Lens Flare

Flare, or stray light, is a visual phenomenon generally considered undesirable in photography that leads to a reduction of the image quality. In this article, we present an objective metric for quantifying the amount of flare of the lens of a camera module. This includes hardware and software tools to measure the spread of the stray light in the image. A novel measurement setup has been developed to generate flare images in a reproducible way via a bright light source, close in apparent size and color temperature to the sun, both within and outside the field of view of the device. The proposed measurement works on RAW images to characterize and measure the optical phenomenon without being affected by any non-linear processing that the device might implement.

Solar thermal control efficiency based on at series micro-controller

Aiming at the problems of water temperature and water level control system of conventional solar water heater and low solar thermal control efficiency, this paper developed an AT series single-chip solar water heater control system for rural areas. In this paper, the detailed design of hardware and software is presented, and the method of evaluating the collector efficiency is simplified by the temperature rise rate and solar irradiance of the collector plate. The software compensation algorithm we adopted can effectively reduce the impact of different water quality on water level measurement and improve solar thermal control efficiency. It is found that the control system designed in this paper has the characteristics of low cost, high safety, and strong practicability.

Efficient FPSoC Prototyping of FCS-MPC for Three-Phase Voltage Source Inverters

This work describes an efficient implementation in terms of computation time and resource usage in a Field-Programmable System-On-Chip (FPSoC) of a Finite Control Set Model Predictive Control (FCS-MPC) algorithm. As an example, the FCS-MPC implementation is used for the current reference tracking of a two-level three-phase power converter. The proposed solution is an enabler for using both complex control algorithms and digital controllers for high switching frequency semiconductor technologies. An original HW/SW (hardware and software) system architecture for an FPSoC is designed to take advantage of a modern operating system, while removing time uncertainty in real-time software tasks, and exploiting dedicated FPGA fabric for the most complex computations. In addition, two different architectures for the FPGA-implemented functionality are proposed and compared in order to study the area-speed trade-off. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed implementation, which achieves a speed hundreds of times faster than the conventional Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-based control platform.

Study of metrological characteristics of low-cost digital temperature sensors for greenhouse conditions

The article focuses on the relevant scientific and applied problem of assessing and analyzing the metrological characteristics of available digital temperature sensors for greenhouse conditions. The hardware and software implementation of the microprocessor system for obtaining calibration characteristics and evaluating the accuracy and performance of temperature sensors for the physical media under greenhouse conditions is studied. A particular type of linear calibration equation for the temperature sensors under study is established. The values of systematic absolute measurement deviations of temperature sensors DS18B20, SHT11, SHT21, BMP180, BME280 and DHT22 are experimentally obtained. Recommendations on improving the accuracy of temperature information and temperature measuring systems under greenhouse conditions are given. The perspective areas of the research on metrological provision of modern means of automatic monitoring and temperature control in industrial greenhouses are substantiated.

Implementation of Finite State Automata in an Amusement Park Automatic Ticket Selling Machine

Introduction: Amusement Park is a place that provides various attractions for entertainmentpurpose. People can enjoy games, rides such as roller coaster rides, merry-go-round, etc.Over the time, technology has grown. Many things that are usually done manually by humansare now being replaced by computers. With an automated ticket selling machine, the processof buying the ticket of an amusement park becomes easier for the user. Automata theory is atheoretical branch that has not been widely known to many yet plays essential role in the fieldof computer science. The main concept of automata theory itself is how to make machinesworks automatically. Therefore, this study aims to show the implementation of the concept ofAutomata theory in an amusement park automatic ticket selling machine.Methods: Themethod used to develop the application is formal methods known as Finite State Automata.We also used Sequential Linear method to design the application. Formal method is amathematical modelling that links the production, development, and verification of softwareand hardware. In this application, the concept of Finite State Automata was applied torecognize and then capture the pattern on the process of ticket selling machine.Results: Theresult of this study shows that Finite State Automata can become one of the alternatives todesign an automatic ticket selling machine for an amusement park by reading each inputgiven by the user and then converts it to the language know by the Finite StateAutomata.Discussion: In this application, the payment method is by inserting a certainamount of cash into the machine and the machine will proceed to the next process. However,for future development another payment method can be added. For example, instead ofinserting cash, user can choose to pay using debit as well as credit card.

Разработка элементов виртуальной исследовательской среды для анализа, оценки и прогнозирования последствий глобальных климатических изменений

Представлены описание и первые результаты разработки виртуальной вычислительно-информационной среды для анализа, оценки и прогноза последствий глобальных климатических изменений окружающей среды и климата в выбранном регионе. Созданная среда основана на информационных ресурсах трехслойной архитектуры. Intermediate results of the project aimed at improving methods of the detailed analysis, assessment and prediction of global climate change impact on the regional environment and climate are presented. New reliable interactive tools for in-depth statistical analysis and studying climate change impact obtained in this project will provide specialists, professionals, decision-makers and stakeholders with detailed climatic information. The project addresses the development of a topical virtual research environment (VRE) for the comprehensive study of ongoing and possible future climate change. It analyses the relevant subsequent effects. Such VRE will provide full topical informational required for studying regional economic, political and social consequences of the global climate change. The ultimate goal of this work is a design of hardware and software prototype supporting the topical virtual research environment for climate and environmental monitoring and analysis of the impact of climate change on socioeconomic processes on both local and regional scales. This VRE will integrate both already known and new archives of climate data sets with software realizations of traditional and advanced methods for statistical analysis of big spatial data sets. VRE prototype will provide scientists, decision-makers and stakeholders the access to processing resources and services for interactive analysis of geographically distributed spatial data through a web browser. It will present the results of the analysis using geoinformation technologies and ensure the systematization of spatial data and associated climate information. Also, the work describes an ontological approach to this systematization, which makes it possible to compare the semantics of meteorological and climatic parameters used in different collections and applied problems.

Design and Development Based on Embedded System

The demand for equipment has been unable to meet the current and future high performance application anddevelopment needs with the rapid development of electronic technology and upgrading of traditional industries inChina. At the same time, intense market competition and technical competition require that the development cycle ofthe product to be as short as possible. Obviously, the software and hardware of embedded system are becoming moreimportant foundation of technological innovation in various fi elds. The embedded system is a combination of advancedcomputer technology, semiconductor technology, electronic technology and the specific application of variousindustries. This determines that it must be a technology-intensive, capital-intensive, highly fragmented and innovativeknowledge integration system. The embedded type is based on the application of computer technology-based hardwareand software can be tailored to adapt to the application system on the function, reliability, cost, size, power and otherstrict requirements of the special computer system. The emergence of consumer appliances and cheap microprocessorsembedded systems will form larger application areas in daily life to as the embedded system usually has low powerconsumption, small size and high integration. Embedded employment is widely embedded in the social needs of largetalent. The content of the paper is clear in the embedded control system overview - development - application writingideas in three chapters gradually. Chapter 1 introduces the defi nition, frame, characteristic, development history, currentsituation and prospect of the embedded control system in detail. The development of the embedded control systemmainly discusses the development steps and methods. The third chapter embedded control system. This paper discussesthe practical application of embedded control system in public life. As the application of these research results in thefi nal summary of the various aspects of the system capacity and analysis of the existing problems for further research toprovide a direction and valuable experience.

Hardware and Software Implementations of Measuring System for Resonant Electromagnetic Vibratory Conveyor

Vibratory movements are one of the most ways for conveying and transportation of granular and particulate materials.Vibratory conveyors and feeders with electromagnetic excitation belong to a group of mechatronic devices that in an efficient wayprovides drive force and oscillations for this conveying. They have an important role in framework of the many industrial process inwhich are dominant the particulate materials: food processing, cement production, certain product line in steel industry,pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, etc. Therefore, they are representing a very important element of above mentioned technologicprocesses and production line. Especially, the vibratory conveyors and feeders that operate in the resonant mode are used in industrialapplications because of their energy efficiency increasing. The relatively small input energy of actuator drive causes intensivelyvibrations of load carry element (LCE) of vibratory conveyor. The intensity of the vibrations directly affects on gravimetric flow (massflow) and therefore on the productivity of vibratory conveyors. To ensure a reliable and energy-efficient operation of vibratoryconveyors, it is necessary to have a reliable and accurate measurement and testing of electrical and mechanical quantities. A hardwareand software implementation of the testing and measurement system of resonant vibratory conveyor with electromagnetic drive, andtheir corresponding data acquisition platform are presented in this paper. The experimental results obtained on a real laboratory setupof resonant vibratory conveyor are also shown.

Research on the Application of Cloud Computing in Medical Field

Cloud computing is a new Internet application model. The ultimate goal is to provide computing, services andapplications as a public facilities to the public, so that people can easily use the computer resources, while cloudcomputing as a new IT implementation of the way, is a profound impact on the development and transformation of IT.Cloud computing can provide enterprises with enterprise management key software, eff ectively reduce IT hardware andsoftware costs and maintenance costs, to adapt to the needs of enterprises in diff erent stages of development. But alsoto help small and medium enterprises to make it less IT investment, access to more professional, more comprehensiveIT solutions. With the rapid development of information industry, all walks of life have to speed up the information,the pace of digital, regional medical and health industry is no exception. China has long been concerned about themedical and health industry information construction, the new medical reform program is the release of the domesticregional medical information construction to a climax. Cloud computing as a cutting-edge technology of today's globalIT, its technology and philosophy to change the traditional computing resources application model, is to bring greatchanges in enterprise IT applications, it is particularly important in the role of regional medical information, with avery large Signifi cance. In this paper, the application of cloud computing in medical fi eld has been studied, and thedevelopment situation of cloud computing in medical fi eld at home and abroad is analyzed in detail. The new situationand the new situation of regional medical and health cloud will be put forward and forecast the development of cloudcomputing in medical fi eld prospect. In addition, we summarize the advantages of cloud computing to regional healthsystems, identify problems that exist in the development, present the risks and challenges it may bring, and put forwardcountermeasures against these problems and risks.

Multi-core model checking and maximum satisfiability applied to hardware-software partitioning

Bounded model checking (BMC) based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) is well-known by its capability to verify software. However, its use as optimisation tool, to solve hardware and software (HW-SW) partitioning problems, is something new. In particular, its integration with the maximum satisfiability solver vZ tool, which provides a portfolio of approaches for solving linear optimisation problems over SMT formulas, is unprecedented. We present new alternative approaches to solve the HW-SW partitioning problem. First, we use SMT-based BMC in conjunction with a multi-core support using open multi-processing to create four variants to solve the partitioning problem. The multi-core SMT-based BMC approaches allow initialising many verification instances based on the number of available processing cores, where each instance checks a different optimum value until the optimisation problem is satisfied. Additionally, we integrate the vZ into the BMC, making it a specialised solution for optimisation in a single-core environment. We implement all five approaches on top of the efficient SMT-based context-bounded model checker (ESBMC) and compare them to a state-of-the-art optimisation tool. Experimental results show that there is no single optimisation tool to solve all HW-SW partitioning benchmarks, but based on medium-size benchmarks, ESBMC-vZ had better performance.

Multi-core model checking and maximum satisfiability applied to hardware-software partitioning

Bounded model checking (BMC) based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) is well-known by its capability to verify software. However, its use as optimisation tool, to solve hardware and software (HW-SW) partitioning problems, is something new. In particular, its integration with the maximum satisfiability solver vZ tool, which provides a portfolio of approaches for solving linear optimisation problems over SMT formulas, is unprecedented. We present new alternative approaches to solve the HW-SW partitioning problem. First, we use SMT-based BMC in conjunction with a multi-core support using open multi-processing to create four variants to solve the partitioning problem. The multi-core SMT-based BMC approaches allow initialising many verification instances based on the number of available processing cores, where each instance checks a different optimum value until the optimisation problem is satisfied. Additionally, we integrate the vZ into the BMC, making it a specialised solution for optimisation in a single-core environment. We implement all five approaches on top of the efficient SMT-based context-bounded model checker (ESBMC) and compare them to a state-of-the-art optimisation tool. Experimental results show that there is no single optimisation tool to solve all HW-SW partitioning benchmarks, but based on medium-size benchmarks, ESBMC-vZ had better performance.

CREATION OF A TREE OF PHASES OF THE FOURFOLD MUTUAL SYSTEMS Na,Ba∥F,Cl,WO4

Multicomponent system is the basis for the development of compositions withdesired properties. Previously, the study of topology of multicomponent systemswas carried out using graph theory (method of indices of vertices). Due to thecomplex topological structure of component relationships, the study of such systemsis currently underway with the use of innovative methods: computer simulationand experimental study using the capabilities of modern hardware andsoftware of the experiment. In the framework of the innovative methodology ofthe study the reciprocal Quaternary system Na,Ba||F,Cl,WO4, at the level splittingin stable Association phases. The tree phases was confirmed experimentallyby means of DTA and XRD.

Self-reconfigurable control architecture for complex mobile robots

Abstract Advanced mobile robot systems need to accomplish increasingly complex task sets. However, to solve demanding problems, they are typically optimized to a very restricted set of tasks and environments. This work will therefore propose a self-reconfigurable software and hardware architecture to allow the dynamic optimization of a robot system depending on the current situation, i. e. the current task, the robot inner state, and the environment. The proposed framework is based on organic computing principles and unsupervised machine learning techniques. It further uses dynamically reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) as hardware accelerators. Preliminary results will be presented, which demonstrate the feasibility of the self-reconfiguration approach.