Microcontroller-based Architecture Research Articles

Low-Cost Portable System for Measurement and Representation of 3D Kinematic Parameters in Sport Monitoring: Discus Throwing as a Case Study

Monitoring of sports practice has become an almost essential tool in high-level professional training. The knowledge of the exact movements performed by an athlete provides a great advantage over conventional training, since the best performance can be theoretically known in advance and the trainer will expect the real athlete's movements to approximate it. Following this trend, this article deals with the design and development of a low-cost wearable biofeedback system for the measurement and representation of kinematic parameters in 3D. To capture the athlete's movements, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is used, whose data are processed in an microcontroller-based architecture. The kinematic parameters of the athlete's movement are sent via Bluetooth to a smart phone, where they are displayed graphically. Experimental examples show the effectiveness of the device developed and illustrate the key results derived.

Footprint Reduction of Sensor Control Modules for Remote Portable Laboratories.

Following the automation of monitoring systems for pollution levels in cities or protected nature reserves, there comes a need to increase the autonomy of robotic vectors deployed in the field. Thus, it is important to consider the weight that these robots must hold in order to be able to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the environment. A balance must be struck in the size, weight, and complexity of the mobile laboratories used for measurement and the autonomy of robots, especially given that current technology does not allow, in most cases, a completely autonomous battery charging cycle. Thus, in this paper, we consider a microcontroller-based architecture for a mobile laboratory control system that will be used for installation on both an aerial and an aquatic mobile vector. We found that such a system can be repurposed for several sensor types and configurations, thus being able to massively reduce the space allocated when compared to embedded widespread products.

Time domain implementation of pediatric epileptic seizure detection system for enhancing the performance of detection and easy monitoring of pediatric patients

ObjectiveThe clinical phenomenon of epilepsy varies greatly among patients and this in turn, has its effect on the quality of life they lead. Studies reveal a requisite for efficient epileptic seizure detection techniques. In this work, an extensive study has been carried out for the detection of pediatric epileptic seizures. The major challenges of pediatric epileptic seizure detection lie in the extraction of appropriate features, adaptability of the method with respect to seizure signals, applicability to all types of seizure conditions and dependency on signal channels. MethodsElectroencephalogram (EEG) signals have been used as input which is processed with discrete wavelet transform (DWT) using multi-resolution analysis. Four different wavelets such as Daubechies, Symlet, Bi-orthogonal and Coiflet have been used for feature extraction. The classifier used for this work is artificial neural network (ANN). Microcontroller based prototype model has been used for substantiation of the designed architecture. ResultsThe work has been verified using the CHB-MIT EEG database for pediatric patients. Records of 10 patients have been selected and the measurement criteria showed the highest accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 95.3%, 97.2% and 93.5% respectively for sym4 wavelet. ConclusionA prototype microcontroller-based model has been designed using MATLAB/SIMULINK and ARDUINO. The advantage of the work is that it is not patient-specific or channels specific, hence it can be used to detect partial as well as generalized seizure. SignificanceThe significance of the proposed microcontroller-based architecture lies in its low power consumption, accurate seizure detection in a minimum amount of time and having the compatibility of working with computers and sensors. This proposed prototype can be used in the future for designing a hardware-based detection system that would be portable and non-invasive in nature.

Towards Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures for Edge Computing

In recent years, the edge computing paradigm has been attracting much attention in the Internet-of-Things domain. It aims to push the frontier of computing applications, data, and services away from the usually centralized cloud servers to the boundary of the network. The benefits of this paradigm shift include better reactivity and reliability, reduced data transfer costs toward the centralized cloud servers, and enhanced confidentiality. The design of energy-efficient edge compute nodes requires, among others, low power cores such as microprocessors. Heterogeneous architectures are key solutions to address the crucial energy-efficiency demand in modern systems. They combine various processors providing attractive power and performance trade-offs. Unfortunately, no standard heterogeneous microcontroller-based architecture exists for edge computing. This paper deals with the aforementioned issue by exploring typical low power architectures for edge computing. Various heterogeneous multicore designs are developed and prototyped on FPGA for unbiased evaluation. These designs rely on cost-effective and inherently ultra-low power cores commercialized by Cortus SA, a world-leading semiconductor IP company in the embedded ultra-low power microcontroller domain. Some microarchitecture-level design considerations, e.g., floating point and out-of-order computing capabilities, are taken into account for exploring candidate solutions. In addition, a tailored and flexible multi-task programming model is defined for the proposed architecture paradigm. We analyze the behavior of various application programs on available core configurations. This provides valuable insights on the best architecture setups that match program characteristics, so as to enable increased energy-efficiency. Our experiments on multi-benchmark programs show that on average 22% energy gain can be achieved (up to 45%) compared to a reference system design, i.e., a system with the same execution architecture, but agnostic of the task management insights gained from the comprehensive evaluation carried out in this work.

A Novel Implementation of UHF RFID Reader

The radio frequency identification technology is a kind of emerging non-contact identification technology. In the study of radio frequency identification reader, the traditional microcontroller-based architecture can’t meet the system requirements due to the limited processing ability. In this paper, the author designs a UHF RFID reader based on the ARM processor and FPGA, compared to the microcontroller-based architecture, the reader deals faster. The reader consists of three parts, namely, the protocol processing module, the digital baseband module and the RF module.

Microcontroller-based process monitoring and management using embedded Petri-nets

This paper presents a methodology enabling the deployment and utilisation of a microcontroller based process monitoring system. This approach utilises the results of research into the embedding of Petri-net functions within microcontroller based architectures. This research is presented here through its application to the design, development and deployment of a process monitoring system into a laboratory based hydro-forming press test rig. The paper illustrates how this approach can provide real time online process information and demonstrates how the microcontroller-based architecture can be used to identify the cause and effects of process faults. The paper further considers how results are captured and processed, and how the management information that they enable can be displayed using a web page based architecture.

Employing a Microcontroller Architecture for the Implementation of an Advanced PID Autotuner

Abstract The paper describes the implementation of a fast, IMC-based autotuning PID on a low cost, microcontroller-based architecture. After a brief overview of the presented device, the most important aspects of the control law and of the tuning procedure, namely the use of integer computations and the problems encountered due to the smalla amount of memory available, are pointed out. A test performed with the device are also reported.

Microcontroller-based architecture for control of a six joint robot arm

A robot arm controller has been developed with a dual emphasis on performance and flexibility. It includes a general-purpose interface for a host microcomputer, and can be configured with up to two floating-point signal processors. The controller responds to high-level control commands from the host, computes the arm trajectory, and corrects motion errors in real-time using Newton-Euler equations. By relieving the host computer of all computational requirements, this controller design permits one host to control multiple robot arms while maintaining maximum performance.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>