34506295
The low power energy aware processing (LEAP)embedded networked sensor system
3084327
Efficient Planning of Informative Paths for Multiple Robots
In many sensing applications, including environmental monitoring, measurement systems must cover a large space with only limited sensing resources. One approach to achieve required sensing coverage is to use robots to convey sensors within this space. Planning the motion of these robots - coordinating their paths in order to maximize the amount of information collected while placing bounds on their resources (e.g., path length or energy capacity) - is aNP-hard problem. In this paper, we present an efficient path planning algorithm that coordinates multiple robots, each having a resource constraint, to maximize the "informativeness" of their visited locations. In particular, we use a Gaussian Process to model the underlying phenomenon, and use the mutual information between the visited locations and remainder of the space to characterize the amount of information collected. We provide strong theoretical approximation guarantees for our algorithm by exploiting the submodularity property of mutual information. In addition, we improve the efficiency of our approach by extending the algorithm using branch and bound and a region-based decomposition of the space. We provide an extensive empirical analysis of our algorithm, comparing with existing heuristics on datasets from several real world sensing applications.
13977499
Energy based path planning for a novel cabled robotic system
Cabled robotic systems have been used for a diverse set of applications such as environmental sensing, search and rescue, sports and entertainment and air vehicle simulators. In this paper, we introduce a new cabled robot- Networked Info Mechanical System for Planar actuation (NIMS-PL), with energy profiling capabilities. Accurate energy measurements supported by NIMS-PL enable path planning that optimizes the robotpsilas path subject to an upper bound on energy consumption. We performed extensive empirical validation of the optimized path planning approach in simulation using an environmental sensing application as an example. We also validated the simulation results using NIMS-PL, demonstrating significant improvements in the sensing task when accounting with accurate energy measurements as opposed to Euclidean distance, which is typically used for modeling energy spent in path traversal.
14857728
Human assisted robotic team campaigns for aquatic monitoring
Large-scale environmental sensing, e.g., understanding microbial processes in an aquatic ecosystem, requires coordination across a multidisciplinary team of experts working closely with a robotic sensing and sampling system. We describe a human-robot team that conducted an aquatic sampling campaign in Lake Fulmor, San Jacinto Mountains Reserve, California during three consecutive site visits (May 9–11, June 19–22, and August 28–31, 2006). The goal of the campaign was to study the behavior of phytoplankton in the lake and their relationship to the underlying physical, chemical, and biological parameters. Phytoplankton form the largest source of oxygen and the foundation of the food web in most aquatic ecosystems. The reported campaign consisted of three system deployments spanning four months. The robotic system consisted of two subsystems—NAMOS (networked aquatic microbial observing systems) comprised of a robotic boat and static buoys, and NIMS-RD (rapidly deployable networked infomechanical systems) comprised of an infrastructure-supported tethered robotic system capable of high-resolution sampling in a two-dimensional cross section (vertical plane) of the lake. The multidisciplinary human team consisted of 25 investigators from robotics, computer science, engineering, biology, and statistics.We describe the lake profiling campaign requirements, the robotic systems assisted by a human team to perform high fidelity sampling, and the sensing devices used during the campaign to observe several environmental parameters. We discuss measures taken to ensure system robustness and quality of the collected data. Finally, we present an analysis of the data collected by iteratively adapting our experiment design to the observations in the sampled environment. We conclude with the plans for future deployments.
2744750
Mobile Robot Sensing for Environmental Applications
This paper reports the first application of iterative experimental design methodology for high spatiotemporal resolution characterization of river and lake aquatic systems performed using mobile robot sensing systems. Both applications involve dynamic phenomena spread over large spatial domain: 1) Characterization of contaminant concentration and flow at the confluence of two major rivers displaying dynamics due to flow of the water; and 2) Characterization of rapidly evolving biological processes such as phytoplankton dynamics in a lake system. We describe the development and application of a new general purpose method for mobile robot sensing in such environments - Iterative experiment Design for Environmental Applications (IDEA). IDEA introduces in-field adaptation of mobile robotic sensing system. Analysis of the complex spatial and temporal structures associated with each observed environment is presented. Detailed characterization of the observed environment using IDEA methodology is used as an informed prior to improve the performance of the existing adaptive experimental design approaches for mobile robotic systems - stratified adaptive sampling and hierarchical non-stationary Gaussian Processes.
17257241
SoC synthesis with automatic hardware-software interface generation
Design of efficient system-on-chips (SoCs) requires thorough application analysis to identify various compute intensive parts. These compute intensive parts can be mapped to hardware in order to meet the cost as well as the performance constraints. However, faster time to market requires automation of synthesis of these code segments of the application from high level specification such as C along with its interfaces. Such a synthesis system should be able to generate hardware which is easily pluggable in various types of architectures, as well as augment the application code to automatically take advantage of this new hardware component. In this paper, we address this problem and present an approach for complete SoC synthesis. We automatically generate synthesizable VHDL for the compute intensive part of the application along with necessary interfaces. Our approach is generic in the sense that it supports various processors and buses by keeping a generic hardware interface on one end and a dedicated one on the other. The generated hardware can be used in a tightly or loosely coupled manner in terms of memory and register communication. We present the effectiveness of this approach for some commonly used image processing spatial filter applications.