Special Session on Design of Heterogeneous Cyber-Physical Systems at DSD2012

Dr. Davide Quaglia (University of Verona, Italy) is arranging a special session at the 15th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design.

Scope and topics:

Future cyber-physical systems will be heterogeneous systems made of components from different domains, such as digital (hardware, software, network) and analog (electronic, electromechanical, etc., as for instance MEMS, power sources, thermal sources, sensors and actuators). To fully exploit the potential of current nanoelectronics technologies, as well as to enable the integration of existing/new IPs and “More than Moore” devices, new methodologies and tools for multi-disciplinary and multi-scale design, modeling, and simulation are needed.

Papers on any of the following and related topics can be submitted to the special session:

• Foundations of heterogeneous systems: discrete and hybrid models of computation; domain-specific languages for specification (e.g., SysML, SystemC-AMS, VHDL-AMS).
• Efficient simulation and emulation of heterogeneous systems. Co-simulation techniques.
• Design and optimization of heterogeneous systems and co-design techniques.
• Case studies and applications include, but are not limited to, networked embedded systems and networked control systems taken from transportation (e.g., automotive), building automation, electricity generation and management, environmental monitoring, biomedical chips, tele-operation and robotics.

For you out there with an interest in smart dust (how to design them, how to simulate them, how to verify them), this could be a good session for you.

Yes – I’m in the review committee …

EHC: Energy Harvesting for Communications

This sounds like an interesting conference:

• First IEEE International Workshop on Energy Harvesting for Communications

Paper submission is already due, unfortunately. But the scope is very interesting:

“—
However, the energy harvesting process may be sporadic, due to which nodes may temporarily run out of energy. Algorithms and protocols need to be designed that are robust to the sporadic and possibly limited energy resources available for sensing and communication.
—”

I know at least three people following this blog who should keep their eyes open …

ELLIIT III – SAAB

One of today’s keynote speeches is held by Dr. Lars Rundqwist from SAAB. The topic of the speech is

Collaborating unmanned combat aircraft

The project is a joint French-Swedish-German project (Dassault-SAAB-Cassidian).

An overview of the American UAV is given. For example, typically two or three operators are required to man the aircraft. The collaboration between the vehicles is typically on the human level at the home/remote control base.

The Chinese soar eagle is also mentioned.

Currently research is on many small vehicles (swarms, etc.) The “new” vehicles should have a high level of autonomy, require a less number of operators per unit, adaptable to the mission, coordinated flight, task and role (re)allocation during mission.

A short description of Technology Readiness Levels is given. A thermometer of the status of your project. This project targets TRL 5. Further on, an outline of different autonomy levels is also presented. The project uses 6 levels. The lowest implies that remote operator controls everything. The highest implies that only an interrupt can be given by the operator, the rest is handled by the UAVs.

The technical challenges are plenty, plenty — all the way from flying the machine up to mission management, contingency plans, decision makings, etc. The main focus though, is on flight management and mission management where the flight management currently takes most resources.

Some more UAV:s

• RQ-11
• RQ-7
• MQ-1C
• and perhaps MAVs

Dr. Lundqwist describes a few examples on adaptation where the mission needs to be redefined on-the-fly (sorry). Even though a target has been identified there might be other hidden threats along the path. How do we manage the group of aircrafts to pass the threats but still take out the target, or possibly take out new target along the path.

(… and the project is run on Linux machines, CentOS distro btw.)

Project funded

The other day, the CENIIT board at Linköping University were very kind to believe in me and my proposed project on transceivers for body area networks (BAN).

I am now looking for master thesis students who are interested in working on body area networks. We will implement new high-speed (relatively) systems and look at a couple of new ideas.

For the interested, the google is out there… but two main sources are:

• Zimmerman
• Wegmüller

and there is a few blogs here on WordPress too, like for example:

• http://norfiden.wordpress.com

So, we are supposed to for some new ideas – but I’ll tell you more if you contact me… I’m looking for those who wants to do some FPGA hacking and a lot of MATLAB simulations, and of course some analog IC designers.