Kalinka Regina Lucas Jaquie Castelo Branco

CaRINA Intelligent Robotic Car: Architectural design and applications

Abstract This paper presents the development of two outdoor intelligent vehicles platforms named CaRINA I and CaRINA II, their system architecture, simulation tools, and control modules. It also describes the development of the intelligent control system modules allowing the mobile robots and vehicles to navigate autonomously in controlled urban environments. Research work has been carried out on tele-operation, driver assistance systems, and autonomous navigation using the vehicles as platforms to experiments and validation. Our robotic platforms include mechanical adaptations and the development of an embedded software architecture. This paper addresses the design, sensing, decision making, and acting infrastructure and several experimental tests that have been carried out to evaluate both platforms and proposed algorithms. The main contributions of this work is the proposed architecture, that is modular and flexible, allowing it to be instantiated into different robotic platforms and applications. The communication and security aspects are also investigated.

Tiriba - a new approach of UAV based on model driven development and multiprocessors

This paper presents the technical details of Tiriba, which is a small autonomous electrical airplane used into pre-defined missions and applications such as agricultural and environmental monitoring. This class of aircrafts has taken advantage of the miniaturization of electronic components and modules such as GPS receivers, digital cameras, wireless communication equipment, and other sensors. One of the main components of Tiriba is the autopilot module, which is capable to control the aircraft and keep it in a predefined route. This paper addresses the use of model driven development of the system and its multiprocessor platform to support the four components that compose the UAV control software architecture.

Adapting a software product line engineering process for certifying safety critical embedded systems

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software development paradigm that aims at reducing the development effort and shorting time-to-market through systematic software reuse. While this paradigm has been successfully applied for the development of embedded systems in various domains, new challenges have emerged from the development of safety critical systems that require certification against a specific standard. Existing SPLE approaches do not explicitly consider the various certification standards or levels that products should satisfy. In this paper, we focus on several practical issues involved in the SPLE process, establishing an infrastructure of a product line engineering for certified products. A metamodel is proposed to capture the entities involved in SPL certification and the relationships among them. ProLiCES, which is a model-driven process for the development of SPLs, was modified to serve as an example of our approach, in the context of the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) domain.

Incorporating certification in feature modelling of an unmanned aerial vehicle product line

Safety critical systems (e.g., an avionics control system for safe flight) are often required to achieve certification under pre-established standards (e.g., DO-178B for software considerations in airborne systems and equipment certification). We have been working with our industrial partner for the last three years to develop product line assets for their avionics software product line (SPL) and, recently, we encountered two major challenges regarding certification. Firstly, an individual product must be certified, but each may require a different certification level: there might be variations in the certification requirements according to specific system usage contexts. Secondly, certification involves not only product but also process, as standards such as DO-178B also assess the quality of the development process. In this paper, we propose to include a certification view during feature modelling to provide a better understanding of the relationships between features and a certification level required for each product. The experience of introducing certification into the design model of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) SPL is presented to illustrate some key ideas. We also describe the lessons we have learned from this experience.

PIV and WPIV: Performance Index For Heterogeneous Systems Evaluation

This article presents two new performance indices (PIV - performance index vector and WPIV - weighted performance index vector), to evaluate heterogeneous computing systems, based on a Euclidian metric. Aiming to maximize the use of the machines, the proposed indices are a combination of several usual indices and the results of their evaluation through a simulator show an appropriate behavior for different kinds of applications

Application of SOA in Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are having a widespread use in enterprise computing applications, being Web services the most common implementation. The use of SOA has also been proposed for embedded systems, although very little could be found in the literature on the use of SOA for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems. This paper discusses the use of SOA for the development of this class of systems. Safety-critical embedded systems have specific requirements such as high reliability and real time response, making the use of SOA more challenging than for standard applications. To make concepts clear, a case study on Avionics for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is presented. This is a complex application based on a reference model proposed by the authors. SOA shows to be a promising approach to implement parts of this reference model, especially in what concerns the missions played by the aircraft.

Using SOA in Critical-Embedded Systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are having a widespread use in enterprise computing applications, being Web services the most common implementation. The use of SOA has also been proposed for embedded systems, although very little could be found in the literature on the use of SOA for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems. This paper discusses the use of SOA for the development of this class of systems. Safety-critical embedded systems have specific requirements such as high reliability and real time response, making the use of SOA more challenging than for standard applications. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new form of segregating the UAV mission from the vehicle itself. In order to separate the mission of the plane the MOSA - Mission Oriented Sensors Array - is proposed, an array of sensors oriented to missions that is plugged into the aircraft so as to leave it totally independent of the payload. The techniques proposed in this paper not only aim to facilitate the development of applications but also allow different tasks to be performed simply switching such sensors and their association with the aircraft.

Performance evaluation of security techniques in web services

This paper proposes an evaluation and comparison of guidelines and techniques that allow the creation of secure Web services to determine whether the application has the desired characteristics related to performance and security. In this sense it is crucial evaluate the cryptographic algorithms and the key length used. The results obtained allow to determine, based on specified objectives, the impact of security mechanisms used in application performance.

Performance evaluation of a CMB protocol

This paper presents the performance evaluation of a CMB (Chandy-Misra-Bryant) protocol from the perspective of execution time. The performance of each logical process in simulation is measured. Our evaluation shows that logical processes can have different behaviors and different protocols can be used simultaneously in simulations. While some logical processes may perform well using conservative protocols, others can use optimistic protocols because otherwise most of the time these processes would be blocked unnecessarily. In order to analyze the behavior of the simulations some models were simulated using a CMB implementation called ParSMPLX. These models showed that each logical process of a simulation has a different behavior that makes it more suitable for a specific protocol, increasing the performance

Collision detection using received signal strength in FANETs

Autonomous vehicles are important to execute missions without the need to put at risk peoples life. To achieve this goal, it is essential that these vehicles are endowed of a collision avoidance system. In this study we discuss the use of received signal strength (RSS) of beacons from a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) as a way to detect dangerous approaches among autonomous vehicles. We extend this study to flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) as a way to provide obstacle avoidance in UAVs. Nowadays autonomous vehicles has the need to be connected, and consequently has wireless network devices forming vehicular networks like VANETs and flying ad hoc network as FANETs. It favors the use of signal strength of beacons as a way to detect dangerous approaches among autonomous vehicles. Initially we presented a study of signal strength variation in relation to the distance and further we investigated how speed influences the received signal strength. Finally we evaluate the results of applying the propagation path loss formula in obtained RSS values to estimate the distance.