Luca Bergesio

Analysis of key aspects to manage wireless sensor networks in ambient assisted living environments

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based on ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 will be key enablers of non-invasive, highly sensitive infrastructures to support the provision of future ambient assisted living services. This paper addresses the main design concerns and requirements when conceiving ambient care systems (ACS), frameworks to provide remote monitoring, emergency detection, activity logging and personal notifications dispatching services. In particular, the paper describes the design of an ACS built on top of a WSN composed of Crossbows MICAz devices, external sensors and PDAs enabled with ZigBee technology. The middleware is integrated in an OSGi framework that processes the acquired information to provide ambient services and also enables smart network control. From our experience, we consider that in a future, the combination of ZigBee technology together with a service oriented architecture may be a versatile approach to AAL services offering, both from the technical and business points of view.

Drone Mission Definition and Implementation for Automated Infrastructure Inspection Using Airborne Sensors

This paper describes a Mission Definition System and the automated flight process it enables to implement measurement plans for discrete infrastructure inspections using aerial platforms, and specifically multi-rotor drones. The mission definition aims at improving planning efficiency with respect to state-of-the-art waypoint-based techniques, using high-level mission definition primitives and linking them with realistic flight models to simulate the inspection in advance. It also provides flight scripts and measurement plans which can be executed by commercial drones. Its user interfaces facilitate mission definition, pre-flight 3D synthetic mission visualisation and flight evaluation. Results are delivered for a set of representative infrastructure inspection flights, showing the accuracy of the flight prediction tools in actual operations using automated flight control.

A Distributed Drone-Oriented Architecture for In-Flight Object Detection

Drones are increasingly being used to provide support to inspection tasks in many industrial sectors and civil applications. The procedure is usually completed off-line by the final user, once the flight mission terminated and the video streaming and conjoint data gathered by the drone were examined. The procedure can be improved with real-time operation and automated object detection features. With this purpose, this paper describes a cloud-based architecture which enables real-time video streaming and bundled object detection in a remote control center, taking advantage of the availability of high-speed cellular networks for communications. The architecture, which is ready to handle different types of drones, is instantiated for a specific use case, the inspection of a telecommunication tower. For this use case, the specific object detection strategy is detailed. Results show that the approach is viable and enables to redesign the traditional inspection procedures with drones, in a step forward between manual operation and full automation.

A multimodal interaction system for big displays

Big displays and ultrawalls are increasingly present in nowadays environments (e.g. in city spaces, buildings, transportation means, teaching rooms, operation rooms, convention centres, etc.), at the same time that they are widely used as tools for collaborative work, monitoring and control in many other contexts. How to enhance interaction with big displays to make it more natural and fluent is still an open challenge. This paper presents a system for multimodal interaction based on pointing and speech recognition. The system makes possible for the user to control the big display through a combination of pointing gestures and a set of control commands built on a predefined vocabulary. The system is already prototyped and being used for service demonstrations for different applications.

Experimental prototype for remote tower systems design

Small and medium-sized airports are poorly occupied or occupied for a small period of time, hence the remote control towers are a good solution to control air traffic in these airports. A surveillance and monitoring air traffic prototype has been built to test surveillance, control and visualization concepts. The prototype is comprised of a hybrid real-synthetic scenario using augmented reality techniques to evaluate the operation of the surveillance/vision systems, observing the behavior of this system with different targets, backgrounds, inclement weather, etc. and helping the design/experimentation of novel control procedures in the airport area. This allows the analysis of risky situations and the controller training without putting at risk neither people nor material goods.

An Object-Oriented Model for Object Orchestration in Smart Environments

Abstract: Nowadays, the heterogeneity of interconnected things and communication technologies creates several small worlds composed of a single object and a smartphone. For each object, the user needs to download a specific application, search and connect the device. The result is a waste of valuable resources: several objects are able to communicate with the smartphone, but they cannot directly interact among them. In this paper, we propose a model that can be used to define a set of standard interfaces suitable for every smart object. Devices that adhere to the same model can be easily controlled and placed in relation among them, creating multi-object behaviors for a smart space. The smartphone is still a control center, but with a single application it is possible to control and personalize spaces in a holistic way, instead of using the traditional one-to-one approach. Moreover, personalization should be portable: it is desirable that a behavior works in as many smart spaces as possible, at least in a similar way as it does in the environment in which it was configured, freeing the user from the tedious task of adapting it manually every time s/he goes to another space. A portable personalization extends the bring your own device paradigm to a new “bring your own space” paradigm. The model is inspired in the object-oriented programming, reinterpreting features such as inheritance and polymorphism to the real world, so it is possible to provide a software system able to adapt existing behaviors to new spaces. The use of the model is exemplified in the paper with two examples of smart spaces.

PERSEO: A system to Personalize smart Environments through Smartphones, sEnsors and media Objects

Smartphones have a great potential as tools to adapt daily living spaces to the specific needs of its inhabitants. These devices usually host selected content, personal information and useful applications for their users, apart from continuously gath- ering their context data and preferences. Taking this fact as starting point, this paper describes PERSEO, a system that imple- ments a mobile-instrumented interaction concept to personalize the smart space by using a network of presence sensors and media objects. PERSEO is device-centric and relies on physical interaction. This means that on touch, grasp or proximity with any of the trigger objects in the presence network (e.g. NFC or Bluetooth enabled devices), the smartphone seamlessly transfers contents or application control to the available (media) objects, in order to improve the user experience. The transfer actions are governed by an event-condition-action logic that may be customized by the user in the smartphone. Actions depend on the iden- tification of the foreground applications running in the smartphone hosting PERSEOs logic. To enable the interaction concept, it has been necessary to design and implement a custom Digital Media Controller based on REST interfaces compatible with DLNA standard for media streaming. The paper explains the interaction flows and details the architecture components through an Android-based mobile prototype working in a smart living room. The system performance has been positively evaluated in terms of response time. Additionally, a group of users have tried PERSEO and favorably informed about this mobile-object instrumented personalization approach.

Towards a Lightweight Mobile Semantic-Based Approach for Enhancing Interaction with Smart Objects

This work describes a semantic extension for a user-smart object interaction model based on the ECA paradigm (Event-Condition-Action). In this approach, smart objects publish their sensing (event) and action capabilities in the cloud and mobile devices are prepared to retrieve them and act as mediators to configure personalized behaviours for the objects. In this paper, the information handled by this interaction system has been shaped according several semantic models that, together with the integration of an embedded ontological and rule-based reasoner, are exploited in order to (i) automatically detect incompatible ECA rules configurations and to (ii) support complex ECA rules definitions and execution. This semantic extension may significantly improve the management of smart spaces populated with numerous smart objects from mobile personal devices, as it facilitates the configuration of coherent ECA rules.

A low power routing algorithm for localization in IEEE 802.15.4 networks

Many context-aware applications rely on the knowledge of the position of the user and the surrounding objects to provide advanced, personalized and real-time services. In wide-area deployments, a routing protocol is needed to collect the location information from distant nodes. In this paper, we propose a new source-initiated (on demand) routing protocol for location-aware applications in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. This protocol uses a low power MAC layer to maximize the lifetime of the network while maintaining the communication delay to a low value. Its performance is assessed through experimental tests that show a good trade-off between power consumption and time delay in the localization of a mobile device.