Rainer Falsett

Reliable event-triggered systems for mechatronic applications

Mechatronic systems most often require hard real-time behaviour of the controlling system. The standard solution for this kind of application is based on the time-triggered approach, and for certain circumstances the schedulability is provable. In contrast, this paper introduces an approach using some hardware enhancements that allow first to substitute the time-triggered system by an event-triggered system but conserving the reliability, second to enhance the event-triggered system by a two-level reaction system while conserving the hard real-time capabilities and third to combine tasks to improve even the worst-case behaviour. This results in a hard-time-but-weak-logic reaction system when computing time is tide but maintains full processing capabilities and therefore exact reaction values for all reactions whenever possible. This meets the goal of creating an event-triggered and reliable system approach. Combining two or more events to more than one combination will improve the theoretical schedulability of the system too, especially in the case when configurable computing elements are used.

Autonomous Sensor Systems for Car Applications

The development of new powertrain functions has many goals: more power and torque, low fuel consumption and emission, best driving performance and a brand specific acoustics. In the future the accuracy of control in Motor Control Units (MCU) will increase more and more. For this reason open loop control will replaced by closed loop control. New and/or other values are needed for better algorithms in powertrain control. Autonomous sensor systems for automobile industry offer increased reliability due to the reduction of cable connections, novel sensing applications made possible by wireless data transfer and cost advantages resulting from the aforementioned aspects. These systems consist of a power generator, energy storage and data transceiver. The technological challenge for realizing such system is most of all the construction and fabrication of a mini power generator that matches the dimensions of standard sensor modules. In this paper different power generators for autonomous sensor systems are reviewed and systematically discussed. It is shown that low power thermoelectric generators can supply autonomous sensor systems with up to 7 mW utilizing waste energy of the engine.