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Evolution plays an increasingly important role in enabling autonomous robots to survive in a partly uncertain and changing environment. Yet the growing success of domestic and field robotics shows the importance of a design framework. The design methodology presented here explicitly addresses design and evolution integration. Mimicking the biological nervous system's network of neurons, a comparable...
This paper is concerned with increasing the reliability with respect to debris impact of computing systems on board satellites using Fault Tolerant Distributed Computing. A novel adaptive middleware for fault-tolerance (AMFT) design is presented. The middleware performs failure detection, isolation and recovery and synchronizes the operation of a distributed On-Board Computer (OBC) system. If one...
Modern FPGA technology allows to modify the hardware configuration of a device not only as a whole, but partially and dynamically at run-time. How to exploit this capability for the implementation of more efficient or less costly systems, for gaining higher system performance or for improvement of life-time reliability issues are topics of current research. In this keynote, we first introduce the...
In this paper a new approach to implement adaptive hardware (AH) based on memFETs crossbar structure is presented. We report a novel computing hardware principle called Shape-Shifting Digital Hardware (SSDH) oriented to execute task requirements in a dynamic, flexible, efficient and adaptive way. In this technique not only the logic functions are modifiable (as in the case of Field Programmable Gate...
Adaptability is undoubtedly one of the most important characteristics of autonomous robots working in real-world outdoor applications. Due to the fact that real-world outdoor environments are dynamic and uncertain, an ability to adapt to cues provided from environments is a potentially important aspect for adaptable robots. This paper proposes an artificial hormone network as a mechanism to alter...
A new Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technology is proposed. The technology is targeting the implementation of a highly secure unclonable electromechanical device. The resulting system includes a physical unit providing identification properties mutually-dependent on both microelectronic and mechanical components. The technology is based on combining very high frequency wave propagation, scattering...
A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a microcontroller-based chip, which provides a hardware-based security to the user's data, cryptographic keys, and other secrets. For this purpose, the TPM is equipped with hardwired cryptographic engines such as RSA, SHA-1, and HMAC that rely on correspondingly uncompromised cryptographic algorithms. For example, the RSA (asymmetric) engine on the TPM utilizes the...
One of the most frequently used techniques for increasing systems' fault-tolerance is N-Modular Redundancy (NMR). The voter in an NMR system besides outputting the voting result can also indicate the situation on its input side, for instance, how many modules agree to the result of voting and which of the modules do not agree. Having this information, elaborated systems may initiate various actions...
Bio-inspired hardware has made great progress in the field of fault-tolerance during the past decades. This paper presents a novel architecture, the virtual-PIG (VPIG), due to the lack of an appropriate platform for the bio-inspired hardware research. The virtual-PIG is derived from PIG (Processing Integrated Grid) and RISA (Reconfigurable Integrated System Array). The VPIG cluster consists of a MCU...
Unlike other digital signal processing techniques such as the Fast Fourier Transform for one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) data (FFT1 and FFT2) that assume signal linearity and stationarity, the Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) utilizes relationships between arbitrary signal's local extrema to find the signal instantaneous spectral representation. This is done in two steps. Firstly, the Huang...
The increasing demand for higher data rates, smaller antenna apertures, or less power at the uplink for mobile devices requires air-interface and application specific processing, especially for telecommunication satellites. Only on satellites for dedicated applications or with a short limited lifetime, on-board processing is partly used, but processing on-board improves the system performance or increases...
K-nearest neighbour (KNN) is a supervised classification technique that is widely used in many fields of study to classify unknown queries based on some known information about the dataset. KNN is known to be robust and simple to implement when dealing with data of small size. However it performs slowly when data are large and have high dimensions. Therefore, KNN classifiers can benefit from the parallelism...
The paper proposes methods to detect and track emergent kinetic data representing clouds of physical entities, e.g., clouds of polluting gas, or clusters of autonomous agents, like robots or vehicles. Kinetic data are important entities in Cyber-Physical Systems as they express phenomena that are distributed in space and time, and are dynamic with respect to their characteristic attributes and lifetime...
Microelectronics and embedded systems for space applications are built to withstand the harsh environment of space and operate autonomously using scarce resources. This talk will describe research projects aimed at increasing the reliability and miniaturisation of computing systems for data processing and control on board satellites. First, the need and challenges of designing embedded systems for...
Spacecraft on-board platforms will soon contain high performance off-the-shelf computing components, as the only way to deal with applications which require High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities. Heterogeneous architectures, give the possibility to profit from specific features of such components, by combining them on the same computing platform. Such architectures integrate different multicore...
The exploration of Mars is one of the main goals for NASA/ESA, as confirmed by past and recent activities. One of the most challenging tasks for these missions is the autonomous robot's navigation. Existing approaches incorporate vision-based solutions and exhibit remarkable results in term of accuracy. Unfortunately, these approaches affect mostly computational and memory intensive algorithms running...
Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a popular method to monitor processes in several contexts, especially when dealing with incidents at distinct points in time. Specific temporal combinations of various events are often of special interest for automatic detection. For the description of such patterns, one can either implement rules in some higher programming language or use some Event Description Language...
This paper describes an accuracy programmable sigmoidal neuron design and its hardware implementation. The “recursive neuron” can be adjusted to produce recursively more accurate and smoother piecewise linear approximations to the sigmoidal neural squashing function. This adaptive accuracy neuron, combined with a constructive training algorithm, can be used as the basic component for the implementation...
Reconfigurable hardware is gaining a steadily growing interest in the domain of space applications. The ability to reconfigure the information processing infrastructure at runtime together with the high computational power of today's FPGA architectures at relatively low power makes these devices interesting candidates for data processing in space applications. Partial dynamic reconfiguration of FPGAs...
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