Search

This paper addresses the problem of programming, control and availability of distributed robots teams. Systems based on robots working together collaboratively has been the subject of much research in recent years. Because the rapid spread of technologies in mobile devices and Internet, as well as the benefits that robotics adds to the various everyday applications, the trend is that more and more it is present in various activities of human beings. For distributed robots systems there is a latent need for research to enable the use of such systems by end users with no or almost no experience with programming or robotics. Thus, this paper proposes a system architecture that allows the creation and programming of robots teams, allowing and users to manage them as a single system and simple way using collective knowledge acquired both programmers as of the and users. The tests are performed by an application that was developed under the concepts of this architecture. It provides a set of special operations by which and users can connect, create and control robots teams at high level. The experiments use LEGO Mindstorms® robots as members of two robot teams. The process of creation, programming and control of the teams is presented in well defined steps. The results are satisfactory and show that the operating strategy of the proposed system meets fundamental aspects at the system level such as modularity, flexibility and ease of access for end users.

Modern Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are pervasive components in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), designed to control industrial processes autonomously or as part of a distributed system topology. Its success may be explained by its robustness and reliability, being one of the most enduring legacies on modern ICS, despite having evolved very little over the last years. This paper proposes an x86-based virtual PLC (vPLC) architecture that decouples the logic and control capabilities from the I/O components, while virtualizing the PLC logic within a real-time hypervisor. To demonstrate the feasibility of this concept, the topic of real-time virtualization for x86 platforms is analyzed, together with an evaluation study of the properties of real-time workloads in partitioned hypervisor environments. European Commission H2020 ; 700581 - ATENA - Advanced Tools to assEss and mitigate the criticality of ICT compoNents and their dependencies over Critical InfrAstructures

In the development of the applications described in NCL language, it was noticed the reusing for some document models and structures, enabling repetitions for common codes in the applications.Thus, due to the need to generalize the development of applications described in the NCL language was created the Luar templates processing system. The Luar system has a templates processor developed with the Lua language and a library to keep and aggregate the collection of templates, sharing them between the developers.This paper has as goal to present the evaluation of the Luar system through software engineering experimental techniques. Language NCL and Lua courses were taught for undergraduate students group and compared the development time of two applications utilizing the different languages. The result showed that development with the Luar language is more productive than the development purely with NCL. It having the development time economy of 60% to 78% approximately, depending on the kind of application, compared with the authored with NCL.

This paper presents a characterization and modeling of the workload of the currently most popular cloud storage system, Drop box. The workload is analyzed from two complementary perspectives. On one side, characteristics of the Drop box folders of a set of 333 volunteers, including number, type and sizes of files, replication level, and file update dynamics are analyzed. On the other side, the client behavior patterns are modeled based on the analysis of Drop box traffic collected from 3 universities. Our results can be explored to design realistic synthetic workloads, which in turn can support the design and evaluation of more cost-effective cloud storage services.

The paper describes the development of an interactive video focusing on groundwater flow phenomena in embankment dams. Using digital video, html and javascript an interactive web application has been developed to provide a learning tool for soil mechanics students. The web application is able to indicate further references through social networks in order to stimulate interest and promote deeper learning of embankment dam engineering and related phenomena. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

International audience; Declarative techniques such as Constraint Program- ming are very useful in modeling complex requirements. They have the added benefit of being executable specifications and, when properly tuned, high-performance ones. In this paper we argue that Information Systems ought to include constraint-based techniques in their design and imple- mentation. We support this claim by introducing tools based on constraint programming, which we apply to an actual use-case: the academic timetable construction and maintenance problem, asdevelopedattheUniversityofE ́vora.Thesystemwebuiltwas implemented using the GNU Prolog language. Moreover, Constraints have the potential to describe global properties that a model must observe, which makes them a semantically very interesting extension to the capabilities of present model-driven techniques and tools.

This paper introduces the use of a flexible and affordable educational robot specifically developed for the practical experimentation inherent to technological disciplines. The robot has been designed to be reconfigurable and extendible, serving as an experimental platform across several undergraduate courses. As most students have a mobile cell phone, this was used as the main control computer for the so-called CellBot, thus avoiding any need to deal with the details of microcontrollers or other embedded computing devices. Assessment results are also presented, based on a pre- and post-survey of student opinion administered to 204 science and engineering students from several universities. Among the conclusions are that 83% of the students prefer to use these low-cost robots as tools to improve their learning of the theory in several disciplines, and 71% of the students stated that they prefer to have their own robot to experiment with, instead of using a didactic kit loaned to them by the university.

The development of network and system management software typically requires data models definition, the creation of specific applications respecting the data model, and yet the implementation of communication interfaces. Skilled professionals usually perform such tasks in a predefined sequence and using different development solutions, but any error or lacks in the data model frequently force to repeat several time-consuming tasks. In this paper we present an integrated development framework that simplifies the construction of NETCONF management applications, from data model specification to deployment and evaluation. The framework is available at http://atnog.av.it.pt/∼ptavares/ yangplugin.