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We present the OpenFlexure Microscope software stack which provides computer control of our open source motorised microscope. Our diverse community of users needs both graphical and script-based interfaces. We split the control code into client and server applications interfaced via a web API conforming to the W3C Web of Things standard. A graphical interface is viewed either in a web browser or in our cross-platform Electron application, and gives basic interactive control including common operations such as Z stack acquisition and tiled scanning. Automated control is possible from Python and M atlab , or any language that supports HTTP requests. Network control makes the software stack more robust, allows multiple microscopes to be controlled by one computer, and facilitates sharing of equipment. Graphical and script-based clients can run simultaneously, making it easier to monitor ongoing experiments. We have included an extension mechanism to add functionality, for example controlling additional hardware components or adding automation routines. Using a Web of Things approach has resulted in a user-friendly and extremely versatile software control solution for the OpenFlexure Microscope, and we believe this approach could be generalized in the future to make automated experiments involving several instruments much easier to implement.

The civil aviation sector plays an increasingly significant role in transportation sustainability in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Driven by the concerns of sustainability in the aviation sector, more electrified aircraft propulsion technologies have emerged and form a very promising approach to future sustainable and decarbonized aviation. This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive and broad-scope survey of the recent progress and development trends in sustainable aviation electrification. Firstly, the architectures of electrified aircraft propulsion are presented with a detailed analysis of the benefits, challenges, and studies/applications to date. Then, the challenges and technical barriers of electrified aircraft propulsion control system design are discussed, followed by a summary of the control methods frequently used in aircraft propulsion systems. Next, the mainstream energy management strategies are investigated and further utilized to minimize the block fuel burn, emissions, and economic cost. Finally, an overview of the development trends of aviation electrification is provided.

Emerging 5G systems will need to seamlessly guarantee novel types of services in a multi-do-main ecosystem. New methodologies of network and infrastructure sharing facilitate the cooperation among the operators, exploiting the core and access sections of the system architecture. Network slicing (NS) is the operators' best technique for building and managing a network. Without NS, the 5G requirements in terms of flexibility, optimal resource utilization, and investment returns cannot materialize. Before slicing is commercially available, different sections of the 5G architecture should be modified to include NS. In this work, we present a novel dynamic radio access network slicing resource sharing method aimed to guarantee optimal service level agreements through the monitoring of each slice tenant's key performance indicators. The experiments are conducted following the 3GPP specifications, and the solution is validated using a testbed based on the main 5G functionalities. © 1979-2012 IEEE., Acknowledgments This work is supported by the research projects 5GROUTES (GA 951867), MSCA ITN 5G STEPF-WD (GA 722429), SPOT5G (TEC2017-87456-P), and AGAUR (2017-SGR-891). © 2021, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work.

Emerging 5G systems will need to seamlessly guarantee novel types of services in a multi-do-main ecosystem. New methodologies of network and infrastructure sharing facilitate the cooperation among the operators, exploiting the core and access sections of the system architecture. Network slicing (NS) is the operators' best technique for building and managing a network. Without NS, the 5G requirements in terms of flexibility, optimal resource utilization, and investment returns cannot materialize. Before slicing is commercially available, different sections of the 5G architecture should be modified to include NS. In this work, we present a novel dynamic radio access network slicing resource sharing method aimed to guarantee optimal service level agreements through the monitoring of each slice tenant's key performance indicators. The experiments are conducted following the 3GPP specifications, and the solution is validated using a testbed based on the main 5G functionalities. © 1979-2012 IEEE.

Almost every research project that focuses on the cooperation of autonomous robots for underwater operations designs their own architectures. As a result, most of these architectures are tightly coupled with the available robots/vehicles for their respective developments, and therefore the mission plan and management is done using an ad-hoc solution. Typically, this solution is tightly coupled to just one underwater autonomous vehicle (AUV), or a restricted set of them selected for the specific project. However, as the use of AUVs for underwater operations increases, there is the need to identify some commonalities and weaknesses of these architectures, specifically in relation to mission planning and management. In this paper, we review a selected number of architectures and frameworks that in one way or another make use of different approaches to mission planning and management. Most of the selected works were developed for underwater operations. Still, we have included some other architectures and frameworks from other domains that can be of interest for the survey. The explored works have been assessed using selected features related to mission planning and management, considering that underwater operations are performed in an uncertain and unreliable environment, and where unexpected events are not strange. Furthermore, we have identified and highlighted some potential challenges for the design and implementation of mission managers. This provides a reference point for the development of a mission manager component to be integrated in architectures for cooperative robotics in underwater operations, and it can serve for the same purposes in other domains of application.

The growing need of technological assistance to provide support to people with special needs demands for systems more and more efficient and with better performances. With this aim, this work tries to advance in a multirobot platform that allows the coordinated control of different agents and other elements in the environment to achieve an autonomous behavior based on the user’s needs or will. Therefore, this environment is structured according to the potentiality of each agent and elements of this environment and of the dynamic context, to generate the adequate actuation plans and the coordination of their execution.

Esta tesis trata sobre qué son los Web Services, la tecnología que es necesaria para su implementación y el uso de protocolos standards. Se incluyen algunos capítulos para ver como enfrentan el tema grandes empresas y sus productos asociados (Microsoft .NET, IBM Websphere, SUN ONE y Mono, como alternativa de implementación sobre LINUX)., Facultad de Informática

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones, which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control architectures is addressed. The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the support, and the partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project PERFoRM (2016b) for the fruitful discussions. The PERFoRM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Software-defined radio (SDR) clouds combine SDR concepts with cloud computing technology for designing and managing future base stations. They provide a scalable solution for the evolution of wireless communications. The authors focus on the resource management implications and propose a hierarchical approach for dynamically managing the real-time computing constraints of wireless communications systems that run on the SDR cloud.

The main objective of this research work is the development of an actuation control concept for a new morphing actuation mechanism made of smart materials, which is built from a shape memory alloy (SMA). Two lines of smart actuators were incorporated to a rectangular wing to modify the upper wing surface, made of a flexible skin, with the intention to move the laminar-to-turbulent transition point closer to the wing trailing edge. After a brief introduction of the morphing wing system architecture and requirements, the actuation lines' design and instrumentation are presented. The integrated controller controls the SMA actuators via an electrical current supply, so that the transducer position can be used to eliminate the deviation between the required values for vertical displacements (corresponding to the optimized airfoils) and their physical values. The final configuration of the integrated controller is a combination of a bi-positional (on–off) controller and a PI (proportional–integral) controller, due to the two heating and cooling phases of the SMA wires' interconnection. This controller must behave like a switch between the cooling and the heating phases, situations where the output current is 0 A, or is controlled by a PI type law. The PI controller for the heating phase is optimally tuned using integral and surface minimum error criteria (Ziegler–Nichols). The controller is numerically tested on the linear identified system in terms of time response, Bode diagram, amplitude and phase stability margins, and root-locus.

Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, a review, analysis, and evaluation of the 30 existing service analysis approaches presented in this paper have shown that a comprehensive approach to the identification and analysis of both business and supporting software services is missing. Based on this evaluation of existing approaches and additional sources, we close this gap by proposing an integrated, consolidated approach to business and software service analysis that combines and extends the strengths of the examined methodologies.

Recent developments in robotics and the associated fields of computer vision and sensors pave the floor for automated robotic solutions, exploitable in the wider field of inspection of civil infrastructures and particularly transportation tunnels, the latter ageing urgently requiring inspection and assessment. Currently, tunnel inspections are performed via visually by human operators. This can result into slow, labour expensive and subjective process often requiring lane shutdown during the inspection, parameters that need to be lowered while having safety requirements and tunnel uptimes increasing. ROBINSPECT is an EC research project (FP7 - ICT - 611145) driven by the tunnel inspection industry, that adapts and integrates recent research results in intelligent control in robotics, computer vision and active continuous learning and sensing, in an innovative, integrated, robotic system that automatically scans the intrados of tunnels for potential defects on the surface while at the same time inspects and measures radial deformation in the cross-section, distance between parallel cracks, cracks and open joints that impact tunnel stability, with mm accuracies. Intelligent control systems and robotics are integrated to set an automatic robotic arm manipulation and autonomous vehicle navigation so as to minimize humans' interaction during tunnel inspection. This way, the structural condition and safety of a tunnel is assessed automatically, reliably and speedily. The robotic system will be evaluated at the research infrastructure of tunnels of VSH, at three road tunnels of the Egnatia Motorway and the rail tunnel of London Underground. This paper will focus on the ROBISPECT EC project first year activities starting from the requirements, specifications and system architecture as well as the technologies that will be integrated and overall technological solution. Also it will provide the current status of implementations and following steps as well as its expected European and International impact.

Cooperative behavior realization is an important aspect of Multi-Agent Systems, and it has been widely addressed by the robotics community. However, the interaction among multiple robots and a human operator still requires a non-negligible effort to be effective. The availability of modern input devices can ease the behavior composition process, allowing a user to train Multi-Agent Systems by using alternative methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to integrate Tangible User Interfaces within a reconfigurable software architecture, for cooperative Multi-Robot Systems. To address a real test case, we implemented a strategy training system for a humanoid RoboCup soccer team. Such a system allows a human coach to train several robotic players by using multiple input interfaces, directly onto the application field.

Evolvability, the ability to respond effectively to change, represents a major challenge to today's high-end embedded systems, such as those developed in the medical domain by Philips Healthcare. These systems are typically developed by multi-disciplinary teams, located around the world, and are in constant need of upgrading to provide new advanced features, to deal with obsolescence, and to exploit emerging enabling technologies. Despite the importance of evolvability for these types of systems, the field has received scant attention from the scientific and engineering communities. Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems focuses on the topic of evolvability of embedded systems from an applied scientific perspective. In particular, the book describes results from the Darwin project that researched evolvability in the context of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. This project applied the Industry-as-Laboratory paradigm, in which industry and academia join forces to ensure continuous knowledge and technology transfer during the projects lifetime. The Darwin project was a collaboration between the Embedded Systems Institute, the MRI business unit of Philips Healthcare, Philips Research, and five Dutch universities. Evolvability was addressed from a system engineering perspective by a number of researchers from different disciplines such as software-, electrical- and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on economic decision making. The research focused on four areas: data mining, reference architectures, mechanisms and patterns for evolvability, in particular visualization & modelling, and economic decision making. Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems is targeted at both researchers and practitioners; they will not only find a state-of-the-art overview on evolvability research, but also guidelines to make systems more evolvable and new industrially-validated techniques to improve the evolvability of embedded systems.

The DASiPM2 project is funded by INFN and is aimed at the development of a demonstrator of a PET system based on SiPM photo-detectors. In this framework an FPGA based DAQ system has been designed and developed at INFN-Pisa to read and characterize 4x4 SiPM matrices. The system architecture, the first test and characterization results and the planned future development activities are here described.

The present paper describes the design of a hybrid actuation control concept, a fuzzy logic proportional-integral-derivative plus a conventional on-off controller, for a new morphing mechanism using smart materials as actuators, which were made from shape memory alloys (SMA). The research work described here was developed for the open loop phase of a morphing wing system, whose primary goal was to reduce the wing drag by delaying the transition (from laminar to fully turbulent flows) position toward the wing trailing edge. The designed controller drives the actuation system equipped with SMA actuators to modify the flexible upper wing skin surface. The designed controller was also included, as an internal loop, in the closed loop architecture of the morphing wing system, based on the pressure information received from the flexible skin mounted pressure sensors and on the estimation of the transition location.The controller’s purposes were established following a comprehensive presentation of the morphing wing system architecture and requirements. The strong nonlinearities of the SMA actuators’ characteristics and the system requirements led to the choice of a hybrid controller architecture as a combination of a bi-positional on-off controller and a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). In the chosen architecture, the controller would behave as a switch between the SMA cooling and heating phases, situations where the output current is 0A or is controlled by the FLC.In the design phase, a proportional-integral-derivative scheme was chosen for the FLC. The input-output mapping of the fuzzy model was designed, taking account of the system’s error and its change in error, and a final architecture for the hybrid controller was obtained. The shapes chosen for the inputs’ membership functions were s -function, π-function, and z -function, and product fuzzy inference and the center average defuzzifier were applied (Sugeno).