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Societies and legislations are moving towards automated decision-making based on measured data in safety-critical environments. Over the next years, density and frequency of measurements will increase to generate more insights and get a more solid basis for decisions, including through redundant low-cost sensor deployments. The resulting data characteristics lead to large-scale system design in which small input data errors may lead to severe cascading problems including ultimately wrong decisions. To ensure internal data consistency to mitigate this risk in such IoT environments, fast-paced data fusion and consensus among redundant measurements need to be achieved. In this context, we introduce history-aware sensor fusion powered by accurate voting with clustering as a promising approach to achieve fast and informed consensus, which can converge to the output up to 4X faster than the state of the art history-based voting. Leveraging three case studies, we investigate different voting schemes and show how this approach can improve data accuracy by up to 30% and performance by up to 12% compared to state-of-the-art sensor fusion approaches. We furthermore contribute a specification format for easily deploying our methods in practice and use it to develop a pilot implementation. • Fast converging method and implementation to ensure data reliability. • VDX, a specification used to generate software voters and a pilot implementation. • AVOC, a method of using clustering to augment the accuracy of voting algorithms. • 3 data fusion and voting experiments based on real-world IoT use-cases for evaluation. • Simulated scaling experiment to evaluate our method for larger scale IoT deployments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend towards continuous manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry is associated with an increasing demand for advanced control strategies. It is a mandatory requirement to obtain reliable real-time information on critical quality attributes (CQA) during every process step as the decision on diversion of material needs to be performed fast and automatically. Where possible, production equipment should provide redundant systems for in-process control (IPC) measurements to ensure continuous process monitoring even if one of the systems is not available. In this paper, two methods for real-time monitoring of granule moisture in a semi-continuous fluid-bed drying unit are compared. While near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has already proven to be a suitable process analytical technology (PAT) tool for moisture measurements in fluid-bed applications, microwave resonance technology (MRT) showed difficulties to monitor moistures above 8% until recently. The results indicate, that the newly developed MRT sensor operating at four resonances is capable to compete with NIR spectroscopy. While NIR spectra were preprocessed by mean centering and first derivative before application of partial least squares (PLS) regression to build predictive models (RMSEP = 0.20%), microwave moisture values of two resonances sufficed to build a statistically close multiple linear regression (MLR) model (RMSEP = 0.07%) for moisture prediction. Thereby, it could be verified that moisture monitoring by MRT sensor systems could be a valuable alternative to NIR spectroscopy or could be used as a redundant system providing great ease of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine craft feedback control systems typically require estimates of position, velocity and heading where the wave-induced motions should be suppressed. This paper presents a strapdown inertial navigation system with adaptive wave filtering. Wave filtering based on inertial navigation systems differ from previous vessel-model-based designs that require knowledge of vessel parameters and mathematical models for estimation of thruster and wind forces and moments based on auxiliary sensors. The origin of the inertial navigation system's error states is proven to be uniformly semiglobally exponentially stable. The wave-filtering scheme uses the estimated states of the inertial navigation system to separate the low-frequency motion of the craft from the wave-frequency motions. The observer structure also allows for estimation of the time-varying encounter frequency by using a signal-based frequency tracker or an adaptive observer. Finally, properties following from the triple-redundant sensor packages have been utilized to obtain optimal and robust sensor fusion with respect to sensor performance and faults. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision based interfaces for human computer interaction have gained increasing attention over the past decade. This study presents a data fusion approach of the Nimble VR vision based system, using the Kinect camera, with the contact based 5DT Data Glove. Data fusion was achieved through a Kalman filter. The Nimble VR and filter output were compared using measurements performed on (1) a wooden hand model placed in various static postures and orientations; and (2) three differently sized human hands during active finger flexions. Precision and accuracy of joint angle estimates as a function of hand posture and orientation were determined. Moreover, in light of possible self-occlusions of the fingers in the Kinect camera images, data completeness was assessed. Results showed that the integration of the Data Glove through the Kalman filter provided for the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints of the fingers a substantial improvement of 79% in precision, from 2.2 deg to 0.9 deg. Moreover, a moderate improvement of 31% in accuracy (being the mean angular deviation from the true joint angle) was established, from 24 deg to 17 deg. The metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint was relatively unaffected by the Kalman filter. Moreover, the Data Glove increased data completeness, thus providing a substantial advantage over the sole use of the Nimble VR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the role of redundant sensory information to prevent the performance degradation of a chemical sensor array for different distributions of sensor failures across sensor types. The large amount of sensing conditions with two different types of redundancy provided by our sensor array makes possible a comprehensive experimental study. Particularly, our sensor array is composed of 8 different types of commercial MOX sensors modulated in temperature with two redundancy levels: (1) 12 replicates of each sensor type for a total of 96 sensors and (2) measurements using 16 load resistors per sensors for a total of 1536 redundant measures per second. We perform two experiments to determine the performance degradation of the array with increasing number of damaged sensors in two different scenarios of sensor faults distributions across sensor types. In the first experiment, we characterize the diversity and redundancy of the array for increasing number of damaged sensors. To measure diversity and redundancy, we proposed a functional definition based on clustering of sensor features. The second experiment is devoted to determine the performance degradation of the array for the effect of faulty sensors. To this end, the system is trained to separate ethanol, acetone and butanone at different concentrations using a PCA–LDA model. Test set samples are corrupted by means of three different simulated types of faults. To evaluate the performance of the array we used the Fisher score as a measure of odour separability. Our results show that to exploit to the utmost the redundancy of the sensor array faulty sensory units have to be distributed uniformly across the different sensor types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a low-cost sensor system composed of four GNSS-RTK receivers to obtain accurate position and posture estimations for a vehicle in real-time. The four antennas of the receivers are placed so that every three-antennas combination is optimal to get the most precise 3D coordinates with respect to a global reference system. The redundancy provided by the fourth receiver allows to improve estimations even more and to maintain accuracy when one of the receivers fails. A mini computer with the Robotic Operating System is responsible for merging all the available measurements reliably. Successful experiments have been carried out with a ground rover on irregular terrain. Angular estimates similar to those of a high-performance IMU have been achieved in dynamic tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with performance enhancement of low-cost, consumer-grade inertial sensors realized by means of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. Focusing their attention on the reduction of bias instability and random walk-driven drift of cost-effective MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes, the authors hereinafter propose a suitable method, based on a redundant configuration and complemented with a proper measurement procedure, to improve the performance of low-cost, consumer-grade MEMS sensors. The performance of the method is assessed by means of an adequate prototype and compared with that assured by a commercial, expensive, tactical-grade MEMS inertial measurement unit, taken as reference. Obtained results highlight the promising reliability and efficacy of the method in estimating position, velocity, and attitude of vehicles; in particular, bias instability and random walk reduction greater than 25% is, in fact, experienced. Moreover, differences as low as 0.025 rad and 0.89 m are obtained when comparing position and attitude estimates provided by the prototype and those granted by the tactical-grade MEMS IMU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents the results of a study on fault-tolerant control of a ship propulsion benchmark [Izadi-Zamanabadi, R., & Blanke, M. (1999). A ship propulsion system as a benchmark for fault tolerant control. Control Engineering Practice, 7 (2), 227–239] which uses estimated or virtual measurements as feedback variables. The estimator operates on a self-adjustable design model so that its outputs can be made immune to the effects of a specific set of component and sensor faults. The adequacy of sensor redundancy is measured using the control reconfigurability [Wu, N. E., Zhou, K., & Salomon, G. (2000). Reconfigurability in linear time-invariant systems. Automatica, 36 (11), 1767–1771] and the number of sensor based measurements are increased when this level is found inadequate. As a result, sensor faults that are captured in the estimator''s design model can be tolerated without the need for any reconfiguration actions. Simulations for the ship propulsion benchmark show that, with additional sensors added as described and the estimator in the loop, satisfactory fault-tolerance is achieved under two additive sensor faults, an incipient fault, and a parametric fault, without having to alter the original controller in the benchmark. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]