Search results for "wireless sensor"
showing 10 items of 375 documents
Detection of User Activities in Intelligent Environments
2014
Research on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) focuses on the development of smart environments adaptable to the needs and preferences of their inhabitants. For this reason it is important to understand and model user preferences. In this chapter we describe a system to detect user behavior patterns in an intelligent workplace. The system is designed for a workplace equipped in the context of Sensor9k, a project carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Palermo (Italy). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.
Extracting Structured Knowledge From Sensor Data for Hybrid Simulation
2014
Obtaining continuous and detailed monitoring of indoor environments has today become viable, also thanks to the widespread availability of effective and flexible sensing technology; this paves the way for the design of practical Ambient Intelligence systems, and for their actual deployment in real-life contexts, which require advanced functionalities, such as for instance the automatic discovery of the activities carried on by users. Novel issues arise in this context; on one hand, it is important to reliably model the phenomena under observation even though, to this end, it is often necessary to craft a carefully designed prototype in order to test and fine-tune the theoretical models.
SmartBuildings: An AmI system for energy efficiency
2015
Nowadays, the increasing global awareness of the importance of energy saving in everyday life acts as a stimulus to provide innovative ICT solutions for sustainability. In this scenario, the growing interest in smart homes has been driven both by socioeconomic and technological expectations. One of the key aspects of being smart is the efficiency of the urban apparatus, which includes, among others, energy, transportation and buildings. The present work describes SmartBuildings, a novel Ambient Intelligence system, which aims at reducing the energy consumption of "legacy" buildings by means of artificial intelligence techniques applied on heterogeneous sensor networks. A prototype has been …
Human-ambient interaction through Wireless Sensor Networks
2009
Recent developments in technology have permitted the creation of cheap, and unintrusive devices that may be effectively employed for instrumenting an intelligent environment. The present work describes a modular framework that makes use of a class of those devices, namely wireless sensors, in order to monitor relevant physical quantities and to collect users' requirements through implicit feedback. A central intelligent unit extracts higher-level concepts from raw sensory inputs, and carries on symbolic reasoning based on them. The aim of the reasoning is to plan a sequence of actions that will lead the environment to a state as close as possible to the users' desires, taking into account b…
A Hybrid Framework for Soft Real-Time WSN Simulation
2009
The design of a wireless sensor network is a chal- lenging task due to its intrinsically application-specific nature. Although a typical choice for testing such kind of networks requires devising ad-hoc testbeds, this is often impractical as it depends on expensive, and hard to maintain deployment of nodes. On the other hand, simulation is a valuable option, as long as the actual functioning conditions are reliably modeled, and carefully replicated. The present work describes a framework for supporting the user in early design and testing of a wireless sensor network with an augmented version of TOSSIM, the de-facto standard for simulators, that allows merging actual and virtual nodes seaml…
Achieving Robustness through Caching and Retransmissions in IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs
2007
This paper proposes a network-layer protocol for wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Our protocol is devised to provide reliable data gathering in latency-constrained applications, and exploits both the flexibility of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer and features of data aggregation techniques, such as implicit acknowledgment of reception. The proposed protocol acts as a routing module and a control entity for the MAC layer and provides reliable communication, while managing power saving and synchronizertion among nodes. Without relying on MAC-layer acknowledgments, the protocol implements caching and network-layer retransmissions, triggered upon detection of a link fai…
Integrating Built-in Sensors of an Android with Sensors Embedded in the Environment for Studying a More Natural Human-Robot Interaction
2011
Several studies supported that there is a strict and complex relationship between outer appearance and the behavior showed by the robot and that a human-like appearance is not enough for give a positive impression. The robot should behave closely to humans, and should have a sense of perception that enables it to communicate with humans. Our past experience with the android “Geminoid HI-1” demonstrated that the sensors equipping the robot are not enough to perform a human-like communication, mainly because of a limited sensing range. To overcome this problem, we endowed the environment around the robot with perceptive capabilities by embedding sensors such as cameras into it. This paper rep…
FAULT DETECTION AND DATA PREDICTION FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
2014
In the last few years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been extensively used as a pervasive sensing module of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems in several application fields, thanks to their versatility and ability to monitor diverse environmental quantities. Although wireless sensor nodes are able to perform onboard computations and to share the sensed data, they are limited by the scarcity of energy resources which heavily influences the network lifetime; moreover, the design phase of a WSN requires testing the application scalability prior to actual deployment. In this regard, this dissertation focuses on data prediction to address such crucial tasks as prolonging the network lifet…
Understanding the Environment through Wireless Sensor Networks
2007
This paper presents a new cognitive architecture for extracting meaningful, high-level information from the environment, starting from the raw data collected by a Wireless Sensor Network. The proposed framework is capable of building rich internal representation of the sensed environment by means of intelligent data processing and correlation. Furthermore, our approach aims at integrating the connectionist, data-driven model with the symbolic one, that uses a high-level knowledge about the domain to drive the environment interpretation. To this aim, the framework exploits the notion of conceptual spaces, adopting a conceptual layer between the subsymbolic one, that processes sensory data, a…
DC4CD
2017
In this article, we present Distributed Computing for Constrained Devices (DC4CD), a novel software architecture that supports symbolic distributed computing on wireless sensor networks. DC4CD integrates the functionalities of a high-level symbolic interpreter, a compiler, and an operating system, and includes networking abstractions to exchange high-level symbolic code among peer devices. Contrarily to other architectures proposed in the literature, DC4CD allows for changes at runtime, even on deployed nodes of both application and system code. Experimental results show that DC4CD is more efficient in terms of memory usage than existing architectures, with which it also compares well in te…