A metaprogrammed C++ framework for hardware/software component integration and communication

With the ever growing complexity of System-on-Chip design, a considerable effort has been made to introduce higher levels of abstraction and to integrate high-level synthesis solutions to the design flow. In such design flows, a uniform communication interface is needed to enable high-level implementations of SoC components regardless of whether they are compiled as software running on a processor or synthesized to dedicated hardware IPs. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a component communication framework that defines an object-oriented remote call mechanism which allows transparent communication across hardware/software boundaries. The proposed framework relies on C++ static metaprogramming techniques to efficiently abstract communication between components implemented using high-level C++. We also define a portability layer that enables the migration of designs throughout different hardware platforms, operating systems, and tools. We assessed the performance and area footprint of our communication infrastructure through the implementation of a voice processing pipeline on top of a Network-on-Chip based architecture. Our results, when compared to previous related works with the same set of capabilities, show that our mechanisms yield small overhead in terms of software memory (up to 64% smaller), FPGA resources (up to 40% smaller), and hardware/software communication latency (up to 51% smaller).     

门座起重机CAD系统界面开发平台的设计

本文讨论了怎样在X窗口系统Motif界面开发接口的基础上，通过合理封装，建立门座起重机CAD系统界面开发平台。该界面开发平台提供了比Motif更高级的界面构件，更简便实用的调用接口，使功能模块的编程人员可以采用近似自然描述的方式来编制界面，大大提高了CAD系统开发的效率。该界面开发平台的设计思想和方法对其他CAD系统也是适用的。     

A PC-based open robot control system: PC-ORC

An open architecture manufacturing system pursues to integrate manufacturing components on a single platform. Therefore, a particular component can be easily added and/or replaced. In this paper, a modular and object-oriented approach for the PC-based open robot control (PC-ORC) system is investigated. A standard reference model for controlling robots, which consists of a hardware platform, an operating system module, and various application software modules, is first proposed. Then, PC-ORC system, which can reconfigure the control system in various production environments, is developed. The PC-ORC is constructed based upon the object-oriented method. Hence, it allows an easy implementation and modification of various modules. The PC-ORC consists of basic software, application objects, and additional hardware devices on a PC platform. Finally, by applying the proposed PC-ORC to a SCARA robot, the performance of the PC-ORC is examined.     

基于QNX的网络视频监控系统的设计与实现

对采用分布式嵌入式实时操作系统QNX开发基于PC硬件平台的嵌入式网络视频监控系统作了应用分析和系统设计，并详细论述了系统的视频采集卡驱动程序和视频回放软件在QNX RTP6．1．0的实现方法。QNX无与伦比的实时性、稳定性、可靠性等性能和对PC硬件的特有支持，使得本系统取得了非常高的性价比。     

Towards multilaterally secure computing platforms—with open source and trusted computing

We present a security architecture for a trustworthy open computing platform that aims at solving a variety of security problems of conventional platforms by an efficient migration of existing operating system components, a Security Software Layer (PERSEUS), and hardware functionalities offered by the Trusted Computing technology. The main goal is to provide multilateral security, e.g., protecting users' privacy while preventing violations of copyrights. Hence the proposed architecture includes a variety of security services such as secure booting, trusted GUI, secure installation/update, and trusted viewer. The design is flexible enough to support a wide range of hardware platforms, i.e., PC, PDA, and embedded systems. The proposed platform shall serve as a basis for implementing a variety of innovative business models and distributed applications with multilateral security.     

Safety in robotic installations

The rapid growth of the robotic industry has made it imperative to consider more seriously the safety aspects of robotic installations. Some work has been initiated recently in this area; a standard proposed by the Robotic Industries Association is a step in the right direction. This paper is based on an investigation of the state of the art in robotic safety, and contains an analysis of the sources of accidents, and the accident-prone operational phases of robotic installations. It forms the groundwork (literature survey) of a research project at the University of Windsor to develop a hardware/software-based safety system. It is suggested that both the robot manufacturer and the user should regard robotic safety as an important consideration.     

Open architecture dynamic manipulator design philosophy (DMD)

This paper presents a generic and universal architecture design for robotic manipulators. A flexible approach is taken to develop the design philosophy throughout, resulting in a hardware architecture that is portable, can be integrated and enables the implementation of advanced control methods. A software kernel of management, supervision and control was developed in order to obtain an easy user interface to the robotic researcher. The application of many such controls has, traditionally, often been severely restricted in partial commercial robotic systems because of limitations associated with their controllers; rather than the arms themselves.     

A hybrid real-time agent platform for fault-tolerant,embedded applications

This paper describes an agent platform based on the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Systems Abstract Architecture, which, together with a highly fault tolerant, bio-inspired hardware architecture, aims to increase the reliability of future, low-cost satellites. To achieve the stringent operational requirements imposed by the real-time and resource-constrained environment of a satellite, the Hybrid Agent Real-Time Platform (HARP) distinguishes itself from other platforms in three areas. Firstly, the HARP middleware uses discrete processors, instead of virtual machines or interpreters, as its agent execution environment. This has the advantage of reducing the agency memory footprint and enabling agents to perform real-time tasks. Secondly, the HARP communication stack makes use of ISO-TP over CAN 2.0A as its transfer level protocol, cutting out resource-intensive layers such as HTTP and IIOP. In addition, the communication stack allows real-time CAN traffic to share the network and be given priority over Agent Communication Language messages. Finally, the HARP middleware embeds a peer-to-peer task manager in each agency, allowing systems which are built using the bio-inspired Artificial Stem Cell Architecture and HARP middleware to autonomously reconfigure in the event of failures. The detailed design of the HARP middleware is given, together with details of an implementation of the HARP middleware on a set of prototype satellite hardware. The performance and scaling potential of the middleware, determined through a set of physical experiments, provide evidence of the practical feasibility of the proposed architecture.     

Design and development of a semi‐autonomous agricultural vineyard sprayer: Human–robot interaction aspects

This article presents the design aspects and development processes to transform a general‐purpose mobile robotic platform into a semi‐autonomous agricultural robot sprayer focusing on user interfaces for teleoperation. The hardware and the software modules that must be installed onto the system are described, with particular emphasis on human–robot interaction. Details of the technology are given focusing on the user interface aspects. Two laboratory experiments and two studies in the field to evaluate the usability of the user interface provide evidence for the increased usability of a prototype robotic system. Specifically, the study aimed to empirically evaluate the type of target selection input device mouse and digital pen outperformed Wiimote in terms of usability. A field experiment evaluated the effect of three design factors: (a) type of screen output, (b) number of views, (c) type of robot control input device. Results showed that participants were significantly more effective but less efficient when they had multiple views, than when they had a single view. PC keyboard was also found to significantly outperform PS3 gamepad in terms of interaction efficiency and perceived usability. Heuristic evaluations of different user interfaces were also performed using research‐based HRI heuristics. Finally, a study on participants’ overall user experience found that the system was evaluated positively on the User Experience Questionnaire scales.     

嵌入式浏览器软硬件混合渲染层的研究与设计

广泛使用的WebKit内核嵌入式浏览器因具有良好的设计架构和优良的跨平台特性已被移植到许多嵌入式平台上。由于嵌入式平台的硬件多样性,WebKit开源版本并没有充分利用嵌入式平台的特点。通过研究WebKit显示系统,实现了充分利用嵌入式硬件加速渲染与软件渲染特点的软硬件混合渲染层。该混合渲染层解决了嵌入式平台上全功能浏览器运行缓慢造成用户体验较差的问题。经对比测试验证了该混合渲染层的可行性,与原始版本相比网站打开时间减少48%以上,网页动画渲染速度提高130%以上。     

Reinforcement learning based compliance control of a robotic walk assist device

ABSTRACT

Millions of people around the globe have to deal with walking disability. Robotic walk assist devices can help people with walking disabilities, especially those with weak legs. However, safety, cost, efficiency and user friendliness are some of the key challenges. For robotic walk assist devices, light weight structure and energy efficient design as well as optimal control are vitally important. In addition, compliance control can help to improve the safety of such devices as well as contribute to their user friendliness. In this paper, an optimal adaptive compliance control is proposed for a Robotic walk assist device. The suggested scheme is based on bio-inspired reinforcement learning. It is completely dynamic-model-free scheme and employs joint position and velocity feedback as well as sensed joint torque (applied by user during walk) for compliance control. The efficiency of the controller is tested in simulation on a robotic walk assisting device model.     

基于MDA思想的嵌入式机电控制器设计框架

嵌入式机电控制器的硬件耦合关系复杂，软件受制于运行环境和开发环境，由此导致该类系统的可移植性和可重用性较差。该文针对软硬件约束，基于MDA思想提出了一种电动车控制器设计框架。该设计框架中的软硬件划分模块和各模块的功能定义使得此类嵌入式应用系统可以顺利地在不同硬件平台和软件开发环境之间进行移植并根据用户需求定制。在该设计框架的指导下，在EM78P458、P87LPC768、ATMega8L 3种硬件平台上实现了控制器系统的移植。     

NUMA-aware image compositing on multi-GPU platform

Sort-last parallel rendering is widely used. Recent GPU developments mean that a PC equipped with multiple GPUs is a viable alternative to a high-cost supercomputer: the Fermi architecture of a single GPU supports uniform virtual addressing, providing a foundation for non-uniform memory access (NUMA) on multi-GPU platforms. Such hardware changes require the user to reconsider the parallel rendering algorithms. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the NUMA-aware image compositing problem, which is the key final stage in sort-last parallel rendering. Based on a proven radix-k strategy, we find one optimal compositing algorithm, which takes advantage of NUMA architecture on the multi-GPU platform. We quantitatively analyze different image compositing modes for practical image compositing, taking into account peer-to-peer communication costs between GPUs. Our experiments on various datasets show that our image compositing method is very fast, an image of a few megapixels can be composited in about 10 ms by eight GPUs.     

基于DSP的工业机器人控制器的设计与实现

提出了一种基于DSP技术的工业机器人控制器的设计，该控制器采用一台工业PC机以 及一块DSP多轴运动控制卡，较好地实现了机器人的实时控制，提高了机器人控制器的运动 控制性能，最后给出了相关的实验和结论．     

A robotic service framework supporting automated integration of ubiquitous sensors and devices

In recent years, due to the emergence of ubiquitous computing technology, a new class of networked robots called ubiquitous robots has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provides its user with the services the user needs, anytime and anywhere, in the ubiquitous computing environments. There are requirements to be met for the vision of URC. One of the essential requirements is that the robotic systems must support ubiquity of services. This means that a robot service must always be available even though there are changes in the service environment. More specifically, a robotic system needs to be interoperable with sensors and devices in its current service environments automatically, rather than statically pre-programmed for its environment. In this paper, the design and implementation of an infrastructure for URC called Ubiquitous Robotic Service Framework (URSF) is presented. URSF enables automated integration of networked robots in a ubiquitous computing environment by the use of Semantic Web Services Technologies.     

A Collaborative Framework for Mould Design Based on Service-Oriented Architecture

Aiming at improving the traditional object-oriented three-layer architecture for collaborative design, a service-oriented framework for mould design is established by adding a Web service layer to decoupling the direct linking of user interface to functional modules,making the system being platform independent and programming language independent,greatly facilitating the reuse of existing software and hardware resources. .NET technology is adopted to implement the framework. An example scenario is introduce...     

A software engineering approach for the development of heterogeneous robotic applications

One of the most evident characteristics of robotic applications is heterogeneity: large robotic projects involve many different researchers with very different programming needs and areas of research, using a variety of hardware and software that must be integrated efficiently (i.e.: with a low development cost) to construct applications that satisfy not only classic robotic requirements (fault-tolerance, real-time specifications, intensive access to hardware, etc.) but also software engineering aspects (reusability, maintainability, etc.). Most existing solutions to this problem either do not deal with such heterogeneity or do not cover specific robotic needs. In this paper we propose a framework for the integration of heterogeneous robotic software through a software engineering approach: the BABEL development system, which is aimed to cover the main phases of the application lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, and maintainance) when unavoidable heterogeneity conditions are present. The capabilities of our system are shown by its support for designing and implementing diverse real robotic applications that use several programming languages (C, C++, JAVA), execution platforms (RT-operating systems, MS-Windows, no operating system at all), communication middleware (CORBA, TCP/IP, USB), and also a variety of hardware components (Personal Computers, microcontrollers, and a wide diversity of sensor and actuator devices in mobile robots and manipulator arms).     

一种总线型软件体系结构的设计与应用

在构造基于面向对象技术的软件系统中,采用良好的软件体系结构可以有效地提高整个系统的可扩展性、灵活性、可插入性,获得较好的可复用性。针对这一点,提出了一种基于组件和中间件技术的总线型软件体系结构,该结构以面向对象技术为基础,并借鉴了计算机硬件系统的设计思想。文中介绍了该体系结构的设计和应用情况,以实例说明了该结构有助于使系统的结构定义更加清晰和具备良好的“可拔插”特性。