Department of Automatic Control, Lund Institute of Technology Automatic Control

Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems (RUNES)

Researchers: Martin Ohlin, Peter Alriksson, Dan Henriksson, Anton Cervin, and Karl-Erik Årzén  in collaboration with the other partners in the Runes project. 

Duration: September 2004 - August 2007

Funding: EU/IST/FP6

RUNES is an EU/IST FP6 integrated project on networked embedded systems with special focus on sensor/actuator networks, that started September 1, 2004. RUNES is coordinated by Ericsson and consists of 23 industrial or academic partners.

Our participation in RUNES is focused on three areas:

Within the project we are extending the TrueTime toolbox with support for simulation of wireless battery-powered nodes. We are also extending the control server model to networked control loops.

Partly within RUNES and partly in a student project course we have developed a sensor-network based mobile inverted pendulum robot. The objectives of the project were to develop  a test case for control over sensor networks and investigate the performance that can be achieved using state of the art sensor network technology wuch as TelosB motes with ZigBee radio communication. An inverted pendulum is mounted on the robot. The task is to stabilize the pendulum while driving around in an environment where sensor network nodes are located. The robot contains two ATMEL AVR Mega8 processors (for the wheel motor control), one ATMEL AVR Mega16 processor (for the pendulum angle sensor interface) and one TelosB mote. The control of the pendulums is either done locally on the robot mote or remotely on some other mote.

During 2006 the work in RUNES has focused on a tunnel disaster scenario. Within WP6, the work  package about control in RUNES, a mobile robot-based sub-scenario is being developed in which autonomous mobile robots are sent into the tunnel acting as mobile radio gateways that are used to ensure connectivity within the tunnel network. In Lund an ultrasound-based localization system has been developed. Each mobile robot is equipped with an ultrasound transmitter and each stationary tunnel-network sensor node is equipped with an ultrasound receiver. By periodically emitting a radio packet and an ultrasound pulse from the robot, it is possible for each sensor node that receives this, to calculate its distance to the robot. When this is done the distance measurements are sent back to the robot and used to calculate its position and orientation using an Extended Kalman filter, in which also dead reckoning from the wheel encoder sensors is included. In order to handle localization of multiple robots a CSMA scheme is used to avoid contention.

Lund is also active in WP7 of RUNES. Here we are developing the TrueTime simulation tool for wireless sensor network and MANET applications. During 2006 version 1.4 of TrueTime was released.

Links

Official RUNES project web page

Publications

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Last modified: 2005-11-18