LoRaCELL-Driven IoT Smart Lighting Systems: Sustainability in Urban Infrastructure.

In recent years, the rate of urbanization has increased enormously, precipitating an escalating demand for improved services and applications in urban areas to improve the quality of life. In the Internet of Things (IoT)era, cities are transforming into smart urban centers. These cities incorporate connected devices, such as intelligent public lighting systems, to enhance their urban infrastructure. Therefore, this work explores the transformative potential of an IoT-enabled smart lighting system in urban environments, emphasizing its essential role in enhancing safety, economy, and sustainability. In this sense, LoRaCELL (Long-Range Cell) is introduced. LoRaCELL is an innovative system that utilizes edge devices for data collection, such as light intensity, humidity, temperature, air quality, solar ultraviolet radiation, ammeter, and voltmeter. It stands as a pioneering solution for intelligent public lighting systems, contributing to advancing IoT-driven urban development. The outcomes showed that the proposed system could successfully synchronize the devices with each other and send IoT sensing data at a low cost compared to traditional technologies such as LoRaWAN.

A novel sEMG data augmentation based on WGAN-GP.

The classification of sEMG signals is fundamental in applications that use mechanical prostheses, making it necessary to work with generalist databases that improve the accuracy of those classifications. Therefore, synthetic signal generation can be beneficial in enriching a database to make it more generalist. This work proposes using a variant of generative adversarial networks to produce synthetic biosignals of sEMG. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to classify the movements. The results showed good performance with an increase of 4.07% in a set of movement classification accuracy when 200 synthetic samples were included for each movement. We compared our results to other methodologies, such as Magnitude Warping and Scaling. Both methodologies did not have the same performance in the classification.

Fuzzy Gain-Scheduling PID for UAV Position and Altitude Controllers.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications have evolved to a wide range of fields in the last decade. One of the main challenges in autonomous tasks is the UAV stability during maneuvers. Thus, attitude and position control play a crucial role in stabilizing the vehicle in the desired orientation and path. Many control techniques have been developed for this. However, proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers are often used due their structure and efficiency. Despite PID's good performance, different requirements may be present at different mission stages. The main contribution of this research work is the development of a novel strategy based on a fuzzy-gain scheduling mechanism to adjust the PID controller to stabilize both position and altitude. This control strategy must be effective, simple, and robust to uncertainties and external disturbances. The Robot Operating System (ROS) integrates the proposed system and the flight control unit. The obtained results showed that the proposed approach was successfully applied to the trajectory tracking and revealed a good performance compared to conventional PID and in the presence of noises. In the tests, the position controller was only affected when the altitude error was higher, with an error of 2% lower.

Photogrammetric Process to Monitor Stress Fields Inside Structural Systems.

This research employs displacement fields photogrammetrically captured on the surface of a solid or structure to estimate real-time stress distributions it undergoes during a given loading period. The displacement fields are determined based on a series of images taken from the solid surface while it experiences deformation. Image displacements are used to estimate the deformations in the plane of the beam surface, and Poisson's Method is subsequently applied to reconstruct these surfaces, at a given time, by extracting triangular meshes from the corresponding points clouds. With the aid of the measured displacement fields, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) is considered to evaluate stress values throughout the solid. Herein, the unknown boundary forces must be additionally calculated. As the photogrammetrically reconstructed deformed surfaces may be defined by several million points, the boundary displacement values of boundary-element models having a convenient number of nodes are determined based on an optimized displacement surface that best fits the real measured data. The results showed the effectiveness and potential application of the proposed methodology in several tasks to determine real-time stress distributions in structures.

Dynamic Optimization and Heuristics Based Online Coverage Path Planning in 3D Environment for UAVs.

Path planning is one of the most important issues in the robotics field, being applied in many domains ranging from aerospace technology and military tasks to manufacturing and agriculture. Path planning is a branch of autonomous navigation. In autonomous navigation, dynamic decisions about the path have to be taken while the robot moves towards its goal. Among the navigation area, an important class of problems is Coverage Path Planning (CPP). The CPP technique is associated with determining a collision-free path that passes through all viewpoints in a specific area. This paper presents a method to perform CPP in 3D environment for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) applications, namely 3D dynamic for CPP applications (3DD-CPP). The proposed method can be deployed in an unknown environment through a combination of linear optimization and heuristics. A model to estimate cost matrices accounting for UAV power usage is proposed and evaluated for a few different flight speeds. As linear optimization methods can be computationally demanding to be used on-board a UAV, this work also proposes a distributed execution of the algorithm through fog-edge computing. Results showed that 3DD-CPP had a good performance in both local execution and fog-edge for different simulated scenarios. The proposed heuristic is capable of re-optimization, enabling execution in environments with local knowledge of the environments.

A Framework for Coverage Path Planning Optimization Based on Point Cloud for Structural Inspection.

Different practical applications have emerged in the last few years, requiring periodic and detailed inspections to verify possible structural changes. Inspections using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) should minimize flight time due to battery time restrictions and identify the terrain's topographic features. In this sense, Coverage Path Planning (CPP) aims at finding the best path to coverage of a determined area respecting the operation's restrictions. Photometric information from the terrain is used to create routes or even refine paths already created. Therefore, this research's main contribution is developing a methodology that uses a metaheuristic algorithm based on point cloud data to inspect slope and dams structures. The technique was applied in a simulated and real scenario to verify its effectiveness. The results showed an increasing 3D reconstructions' quality observing optimizing photometric and mission time criteria.

A Robotic Cognitive Architecture for Slope and Dam Inspections.

Big construction enterprises, such as electrical power generation dams and mining slopes, demand continuous visual inspections. The sizes of these structures and the necessary level of detail in each mission requires a conflicting set of multi-objective goals, such as performance, quality, and safety. It is challenging for human operators, or simple autonomous path-following drones, to process all this information, and thus, it is common that a mission must be repeated several times until it succeeds. This paper deals with this problem by developing a new cognitive architecture based on a collaborative environment between the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other agents focusing on optimizing the data gathering, information processing, and decision-making. The proposed architecture breaks the problem into independent units ranging from sensors and actuators up to high-level intelligence processes. It organizes the structures into data and information; each agent may request an individual behavior from the system. To deal with conflicting behaviors, a supervisory agent analyzes all requests and defines the final planning. This architecture enables real-time decision-making with intelligent social behavior among the agents. Thus, it is possible to process and make decisions about the best way to accomplish the mission. To present the methodology, slope inspection scenarios are shown.

Sensors Fusion and Multidimensional Point Cloud Analysis for Electrical Power System Inspection.

Thermal inspection is a powerful tool that enables the diagnosis of several components at its early stages. One critical aspect that influences thermal inspection outputs is the infrared reflection from external sources. This situation may change the readings, demanding that an expert correctly define the camera position, which is a time consuming and expensive operation. To mitigate this problem, this work proposes an autonomous system capable of identifying infrared reflections by filtering and fusing data obtained from both stereo and thermal cameras. The process starts by acquiring readings from multiples Observation Points (OPs) where, at each OP, the system processes the 3D point cloud and thermal image by fusing them together. The result is a dense point cloud where each point has its spatial position and temperature. Considering that each point's information is acquired from multiple poses, it is possible to generate a temperature profile of each spatial point and filter undesirable readings caused by interference and other phenomena. To deploy and test this approach, a Directional Robotic System (DRS) is mounted over a traditional human-operated service vehicle. In that way, the DRS autonomously tracks and inspects any desirable equipment as the service vehicle passes them by. To demonstrate the results, this work presents the algorithm workflow, a proof of concept, and a real application result, showing improved performance in real-life conditions.