Florida Polytechnic University

About: Florida Polytechnic University is a education organization based out in Lakeland, Florida, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Catalysis. The organization has 302 authors who have published 538 publications receiving 6549 citations. The organization is also known as: Florida Poly.

Design of an FPGA/SoC Hardware Accelerator for MIT Coffee Can Radar Systems

Abstract: For an autonomous vehicle running at highway speeds, processing and response time of radar sensors are of extreme importance. In this paper, we present hardware accelerators for MIT Coffee Can Radar systems [1] using commercial off-the-shelf FPGA/SoC boards [5], [6]. There are multiple advantages of this proposed system architecture, but the ability to process/average more chirp cycles without slowing down the radar sensor output rate is probably the most important one. Averaging over multiple chirps is a known technique which can be used to reduce measurement errors, suppress noise, and improve multi-target detection performance. However, to be able to do more averaging without slowing down the radar sensor output rate, the frequency of the ramp signal driving the VCO must be increased. This will result increased frequency IF signals, and hence will require faster ADC converters. On a multitasking system, this will also increase the size of the data transferred between kernel and user spaces, and will also require handling/averaging over larger arrays stored in the dynamic RAM. These are all known performance bottlenecks both for delay as well as for throughput [7]. We propose the use of a Zynq SoC based system for implementing the signal processing chain. Basically, there will be an application specific hardware accelerator which does averaging of the received signal over multiple chirps inside the FPGA fabric using static block RAMs with deterministic timing. This greatly reduces the computational load on the ARM side of the Zynq, and AXI bus data traffic. Overall, the proposed system will have reduced delays, improved performance, and better real-time characteristics. A preliminary version of the hardware accelerator is synthesized for an entry level Zynq board [5] for I MSPS ADC speed, 100MHz AXI bus speed, and without any pipelining technique. Total resource usage on the FPGA fabric was less than 10%, worst setup slack was 1.090 ns, and worst hold slack was 0.088 ns. All of these show the feasibility of the proposed proposed hardware accelerator.

Rural Areas Interoperability Framework: Intelligent Assessment of Renewable Energy Security Issues in PAKISTAN

Abstract: Electricity is an important component of our life It plays an important role in social development as it improves people’s living standards in urban as well as in rural areas of Pakistan According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), up to 2017, 45% of Pakistani are living without electricity in rural areas In Pakistan, load shedding is always a critical issue due to hectic energy threats, which are alarming for development especially in rural areas Currently, there are 10 hours of load shading in cities and 12 to 14 hours in rural areas There is a need to implement innovative, less costly tools and materials that can convert fossil fuels into renewable energy resources to generate electricity to overcome the load shedding problems in Pakistan especially in rural areas To overcome the load-shedding problems and to convert the fossil fuels into the renewable energy successfully, we have proposed a Rural Areas Interoperability (RAI) framework for analyzing the geographical and environmental situations, feudal system in Sindh, Balochistan, KPK and some areas in Punjab and suggest a suitable renewable energy resource out of existing renewable energy resources ie solar system, wind energy, hydro energy, biomass biogas and thermal energy in a particular area to generate the electricity after analyzing the security issues for installation of these renewable energy resources in the specific area of a district in Pakistan

An UAV-based incentive mechanism for Crowdsensing with budget constraints

Abstract: Monitoring environmental variables in lower layers of the atmosphere is an important activity to measure changes that result from natural events, and human interventions. Volcano eruptions, commercial aviation, and the massive spread of pesticides using light aircraft are just some examples of low layer atmosphere polluters. Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide to monitor environmental variables. The flight of these synthetic rubber balloons last for around 2 hours, then they become pollution too. Recent advances in small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with built in sensors, and their emerging role in business supply chain make UAVs ideal participants for environmental monitoring. In this paper, we present an incentive mechanism for UAV-Crowdsensing. The core of the proposed mechanism consists of a recurrent reverse action and a recruitment model. By these two components, the system encourages UAVs sensing from locations that maximize volume coverage within a given budget. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed incentive mechanism.

Concept network design for a young Mars science station and Trans-planetary communication

Abstract: NASA is planning to send a satellite with some people on it to Mars in 2019. They are calling it manned mission to Mars. This paper presents a high-level networking design to provide high bandwidth for a young and growing Mars settlement and science station. A physical network topology is described consisting of a high power ground station to communicate with orbiters. Different parts and devices of the station are connected with network infrastructure. Some examples are given for various non-obvious use cases of the network. Additionally, an upper level networking protocol is described to handle reliable communication between planets. This trans-planetary Data Mailing Protocol (TDMP) operates three processes working together: a database of retrievable files and user inbox files; a ‘parcel’ structure for data to be contained; and parcel piece fragmenting for asynchronous pipelined transmission and loss handling. Together, these systems allow ease of connection between people, scientists, and experiments.