Counts and abundance of macrozoobenthic organisms settled in artificial soft sediment at Brandal, Kongsfjorden, Spitsbergen

In the Arctic the currently observed rising air temperature results in more frequent calving of icebergs. The latter are derived from tidewater glaciers. Arctic macrozoobenthic soft-sediment communities are considerably disturbed by direct hits and sediment reallocation caused by iceberg scouring. With the aim to describe the primary succession of macrozoobenthic communities following these events, scientific divers installed 28 terracotta containers in the soft-sediment off Brandal (Kongsfjorden, Svalbard, Norway) at 20 m water depth in 2002. The containers were filled with a bentonite-sand-mixture resembling the natural sediment. Samples were taken annually between 2003 and 2007. A shift from pioneering species (e.g. Cumacea: Lamprops fuscatus) towards more specialized taxa, as well as from surface-detritivores towards subsurface-detritivores was observed. This is typical for an ecological succession following the facilitation and inhibition succession model. Similarity between experimental and non-manipulated communities from 2003 was significantly highest after three years of succession. In the following years similarity decreased, probably due to elevated temperatures, which prevented the fjord-system from freezing. Some organisms numerically important in the non-manipulated community (e.g., the polychaete Dipolydora quadrilobata) did not colonies the substrate during the experiment. This suggests that the community had not fully matured within the first three years. Later, the settlement was probably impeded by consequences of warming temperatures. This demonstrates the long-lasting effects of severe disturbances on Arctic macrozoobenthic communities. Furthermore, environmental changes, such as rising temperatures coupled with enhanced food availability due to an increasing frequency of ice-free days per year, may have a stronger effect on succession than exposure time.

Enhancing Interaction With Smart Objects Throught Mobile Devices

Interaction with smart objects can be accomplished with different technologies, such as tangible interfaces or touch computing, among others. Some of them require the object to be especially designed to be 'smart', and some other are limited in the variety and complexity of the possible actions. This paper describes a user-smart object interaction model and prototype based on the well known event-condition-action (ECA) reasoning, which can work, to a degree, independently of the intelligence embedded into the smart object. It has been designed for mobile devices to act as mediators between users and smart objects and provides an intuitive means for personalization of object's behavior. When the user is close to an object, this one publishes its 'event & action' capabilities to the user's device. The user may accept the object's module offering, which will enable him to configure and control that object, but also its actions with respect to other elements of the environment or the virtual world. The modular ECA interaction model facilitates the integration of different types of objects in a smart space, giving the user full control of their capabilities and facilitating creative mash-uping to build customized functionalities that combine physical and virtual actions

Moving Object Detection for Real-Time High-Quality Lightweight Applications on Smart Cameras

Here, a novel and efficient strategy for moving object detection by non-parametric modeling on smart cameras is presented. Whereas the background is modeled using only color information, the foreground model combines color and spatial information. The application of a particle filter allows the update of the spatial information and provides a priori information about the areas to analyze in the following images, enabling an important reduction in the computational requirements and improving the segmentation results

Biomechanics of smart wings in a bat robot: morphing wings using SMA actuators

This paper presents the design of a bat-like micro aerial vehicle with actuated morphing wings. NiTi shape memory alloys (SMAs) acting as artificial biceps and triceps muscles are used for mimicking the morphing wing mechanism of the bat flight apparatus. Our objective is twofold. Firstly, we have implemented a control architecture that allows an accurate and fast SMA actuation. This control makes use of the electrical resistance measurements of SMAs to adjust morphing wing motions. Secondly, the feasibility of using SMA actuation technology is evaluated for the application at hand. To this purpose, experiments are conducted to analyze the control performance in terms of nominal and overloaded operation modes of the SMAs. This analysis includes: (i) inertial forces regarding the stretchable wing membrane and aerodynamic loads, and (ii) uncertainties due to impact of airflow conditions over the resistance–motion relationship of SMAs. With the proposed control, morphing actuation speed can be increased up to 2.5 Hz, being sufficient to generate lift forces at a cruising speed of 5ms−1.

Model-Driven Methodology for Rapid Deployment of Smart Spaces based on Resource-Oriented Architectures

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym.

Design and modeling of the multi-agent robotic system: SMART

This article presents the design, kinematic model and communication architecture for the multi-agent robotic system called SMART. The philosophy behind this kind of system requires the communication architecture to contemplate the concurrence of the whole system. The proposed architecture combines different communication technologies (TCP/IP and Bluetooth) under one protocol designed for the cooperation among agents and other elements of the system such as IP-Cameras, image processing library, path planner, user Interface, control block and data block. The high level control is modeled by Work-Flow Petri nets and implemented in C++ and C♯♯. Experimental results show the performance of the designed architecture.

Ubiquitous green computing techniques for high demand applications in smart environments

Ubiquitous sensor network deployments, such as the ones found in Smart cities and Ambient intelligence applications, require constantly increasing high computational demands in order to process data and offer services to users. The nature of these applications imply the usage of data centers. Research has paid much attention to the energy consumption of the sensor nodes in WSNs infrastructures. However, supercomputing facilities are the ones presenting a higher economic and environmental impact due to their very high power consumption. The latter problem, however, has been disregarded in the field of smart environment services. This paper proposes an energy-minimization workload assignment technique, based on heterogeneity and application-awareness, that redistributes low-demand computational tasks from high-performance facilities to idle nodes with low and medium resources in the WSN infrastructure. These non-optimal allocation policies reduce the energy consumed by the whole infrastructure and the total execution time.