Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

6PO Research Region Lorraine and UL project

Participants : Emmanuel Nataf, Ye-Qiong Song, Laurent Ciarletta [contact] .

Funded by Region Lorraine and Université de Lorraine since 2013. Adel Belkadi (CRAN & LORIA) is co-directed by L. Ciarletta and Didier Theilliol (CRAN correspondant).

6PO (“Systèmes Cyber-Physiques et Commande Coopérative Sûre de Fonctionnement pour une Flotte de Véhicules sans Pilote” ) is a joint research project between the Loria and CRAN laboratories. As a part of the Aetournos ecosystem, it also aims at researching solutions for safe formation flying of collaborative UAVs seen as part of a collection of Cyber Physical Systems mixing computer science and automation solutions.

It is reinforced by a PhD grant from this federation that started in october 2014 (Conception de méthodes de diagnostic et de tolérance aux fautes des systèmes multi-agents: Application à une flotte de véhicules autonomes, Adel Belkadi).

This led to common publications, notably on the subjects of the robust control of a fleet or flock of UAVs (with or without leader, using agents paradigms and particle swarm optimisation [12] and [36]).

The project provides common use cases and scientific challenges that serve as catalysts for collaboration between teams from different research topics :

• Cyber Physical Systems, Real Time, Quality of service, Performance and Energy in Wireless Sensors and Activator Networks

• Collaborative, communicating autonomous systems and Unmanned Vehicles

• Safety, Dependabilty, Reliability, Diagnosis, Fault-Tolerance

Hydradrone FEDER Région Lorraine project

Participants : Adrien Guenard, Zhixiang Liu, Laurent Ciarletta [contact] .

Feder funding

The Madynes team has been working on the Hydradrone project since July 2014. It started as a collaborative R&D initiative funded by Région Lorraine and is now FEDER funded. This project started as a joint work between Madynes and PEMA (Pedon Environnement et Milieux Aquatiques), an SME/VSE (small and medium size Entreprise, PME/TPE). The consortium now includes Alerion another VSE, spinoff from Loria.

It consists in developing a new solution for the surveillance of aquatic environment, the Hydradrone:

• starting with an actual need for automated and remote operation of environmental sensing expressed by PEMA

• based on an hybrid UxV (Unmanned Air, Surface... Vehicle),

• some Cyber Physical bricks in coherence with the Alerion's concepts (ease of use, safety, autonomy)

• and an integration in the Information System of the company

PEMA, as an environmental company, is providing the use cases and terrain (and business) validation, while Alerion is working on the integration and engineering of the solution.

This second year has been dedicated to the development of the initial controllers for the Hydradrones (smal and large one), and the beginning of the integration of the environmental sensors.

Satelor AME Lorraine regional project

Participants : François Despaux, Lei Mo, Mohamed Tlig, Bernardetta Addis, Evangelia Tsiontsiou, Ye-Qiong Song [contact] .

The Madynes team is involved in Satelor, a regional research and development project funded by the AME (Agence de Mobilisation Economique) of Lorraine (October 2013 – September 2017). The consortium includes academic (Univ. of Lorraine, Inria), medical (OHS) and industrial (Diatelic-Pharmagest (lead), ACS, Kapelse, Salendra, Neolinks) partners. It aims at developing innovative and easily deployable ambient assisted living solutions for their effective use in the tele-homecare systems. The Madynes team is mainly involved in the data collection system development based on wireless sensors networks and IoT technology. The first topic consists in defining the basic functions of the future SATEBOX – a gateway box for interconnecting in-home sensors to the medical datacenter, based on our previously developed MPIGate software. A beta-version prototype of the future Satebox gateway has been realased. It now includes Zigbee wireless sensors, EnOcean battery-free sensors and Bluetooth Low Energy sensors. It provides a low-cost and easily deployable solution for the daily activity monitoring. After its first real-world deployment at a OHS hospital room, a second prototype testbed has been prepared for a further test deployment including several rooms. The second topic is related to improving the data transfer reliability while still keep minimum energy consumption. This has led us to focus on the multi-hop mesh network topology with multi-constrained QoS routing problem (PhD thesis of Evangelia Tsiontsiou) [33]. The third topic is related to the wireless charging of sensor nodes (PhD work of Lei MO) in order to keeping sensors in perpetual working state. A new direction has been also investigated which consists in using the CSI (channel signal information) of the omnipresent WiFi (IEEE802.11n) as a new generation of contactless sensors. A first test bed of using CSI to measure the respiration rate has been set up.