Browse Topic: Computer software and hardware
The U-Shift IV represents the latest evolution in modular urban mobility solutions, offering significant advancements over its predecessors. This innovative vehicle concept introduces a distinct separation between the drive module, known as the driveboard, and the transport capsules. The driveboard contains all the necessary components for autonomous driving, allowing it to operate independently. This separation not only enables versatile applications - such as easily swapping capsules for passenger or goods transportation - but also significantly improves the utilization of the driveboard. By allowing a single driveboard to be paired with different capsules, operational efficiency is maximized, enabling continuous deployment of driveboards while the individual capsules are in use. The primary focus of U-Shift IV was to obtain a permit for operating at the Federal Garden Show 2023. To achieve this goal, we built the vehicle around the specific requirements for semi-public road
Vehicles are prime examples of cyber-physical systems that rely on multiple domains, including mechanics, electronics, and software. Due to high customizability and software changes introduced by bug fixes or functional upgrades, vehicle instances vary in space (variants) and time (versions). This results in a huge number of possible variants and versions; thus, testing all combinations to ensure functional safety is practically infeasible. Moreover, components of all domains interact with each other; thus, solely focusing on single domains while testing multi-domain cyber-physical systems is insufficient. In this paper, we propose a process for change-aware testing of cyber-physical systems, including test activities we identified during a literature analysis. The process consists of multiple structured steps, including the selection of affected variants, test case selection, and adaptive configuration of test environments. Based on the process and identified activities, we discuss
Wind Tunnels are complex and cost-intensive test facilities. Thus, increasing the test efficiency is an important aspect. At the same time, active aerodynamic elements gain importance for the efficiency of modern cars. For homologation, such active aero-components pose an extra level of test complexity as their control strategies, the relevant drive cycles and their aerodynamics in different positions must be considered for homologation-relevant data. Often, active components have to be manually adjusted between test runs, which is a time-consuming process because the vehicle is not integrated into the test automation. Even if so, designing a test sequence stepping through the individual settings for each component of a vehicle is a tedious task in the test session. Thus, a sophisticated integration of the wind tunnel control system with a test management system, supporting the full homologation process is one aspect of a solution. The other is the integration of the vehicle’s active
In the early days of computers, interfaces were paper printouts or blinking lights, but as the technology matured, the graphical user interface (GUI) quickly became the standard.
The segment manipulator machine, a large custom-built apparatus, is used for assembling and disassembling heavy tooling, specifically carbon fiber forms. This complex yet slow-moving machine had been in service for nineteen years, with many control components becoming obsolete and difficult to replace. The customer engaged Electroimpact to upgrade the machine using the latest state-of-the-art controls, aiming to extend the system's operational life by at least another two decades. The program from the previous control system could not be reused, necessitating a complete overhaul.
In the domain of aircraft certification, Development Assurance is what some would call a useful tool to gain confidence in the development of complex systems, and what others would call a necessary evil. But what does it actually do? Why is it necessary for certification of modern aircraft? What, epistemologically, does it bring to the table? This paper aims to show how Development Assurance (DA) activities, at all levels from aircraft to item, close the epistemological holes created when complex systems are chosen for implementation. It will map the different sources and types of uncertainty encountered in system and aircraft verification and explain how each type is dealt with within a certification context, working from simple mechanical systems up to complex and highly integrated systems using software and airborne electronic hardware and beyond. It will show that Development Assurance, far from being an arbitrary set of activities, systematically brings personal and corporate
Southwest Research Institute is working to expand software normally used to model electrolytes and predict corrosion and turn it into a tool that can help determine whether ice-covered worlds have the right conditions for microbial life. The project is supported by NASA’s Habitable Worlds program, which seeks to use knowledge of the history of the Earth and the life upon it as a guide for determining the processes and conditions that create and maintain habitable environments.
This document defines a set of standard application layer interfaces called JAUS Manipulator Services. JAUS Services provide the means for software entities in an unmanned system or system of unmanned systems to communicate and coordinate their activities. The Manipulator Services represent platform-independent capabilities commonly found across domains and types of unmanned systems. At present, twenty-five (25) services are defined in this document. These services are categorized as: Low Level Manipulator Control Services – The one service in this category allows for low-level command of the manipulator joint actuation efforts. This is an open-loop command that could be used in a simple tele-operation scenario. The service in this category is listed as follows: Primitive Manipulator Service Manipulator Sensor Services – These services, when queried, return instantaneous sensor data. Three services are defined that return respectively joint positions, joint velocities, and joint
The SAE Aerospace Information Report AIR5315 – Generic Open Architecture (GOA) defines “a framework to identify interface classes for applying open systems to the design of a specific hardware/software system.” [sae] JAUS Service (Interface) Definition Language defines an XML schema for the interface definition of services at the Class 4L, or Application Layer, and Class 3L, or System Services Layer, of the Generic Open Architecture stack (see Figure 1). The specification of JAUS services shall be defined according to the JAUS Service (Interface) Definition Language document.
What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?
A hierarchical control architecture is commonly employed in hybrid torque control, where the supervisor CPU oversees system-level objectives, while the slave CPU manages lower-level control tasks. Frequently, control authority must be transferred between the two to achieve optimal coordination and synchronization. When a closed-loop component is utilized, accurately determining its actual contribution to the controlled system can be challenging. This is because closed-loop components are often designed to compensate for unknown dynamics, component variations, and actuation uncertainties. This paper presents a novel approach to closed-loop component factor transfer and coordination between two CPUs operating at different hierarchical levels within a complex system. The proposed framework enables seamless control authority transition between the supervisor and slave CPUs, ensuring optimal system performance and robustness. To mitigate disturbances and uncertainties during the transition
High-efficiency manufacturing involves the transmission of copious amounts of data, exemplified both by trends in the automotive industry and advances in technology. In the automotive industry, products have been growing increasingly complex, owing to multiple SKUs, global supply chains and the involvement of many tier 2 / Just-In Time (JIT) suppliers. On top of that, recalls and incidents in recent years have made it important for OEMs to be able to track down affected vehicles based on their components. All of this has increased the need for OEMs to be able to collect and analyze component data. The advent of Industry 4.0 and IoT has provided manufacturing with the ability to efficiently collect and store large amounts of data, lining up with the needs of manufacturing-based industries. However, while the needs to collect data have been met, corporations now find themselves facing the need to make sense of the data to provide the insights they need, and the data is often unstructured
Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) is gaining attraction in the automotive industry due to its wide range of benefits like remote software/feature upgrade, scalable functionality, Electronic Control Unit (ECU) commonization, remote diagnostics, increased safety, etc. To obtain all these benefits, ECUs need to be designed accordingly. ECU hardware must be designed to support a range of vehicles with a variety of loading, scalable features, power distribution, levels of processing, and networking architecture. Each domain has unique challenges to make the ECU economical and robust to operating conditions without compromising performance. This paper illustrates the critical hardware design challenges to accommodate a scalable SDV architecture. This paper focuses electrical interface design to support wide range of input/output port loads, scalable functionality, and robust diagnostics. Also, flexibility of microprocessor processing capability, ECU networking, and communication complexity are
Security flaws in automotive software have significant consequences. Modern automotive engineers must assess software not only for performance and reliability but also for safety and security. This paper presents a tool to verify software for safety and security. The tool was originally developed for the Department of Defense (DoD) to detect cybersecurity vulnerabilities in legacy safety-critical software with tight performance constraints and a small memory footprint. We show how the tool and techniques developed for verifying legacy safety-critical software can be applied to automotive and embedded software using real-world case studies. We also discuss how this tool can be extended for software comprehension.
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