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Unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems will become a key enabler to the future drone market ecosystem, enabling the safe concurrent operation of both manned and unmanned aircrafts. Currently, these systems are usually tested by performing real scenarios that are costly, limited, hardly scalable, and poorly repeatable. As a solution, in this paper we propose an agent-based simulation platform, implemented through a micro service architecture, which may simulate UTM information sources, such as flight plans, telemetry messages, or tracks from a surveillance network. The final objective of this simulator is to use these information streams to perform a system-level evaluation of UTM systems both in the pre-flight and in-flight stages. The proposed platform, with a focus on simulation of communications and sensors, allows to model UTM actors&rsquo, behaviors and their interactions. In addition, it also considers the manual definition of events to simulate unexpected behaviors/events (contingencies), such as communications failures or pilots&rsquo, actions. In order to validate our architecture, we implemented a simulator that considers the following actors: drones, pilots, ground control stations, surveillance networks, and communications networks. This platform enables the simulation of the drone trajectory and control, the C2 (command and control) link, drone detection by surveillance sensors, and the communication of all agents by means of a mobile communications network. Our results show that it is possible to truthfully recreate complex scenarios using this simulator, mitigating the disadvantages of real testbeds.

Augmented Reality (AR) functionalities may be effectively leveraged in collaborative service scenarios (e.g., remote maintenance, on-site building, street gaming, etc.). Standard development cycles for collaborative AR require to code for each specific visualization platform and implement the necessary control mechanisms over the shared assets. in order to face this challenge, this paper describes SARA, an architecture to support cross-platform collaborative Augmented Reality applications based on microservices. The architecture is designed to work over the concept of collaboration models which regulate the interaction and permissions of each user over the AR assets. Five of these collaboration models were initially integrated in SARA (turn, layer, ownership, hierarchy-based and unconstrained examples) and the platform enables the definition of new ones. Thanks to the reusability of its components, during the development of an application, SARA enables focusing on the application logic while avoiding the implementation of the communication protocol, data model handling and orchestration between the different, possibly heterogeneous, devices involved in the collaboration (i.e., mobile or wearable AR devices using different operating systems). to describe how to build an application based on SARA, a prototype for HoloLens and iOS devices has been implemented. the prototype is a collaborative voxel-based game in which several players work real time together on a piece of land, adding or eliminating cubes in a collaborative manner to create buildings and landscapes. Turn-based and unconstrained collaboration models are applied to regulate the interaction. the development workflow for this case study shows how the architecture serves as a framework to support the deployment of collaborative AR services, enabling the reuse of collaboration model components, agnostically handling client technologies.

This paper describes the requirements of a flight planning tool for safe urban operations, which may be used to design operations considering flight constraints and limitations. This system is designed to work in coordination with an unmanned traffic management system in charge of distributing available very low level airspace resources among different operations and authorizing them, and of monitoring compliance of actual flights with flight authorizations. Representative examples of flight planning are described, as calculated by a prototype flight planning tool following this requirements.

Drone operators, institutions (e.g. law enforcement, rescue agencies, preservation organisms, etc.) and companies (logistics, surveillance, inspection, etc.), are constituting themselves as drone operators, at the same time that increase the size of their fleets of drones. Nowadays, each operator independently manages its drones, on service request. Beyond this isolated approach, many operation scenarios would be much better addressed if automated means for coordinated resource allocation and simultaneous drone control were available. In this paper, we describe a microservice-oriented architecture that provides organization and optimization functionalities to orchestrate drone operation. The platform built on the proposed architecture may be used to enable a single operator to optimize the management of its fleet of drones, but also to facilitate coordination of different resources towards a common goal, assuming a drone-as-a-service operation mode. The architecture is validated through a specific use case, for real time allocation of drone resources to enable fast emergency response.

The large increase in the sale of drones as well as their use in more and more aspects of daily life has led to the emergence of increasingly voices warning of the need to track and monitoring these drones. The prototype UTM monitoring system to be described in this paper is aimed to address this problem. It is implemented as a microservice to be inserted in a complete UTM SW ecosystem, processing telemetry and other sensors position/velocity information to be able to track, monitor and control the good operation and thus avoid the possible conflicts or accidents that can cause due to a bad use or malfunction of them. This prototype may also allow the analysis of the performance without putting at risk neither people nor material goods since all drone data may be simulated. Also, it has been tested using real data from industrial multirotors.

Smartphones have a great potential as tools to adapt daily living spaces to the specific needs of its inhabitants. These devices usually host selected content, personal information and useful applications for their users, apart from continuously gath- ering their context data and preferences. Taking this fact as starting point, this paper describes PERSEO, a system that imple- ments a mobile-instrumented interaction concept to personalize the smart space by using a network of presence sensors and media objects. PERSEO is device-centric and relies on physical interaction. This means that on touch, grasp or proximity with any of the trigger objects in the presence network (e.g. NFC or Bluetooth enabled devices), the smartphone seamlessly transfers contents or application control to the available (media) objects, in order to improve the user experience. The transfer actions are governed by an event-condition-action logic that may be customized by the user in the smartphone. Actions depend on the iden- tification of the foreground applications running in the smartphone hosting PERSEO's logic. To enable the interaction concept, it has been necessary to design and implement a custom Digital Media Controller based on REST interfaces compatible with DLNA standard for media streaming. The paper explains the interaction flows and details the architecture components through an Android-based mobile prototype working in a smart living room. The system performance has been positively evaluated in terms of response time. Additionally, a group of users have tried PERSEO and favorably informed about this mobile-object instrumented personalization approach.

Drones are increasingly being used to provide support to inspection tasks in many industrial sectors and civil applications. The procedure is usually completed off-line by the final user, once the flight mission terminated and the video streaming and conjoint data gathered by the drone were examined. The procedure can be improved with real-time operation and automated object detection features. With this purpose, this paper describes a cloud-based architecture which enables real-time video streaming and bundled object detection in a remote control center, taking advantage of the availability of high-speed cellular networks for communications. The architecture, which is ready to handle different types of drones, is instantiated for a specific use case, the inspection of a telecommunication tower. For this use case, the specific object detection strategy is detailed. Results show that the approach is viable and enables to redesign the traditional inspection procedures with drones, in a step forward between manual operation and full automation.

Nowadays, the Bluetooth Low-Energy (BTLE) technology is integrated in numerous smartphones and beacons, but there is still an open challenge on delivering a presence-into-zone positioning system that facilitates the design and reconfiguration of the service zones and offers stable target tracking. In this paper, we report the experience gained from the deployment of a BTLE zone-based positioning system in a retail setting with defined service objectives. The algorithm powering the positioning system requires previous calibration, which comes to be a tedious and long invasive process when it is accomplished in a space with high people flow. The paper describes our work to minimize the calibration effort, by analyzing the effect of calibration samples reduction and proposing the application of a on-the-move calibration strategy that facilitates the calibration dynamics preserving the system's correct recognition rate.

Big displays and ultrawalls are increasingly present in nowadays environments (e.g. in city spaces, buildings, transportation means, teaching rooms, operation rooms, convention centres, etc.), at the same time that they are widely used as tools for collaborative work, monitoring and control in many other contexts. How to enhance interaction with big displays to make it more natural and fluent is still an open challenge. This paper presents a system for multimodal interaction based on pointing and speech recognition. The system makes possible for the user to control the big display through a combination of pointing gestures and a set of control commands built on a predefined vocabulary. The system is already prototyped and being used for service demonstrations for different applications.

Small and medium-sized airports are poorly occupied or occupied for a small period of time, hence the remote control towers are a good solution to control air traffic in these airports. A surveillance and monitoring air traffic prototype has been built to test surveillance, control and visualization concepts. The prototype is comprised of a hybrid real-synthetic scenario using augmented reality techniques to evaluate the operation of the surveillance/vision systems, observing the behavior of this system with different targets, backgrounds, inclement weather, etc. and helping the design/experimentation of novel control procedures in the airport area. This allows the analysis of risky situations and the controller training without putting at risk neither people nor material goods.

Nowadays, the heterogeneity of interconnected things and communication technologies creates several small worlds composed of a single object and a smartphone. For each object, the user needs to download a specific application, search and connect the device. The result is a waste of valuable resources: several objects are able to communicate with the smartphone, but they cannot directly interact among them. In this paper, we propose a model that can be used to define a set of standard interfaces suitable for every smart object. Devices that adhere to the same model can be easily controlled and placed in relation among them, creating multi-object behaviors for a smart space. The smartphone is still a control center, but with a single application it is possible to control and personalize spaces in a holistic way, instead of using the traditional one-to-one approach. Moreover, personalization should be portable: it is desirable that a behavior works in as many smart spaces as possible, at least in a similar way as it does in the environment in which it was configured, freeing the user from the tedious task of adapting it manually every time s/he goes to another space. A portable personalization extends the bring your own device paradigm to a new “bring your own space” paradigm. The model is inspired in the object-oriented programming, reinterpreting features such as inheritance and polymorphism to the real world, so it is possible to provide a software system able to adapt existing behaviors to new spaces. The use of the model is exemplified in the paper with two examples of smart spaces.

Pointing is a universal gesture that naturally expresses interest or attraction towards the pointed items. If some ‘magic’ is added, the gesture may also make these items perform actions. In this paper, we describe a system that enables to interact by pointing with digital or physical controllable resources distributed in a smart space. The system facilitates building an interactive room using COTS devices, in particular a pair of Kinect sensors. The pointing direction is inferred from the user’s elbow-wrist vector, which together with a secondary elbow-object vector serves to filter the controllable objects in the area of pointing. Experiments with 8 users in a real setting demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and show that the accuracy of the system is very dependent on the relative position user-resource and on the user behaviour itself.

Gestures contain enough information to distinguish a person from another. This ‘biometric’ feature is the basis of the Kinect-enabled system described in this paper, which is designed to identify a given person through a short chain of in-air gestures (2–3 ones). The user-dependent (trainable) system relies on a traditional Dynamic Time Warping classification algorithm. This core algorithm enhances its performance thanks to two filters (duration and sensitivity) that make the system more robust against the variability of the gestures from the same user among iterations (e.g. gestures may differ in duration and shape). The system includes a ‘point-based’ score strategy designed to rapidly discard the non-probable users and to speed up identity confirmation among the most probable candidates. Additionally, the system includes a specific component to guarantee the training quality. In order to integrate the identification process into a real service, the gesture chain is retrieved through a sequence of double-option questions that aim at better adapting a smart space (the lighting infrastructure and the available multimedia contents) to a given user depending on his specific needs. This way, the identification task remains in second plane, wrapped in functional questions. Ten users have tested the service, providing their positive feedback.

Augmented reality (AR) has become popular in the last few years thanks to the penetration of smartphones with AR browsers and applications. Nevertheless, mobile devices act as an imperfect virtual window, thus research is also exploring how to make AR systems wearable. In this direction, this paper describes a wearable system that uses projected interfaces and gesture-based interaction to enable an AR experience within a smart environment. It is composed of a Pico projector, a Raspberry Pi equipped both with WiFi and ZigBee interfaces and a handheld gesture detection device. Scattered in the environment, different Arduino objects with sensors and ZigBee connectivity capabilities propose projected services to nearby users. The system's architecture is detailed and exemplified with three types of objects: a navigation beacon, a smart plant pot and a game box.

When designing services to control the behavior of a smart environment, it is feasible to rely on mobile devices as mediators to empower the user and handle his needs and preferences. In this direction, this paper describes a concept for mobile-object instrumented interaction through a system that enables the orchestration of a set of smart objects with sensing and/or media capabilities deployed in a room. These objects are coordinated to respond accordingly to the physical and logical state of a mobile device. A specific case of use is described; it is centered on a 'smart night table' that coordinates the response of the smart environment, populated with interfaces such as a TV, tablet, sound system and photo framework. When a user places his smartphone on the smart table, a service checks the active applications in the mobile device and makes an external controller to forward actions to the mentioned interfaces, managing their availability. The prototype shows the viability of these mobile-object instrumented personalization and interaction concepts.

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.

Many context-aware applications rely on the knowledge of the position of the user and the surrounding objects to provide advanced, personalized and real-time services. In wide-area deployments, a routing protocol is needed to collect the location information from distant nodes. In this paper, we propose a new source-initiated (on demand) routing protocol for location-aware applications in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. This protocol uses a low power MAC layer to maximize the lifetime of the network while maintaining the communication delay to a low value. Its performance is assessed through experimental tests that show a good trade-off between power consumption and time delay in the localization of a mobile device.

This chapter presents a multihop routing solution, called Hopefully Longest Jump First, specifically proposed for WSNs arranged in a linear topology and compares it to two simple approaches, named Single Hop and Limited Flooder. At the application level, we suppose that a Master Node, deployed at one side of the WSN, progressively queries each of the N Slave Nodes. On its turn, when queried, a Slave Node replies to the Master Node. The performance of the proposed routing schemes is evaluated and compared on the basis of experimental results involving a real indoor WSN composed of 11 Telos motes, representing 1 Master Node and 10 Slave Nodes. The WSN has been deployed inside ISMB Lab. The analysis is based on performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and end-to-end packet delivery success rate, also considering the impact of the distance between two adjacent nodes and thus the expected number of neighbors within a node radio coverage.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based on ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 will be key enablers of non-invasive, highly sensitive infrastructures to support the provision of future ambient assisted living services. This paper addresses the main design concerns and requirements when conceiving Ambient Care Systems (ACS), frameworks to provide remote monitoring, emergency detection, activity logging and personal notifications dispatching services. In particular, the paper describes the design of an ACS built on top of a WSN composed of Crossbow's MICAz devices, external sensors and PDAs enabled with ZigBee technology. The middleware is integrated in an OSGi framework that processes the acquired information to provide ambient services and also enables smart network control. From our experience, we consider that in a future, the combination of ZigBee technology together with a Service Oriented Architecture may be a versatile approach to AAL services offering, both from the technical and business points of view.