Development of an extensible dual-core wireless sensing node for cyber-physical systems

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Abstract

The introduction of wireless telemetry into the design of monitoring and control systems has been shown to reduce system costs while simplifying installations. To date, wireless nodes proposed for sensing and actuation in cyberphysical systems have been designed using microcontrollers with one computational pipeline (i.e., single-core microcontrollers). While concurrent code execution can be implemented on single-core microcontrollers, concurrency is emulated by splitting the pipeline's resources to support multiple threads of code execution. For many applications, this approach to multi-threading is acceptable in terms of speed and function. However, some applications such as feedback controls demand deterministic timing of code execution and maximum computational throughput. For these applications, the adoption of multi-core processor architectures represents one effective solution. Multi-core microcontrollers have multiple computational pipelines that can execute embedded code in parallel and can be interrupted independent of one another. In this study, a new wireless platform named Martlet is introduced with a dual-core microcontroller adopted in its design. The dual-core microcontroller design allows Martlet to dedicate one core to standard wireless sensor operations while the other core is reserved for embedded data processing and real-time feedback control law execution. Another distinct feature of Martlet is a standardized hardware interface that allows specialized daughter boards (termed wing boards) to be interfaced to the Martlet baseboard. This extensibility opens opportunity to encapsulate specialized sensing and actuation functions in a wing board without altering the design of Martlet. In addition to describing the design of Martlet, a few example wings are detailed, along with experiments showing the Martlet's ability to monitor and control physical systems such as wind turbines and buildings. © 2014 SPIE.

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Share

COinS