Limited energy availability is among the most challenging considerations developers face for heterogeneous systems and is critical for battery-powered devices. For complex systems composed of mechanical and computational units, such as drones and mobile robots, more than half of the power consumption can be due to the computational operations. Critically, these systems are often composed of many components, interacting concurrently to achieve specific functionality. As a result, power prediction and estimation can be a challenging task, especially if different computational units, such as CPU and GPU, should be modeled. In this paper, we focus on limited energy availability for mobile heterogeneous devices powered by a battery and present a coarse-grained computation-oriented energy modeling approach. Our approach predicts the energy consumption of a set of software components, in a specific configuration, executed according to a given scheduling policy. The model, determined numerically from several empirical power samples, describes the energy consumed by a software configuration and can be used for energy-aware planning and optimization from a computational point of view. It can potentially support a complex embedded system in maximizing the level of autonomy while minimizing power consumption and preserving the most appropriate amount of battery charge by finding the right rate of quality of service. Our approach is supported and validated by the design and implementation of a profiling tool. The tool abstracts computational energy behavior and describes the current battery drain as a function of all the admissible configurations.
The power grid is an essential infrastructure in any country, comprising thousands of kilometers of power lines that require periodic inspection and maintenance, carried out nowadays by human operators in risky conditions. To increase safety and reduce time and cost with respect to conventional solutions involving manned helicopters and heavy vehicles, the AERIAL-CORE project proposes the development of aerial robots capable of performing aerial manipulation operations to assist human operators in power lines inspection and maintenance, allowing the installation of devices, such as bird flight diverters or electrical spacers, and the fast delivery and retrieval of tools. This manuscript describes the goals and functionalities to be developed for safe local aerial manipulation, presenting the preliminary designs and experimental results obtained in the first year of the project.
A large percentage of current overhead power transmission infrastructure is becoming aged, raising the demand for frequent grid inspections in an efficient, and cost-effect manner in order to keep it functional. Autonomous drones are a promising solution for infrastructure inspection, but require further investigation and development to be a viable alternative. This paper proposes a drone framework based on open-source platforms for autonomous inspection of electrical grid infrastructure and for cable grasping. The framework incorporates a cloud service functionality to provide geo-location data of nearby power pylons; a localisation system for navigation near power pylons and grasping cables; and algorithms for finding and planning paths for navigation and grasping over cables. The proposed framework has been tested and validated in simulation, with the development of a UAV platform for future integration.
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