Design and Implementation of a Sensor-instrumented Table for Smart Spaces

Title: Design and Implementation of a Sensor-instrumented Table for Smart Spaces
Invited Speaker: Philipp Steurer, NESL, UCLA
Date: FRIDAY, August 1, 2003
Time: 1pm-2pm
Venue: Room # 4760, Boelter Hall, UCLA
http://www.cens.ucla.edu/seminars/seminar_summer03.html

FOR TELE-ATTENDEES: If you are attending remotely, you may wish to access the
slides at: http://www.cens.ucla.edu/censweb/CENS-Seminar-Series/ (Slides
will be available a few minutes before seminar starts.)

Abstract:

The talk focusses on the system design and implementation of a sensor-instrumented table called Smart Table. Smart Table is a table that can track and identify multiple objects simultaneously when placed on top of its surface. The table has been designed to support a smart problem-solving environment for early childhood education in a project called Smart Kindergarten. The incorporation of location information and identification provided by Smart Table into context-aware computing applications is presented. The overall system architecture is described in detail unleashing the core of the hardware, namely the printed circuit boards. Utilization of Hall effect sensors mounted on these boards enable tracking of objects when they are tagged with magnetic labels. A distributed sensor scanning technique is implemented on the sensor boards. The sensor status information of the sensor boards is sent to a host over an RS-485 communication bus for further processing. Secondly, the talk covers the software architecture and the corresponding implementations involving three different computing platforms ranging from an 8-bit RISC microcontroller through a StrongARM CPU and a high-end Pentium-4 microprocessor. The proposed object localization and identification algorithm has been simulated in Matlab. The algorithm was successfully transferred to a fixed-point implementation, which runs on embedded hardware and satisfies real-time requirements. Lastly, system performance of the final implementation of Smart Table is presented, which proves that the system is ready for deployment outside a laboratory environment. The talk concludes with ideas and considerations for future work.

Biographical Information:

Philipp Steurer received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Applied Science in Lucerne, Switzerland. In 1997 he joined the Komax Corporation where he was responsible for the hard- and software development of embedded systems. Since fall 2001 he is pursuing his Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering at UCLA with specialization in signal processing. He became a member of the Networked & Embedded Systems Lab (NESL) in Spring 2002 when he started working on the Smart Table project. His research interests include hardware and software for embedded systems, real time operating systems, software analysis and design concepts, speech and image processing.