An airborne wireless sensor network (WSN) composed of bird-sized micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enables low cost high granularity atmospheric sensing of toxic plume behavior and storm dynamics, and provides a unique three-dimensional vantage for monitoring wildlife and ecological systems. This paper describes a complete implementation of our SensorFlock airborne WSN, spanning the development of our MAV airplane, its avionics, semi-autonomous flight control software, launch system, flock control algorithm, and wireless communication networking between MAVs. We present experimental results from flight tests of flocks of MAVs, and a characterization of wireless RF behavior in air-to-air communication as well as air-to-ground communication.

Brownfield areas are contaminated lands that lie unused and unproductive. Because of the serious economic, social, political, and environmental damages that brownfield problems can cause to society, governments are focusing their attentions on the redevelopment of these contaminated sites. However, the excess costs of reconstruction projects over their benefits often stall the initiation of projects. Moreover, brownfield projects involve several uncertainties that seriously contribute to the challenges of brownfield redevelopment, such as uncertainty about the extent of contamination and the uncertainty in cleanup costs. To overcome these challenges, negotiation among the involved parties (government, owner, purchaser, and their stakeholders) is one of the most efficient tactics to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution and, as such, saves an enormous amount of time, cost, and resources. This paper aims at discussing the negotiation process associated with remediation and redevelopment of brownfield projects. Timing, type of contaminate, extent of contaminate, zoning, offsite impact, and the number of players are some of the most important factors affecting the study of brownfield negotiation and their ultimate redevelopment. The needs and interests of the various parties involved in a brownfield negotiation process are discussed. Initial steps towards the development of a decision support system for resolving brownfield conflicts through negotiation are then highlighted.

This paper describes the column oriented butted regular architecture-algorithmic behavioral synthesis (COBRA-ABS) high-level synthesis tool which has been designed to synthesize DSP algorithms, specified in C, onto multi-field programmable gate array (FPGA) custom computing machines (FCCMs). COBRA-ABS performs synthesis using a new simulated annealing-based methodology, which maps the specified behavior into a four-dimensional (4-D) space and then optimizes the implied architecture. COBRA-ABS synthesizes custom very long instruction word (VLIW) style architectures partitioned across the FPGAs of the FCCM and has been used to compile C algorithms down to FPGA configuration bit-streams. This paper describes the tool and synthesis concepts and presents simulation results from a number of synthesized fast Fourier transform (FFT) related algorithms.

This paper presents an overview of the COBRA-ABS behavioural high-level synthesis tool. COBRA-ABS has been designed to synthesise custom architectures for arithmetic intensive algorithms, specified in C, for implementation on multi-FPGA Custom Computing Machine (FCCM) platforms. It performs globally optimising high level synthesis using simulated annealing, integrating all partitioning, scheduling, binding and allocation operations in one optimisation step, and has been designed to be retargetable to different board architectures. COBRA-ABS synthesises a custom Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture for the given algorithm for implementation on the specified FCCM. The paper gives details of the architectural issues which have influenced the design of the tool, looks at how it fits into the overall design flow and reviews the fundamental concepts and implementation of the globally optimising synthesis methodology. To illustrate the operation of the tool, a number of results for synthesis of a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm are presented.