We explored the problems which are soon to be faced while parking autonomous cars in parking lots. Like where is the closest parking slot available to the autonomous car? How to navigate to that location? What kind of parking structures could be good for autonomous cars? We also provide an initial solution which uses a central server and the graph of the parking lot to guide the cars to the closest parking slots. With experiments, we have shown that our proposed method should be effective for the controlled parking for self-driving cars.

Rate Monotonic scheduling algorithm has been widely used in real-time systems for its optimality in fixed priority scheduling. Determining the Rate Monotonic schedulability of tasks is an important problem when designing a real-time system. There are exact schedulability test methods for Rate Monotonic scheduling, but the worst case response time analysis on which the exact tests are based is NP-hard. So the exact tests are often too complex to be executed on-line for large numbers of tasks. For practical use, polynomial time sufficient conditions for the Rate Monotonic schedulability have been studied. However, existing polynomial time tests are often too pessimistic. In this paper, we propose a new polynomial time sufficient condition based on the response time analysis, which is less pessimistic than existing ones. Simulation results show that our test significantly outperforms the existing tests and has performance close to the exact test.

We present a long-term and cross-sectional study of a vibration-based water flow rate monitoring system in practical environments and scenarios. In our earlier research, we proved that a water flow monitoring system with vibration sensors is feasible by deploying and evaluating it in a small-scale laboratory setting. To validate the proposed system, the system was deployed in existing environments—two houses and a public restroom—and in two different laboratory test settings. With the collected data, we first demonstrate various aspects of the system's performance, including sensing stability, sensor node lifetime, the stability of autonomous sensor calibration, time to adaptation, and deployment complexity. We then discuss the practical challenges and lessons from the full-scale deployments. The evaluation results show that our water monitoring solution is a practical, quick-to-deploy system with a less than 5% average flow estimation error.

Service discovery is an essential protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks as it is used to search for available services. It is becoming an important issue because of node mobility and requirements of low number of messages. This paper proposes a service discovery scheme which combines cooperative service information spreading of adjacent nodes and the higher degree-based search protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks. It proposes an algorithm for selecting adaptive nodes from mobile nodes, which enables search and utilization of up-to-date information in MANET. The proposed method is effective, since it does not require a central lookup server and it does not rely on flooding. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduced the total network load and power consumption. Compared to other systems, it significantly reduces the number of messages and the average number of response hops, and thus improves the response time and power consumption.

We present the design and implementation of the Illuminator, a preliminary sensor network-based intelligent light control system for entertainment and media production. Unlike most sensor network applications, which focus on sensing alone, a distinctive aspect of Illuminator is that it closes the loop from light sensing to lighting control. We describe the Illuminator's design requirements, system architecture, algorithms, implementation and experimental results. To satisfy the high-performance light sensing requirements of entertainment and media production applications, the system uses the Illumimote, which is a multi-modal and high fidelity light sensor module well-suited to wireless sensor networks. The Illuminator system is a toolset to characterize the illumination profile of a deployed set of fixed position lights, generate desired lighting effects for moving targets (actors, scenic elements, etc.) based on user constraints expressed in a formal language, and assist in the set up of lights to achieve the same illumination profile in multiple venues. After characterizing deployed lights, the Illuminator computes at run-time optimal light settings to achieve a user-specified actuation profile using an optimization framework based on a genetic algorithm Uniquely, it can use deployed sensors to incorporate changing ambient lighting conditions and moving targets into actuation. With experimental results, we demonstrate that the Illuminator handles various high-level user's constraints and generates optimal light actuation profile. These results suggest that our system should support entertainment and media production applications.

With the advent of tiny networked devices, Mark Weiser's vision of a world embedded with invisible computers is coming to age. Due to their small size and relative ease of deployment, sensor networks have been utilized by zoologists, seismologists and military personnel. In this paper, we investigate the application of sensor networks to the film industry. In particular, we are interested in augmenting film and video footage with sensor data. Unobtrusive sensors are deployed on a film set or in a television studio and on performers. During a filming of a scene, sensor data such as light intensity, color temperature and location are collected and synchronized with each film or video frame. Later, editors, graphics artists and programmers can view this data in synchronization with film and video playback. For example, such data can help define a new level of seamless integration between computer graphics and real world photography. A real-time version of our system would allow sensor data to trigger camera movement and cue special effects. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of the first part of our embedded film set environment, the augmented recording system. Augmented recording is a foundational component for the UCLA Hypermedia Studio's research into the use of sensor networks in film and video production. In addition, we have evaluated our system in a television studio.

No abstract available.