Publication type: Conferences

Vessels constitute one of the most cost effective ways of transporting goods around the world. Despite the efforts, maritime accidents still occur, with catastrophic consequences. For this reason, vessels are submitted to periodical inspections for the early detection of cracks and corrosion. These inspections are nowadays carried out at a great cost. In order to contribute to make ship inspections safer and more cost-efficiently, this paper presents a novel Micro-Aerial Vehicle devised as a flying camera that can virtually teleport the human surveyor through the different structures of the vessel hull. The control software has been designed following the Supervised Autonomy paradigm, so that it is in charge of safety related issues such as collision avoidance, while the surveyor, within the main control loop, is supposed to supply displacement commands while he/she is concentrated on the inspection at hand. The paper provides an extensive evaluation of the platform capabilities and usability, both under laboratory conditions and onboard a real vessel, during an inspection campaign.

Corrosion is one of the major causes of the structural defects that affect vessel hulls. For its early detection, intensive inspections of the inner and outer structures of the vessel hull are carried out at a great cost, where the visual assessment plays an important role. In order to reduce the cost of the visual inspections, we present a corrosion detector to identify defective areas in digital images taken from vessel hulls. Two main contributions stand out: on the one hand, a specific detector which combines color and texture features to describe corrosion; on the other hand, a prior stage which implements a generic-defect search based on the concept of saliency, and it is used to boost the specific corrosion detector. Both the original and the saliency-boosted methods provide successful detection rates, but the guidance by means of saliency allows for precision improvements.

An adaptive distributed embedded system is able to automatize some processes at the same time it modifies its behaviour autonomously and dynamically in response to changing operating conditions. To support adaptivity it is necessary that the underlying Distributed Embedded System (DES) is able to dynamically change the assignment of the processing and network resources. In this regard, the DFT4FTT project aims at providing a complete DES that can support applications with real-time, reliability and adaptivity requirements. This paper describes the first steps towards the design of the task allocation scheme used in the DFT4FTT architecture, responsible for dynamically distributing the workload among the nodes of the DES, taking into account the changes in the environment and in the system itself. This allocation scheme not only provides flexibility from a functional point of view, but also from a fault tolerance point of view. Moreover, its modular design makes it possible to tune the desired level of autonomy in the adaptivity, from a simple support for application reconfiguration to a complete automatic reconfiguration assisted with machine learning algorithms.

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of technical standards that is being developed to provide Ethernet with
hard real-time, reliability and flexibility services. In the last years, there has been a growing interest in increasing the connectivity of all kind of devices. This trend has reached industrial environments, where the demanding timing and reliability constrains imposed the use of specialised networks with specific features to support these requirements. Moreover, the industry has shown interest in using Ethernet as the network technology in industrial environments, due to its low cost, high bandwidth and extensive use. The ability of TSN to support both, data-oriented and traditional control traffic over the same network makes it an appealing technology to implement the next generation of industrial networks with high connectivity. Nevertheless, TSN does not cover some reliability aspects important for its deployment in critical systems. In this work we propose the implementation of time redundancy of frames in order to tolerate temporary faults in the channel and, therefore, increase the reliability of the network.