[Back]


Diploma and Master Theses (authored and supervised):

D. Macher:
"Intercommunication framework for autonomous real-time systems";
Supervisor: R. Grosu, O. Höftberger; Institut für Technische Informatik, 2014; final examination: 2014-04-29.



English abstract:
Vehicles and autonomous systems can strongly benefit from the exchange of information. For
instance, vehicles can inform each other about accidents, such that a detour can be found in time.
The challenge of information exchange between autonomous systems is that there are different
types of systems which want to share information. Each system type has specific requirements
for its information, i.e. one system is interested in a particular kind of information whereas other
systems may be interested in different information. Another challenge is that information often
gets invalid after a specific time or due to some other invalidation criteria (e.g. leaving the road
on which an accident happened). Systems are not interested in such information any more, i.e.
it is not necessary to share invalid information. So it is required to not share all information
that is available between systems, instead autonomous systems should be able to decide which
kind of information to exchange. This thesis is working towards a solution for these challenges,
i.e. a software framework is implemented that allows autonomous systems to exchange different
types of information and also to restrict that exchange (i.e. avoid unnecessary communication).
The implemented software will be referred as Information Management Framework (IMF) and
it provides mechanisms to control sharing of information between these systems. The framework
enables communication between different types of autonomous systems. Moving robot
systems like rovers are often equipped with the robot operating system (ROS) as hardware abstraction
layer to gather data from hardware sensors. Therefore the IMF supports the exchange
of data with ROS by implemented software modules using the functionality of inter-process
communication (IPC). Information generated by ROS software modules or which is needed by
ROS software modules for computation or the operation of actuators is exchanged with the IMF
on the one hand. On the other hand, this information can be shared with the IMF of other
autonomous systems connected to the network. Information is stored on each system after generating
or after receiving from other systems as long as it is valid and needed by the system.
This means that each kind of information has a dedicated lifetime. It is essential for systems to
not only share as much information as possible and exhaust the network capacity, instead the
framework provides a way to control the information flow (i.e. only exchange information that
might be beneficial for other systems). Finally, different experiments have been conducted to
demonstrate the applicability of the IMF for real usage scenarios.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_233068.pdf