Question: SecuWear: An open-source, multi-component hardware/software framework for investigating wearable security solutions.

In the realm of emerging body area networking (BAN) technologies, a plethora of opportunities has arisen due to advancements in wireless technology and infrastructure, enabling real-time health and fitness monitoring without hindering user mobility. Body-worn, miniaturized sensors and actuators create a network around the body for continuous, automated monitoring of vital signs, catering to medical, lifestyle, and entertainment applications. However, BAN technology is still in its infancy, facing numerous research challenges that must be addressed for widespread adoption. This article delves into the essential application, functional, and technical requirements of BANs, along with fundamental research obstacles such as scalability (regarding data rate, power consumption, and duty cycle), antenna design, interference management, coexistence, quality of service (QoS), reliability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency. We assess various technologies that are contenders for the emerging BAN market, outlining their strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, an overview of standardization efforts pertinent to BANs is provided. This exploration is crucial for understanding the potential and limitations of BANs in enhancing wearable security and functionality, echoing the spirit of the Secu Wear platform.

We present SABER (Survivability Architecture: Block, Evade, React), a proposed survivability architecture that blocks, evades and reacts to a variety of attacks by using several security and survivability mechanisms in an automated and coordinated fashion. Contrary to the ad hoc manner in which contemporary survivable systems are built-using isolated, independent security mechanisms such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems and software sandboxes-SABER integrates several different technologies in an attempt to provide a unified framework for responding to the wide range of attacks malicious insiders and outsiders can launch.
 This coordinated multi-layer approach will be capable of defending against attacks targeted at various levels of the network stack, such as congestion-based DoS attacks, software-based DoS or code-injection attacks, and others. Our fundamental insight is that while multiple lines of defense are useful, most conventional, uncoordinated approaches fail to exploit the full range of available responses to incidents. By coordinating the response, the ability to survive successful security breaches increases substantially.
 We discuss the key components of SABER, how they will be integrated together, and how we can leverage on the promising results of the individual components to improve survivability in a variety of coordinated attack scenarios. SABER is currently in the prototyping stages, with several interesting open research topics.

Often security is seen as an add-on service for automation systems that frequently conflicts with other goals such as efficient transmission or resource limitations. This article goes for a practice-oriented approach to security in automation systems. It analysis common threats to automation systems and automation networks in particular, sets up a model to classify systems with respect to security and discusses common measures available at different system levels. The description of measures should allow to rate the effects on the overall system security

Grey is a smartphone-based system by which a user can exercise her authority to gain access to rooms in our university building, and by which she can delegate that authority to other users. We present findings from a trial of Grey, with emphasis on how common usability principles manifest themselves in a smartphone-based security application. In particular, we demonstrate aspects of the system that gave rise to failures, misunderstandings, misperceptions, and unintended uses; network effects and new flexibility enabled by Grey; and the implications of these for user behavior. We argue that the manner in which usability principles emerged in the context of Grey can inform the design of other such applications.

Wearable computers are one of the new technologies that are expected to be a part of users' lives extensively in near future. While some of the users have positive attitudes towards these new products, some users may reject to use them due to different reasons. User experience is subjective, and effected by various parameters. Among these the first impression, namely the perceived qualities has an important impact on product acceptance. This paper aims to explore the perceived qualities of wearables and define the relations between them. An empirical study is conducted, to find out the hierarchy and meaningful relationships between the perceived qualities of smart wearables. The study is based on personal construct theory and data is presented by Cross-Impact Analysis. The patterns behind affection and affected qualities are explored to understand the design requirements for the best integration of wearables into daily lives.

IoT is going to be an established part of life by extending the communication and networking anytime, anywhere. Security requirements for IoT will certainly underline the importance of properly formulated, implemented, and enforced security policies throughout their life-cycle. This paper gives a detailed survey and analysis of embedded security, especially in the area of IoT. Together with the conventional security solutions, the paper highlights the need to provide in-built security in the device itself to provide a flexible infrastructure for dynamic prevention, detection, diagnosis, isolation, and countermeasures against successful breaches. Based on this survey and analysis, the paper defines the security needs taking into account computational time, energy consumption and memory requirements of the devices. Finally, this paper proposes an embedded security framework as a feature of software/hardware co-design methodology.

With the Internet of Things, sensors are becoming ever more ubiquitous, but interacting with them continues to present numerous challenges, particularly for applications running on resource-constrained devices like smartphones. The SOUL abstractions in this paper address two issues faced by such applications: (1) access to sensors with the levels of convenience needed for their ubiquitous, dynamic use, and only by parties authorized to do so, and (2) scalability in sensor access, given today's multitude of sensors. Toward this end, SOUL, first, introduces a new abstraction for the applications to transparently and uniformly access both on-device and ambient sensors with associated actuators. Second, potentially expensive sensor-related processing needs not just occur on smartphones, but can also leverage edge-and remote-cloud resources. Finally, SOUL provides access control methods that permit users to easily define access permissions for sensors, which leverages users' social ties and captures the context in which access requests are made. SOUL demonstrates that the applications on Android platforms can scale the use of 100s of sensors with performance and energy efficiency.

At its peak, the Internet-of-Things will largely be composed of low-power devices with wireless radios attached. Yet, secure authentication of these devices amidst adversaries with much higher power and computational capability remains a challenge, even for advanced cryptographic and wireless security protocols. For instance, a high-power software radio could simply replay chunks of signals from a low-power device to emulate it. This paper presents a deep-learning classifier that learns hardware imperfections of low-power radios that are challenging to emulate, even for high- power adversaries. We build an LSTM framework, specifically sensitive to signal imperfections that persist over long durations. Experimental results from a testbed of 30 low-power nodes demonstrate high resilience to advanced software radio adversaries.

A new method for researching haptic interaction styles is presented, based on a layered interaction model and a classification of existing devices. The method is illustrated by designing a new foot interaction device. The aim of which is to enhance non-verbal communication over a computer network. A layered protocols interaction model allows to consider all aspects of the haptic communication process: the intention to perform an action, limitations of the human body, and specifications of the communication device and the network. We demonstrate how this model can be used to derive design-guidelines by analyzing and classifying existing communication devices. By designing and evaluating a foot interaction device, we not only demonstrate that feet are suited for personal, concealed communication over a network, but also show the added value of the design-guidelines. Results of user tests provide clues for designing stimuli for foot interaction and indicate applications of foot communication devices.

Wearable health monitoring systems use integrated sensors to monitor vital physiological parameters of the wearer. The paper discusses the preliminary results of a prototype wearable physiological monitoring system to monitor physiological parameters such as Electrocardiogram (ECG), Heart Rate (HR), Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Body Temperature. The ECG and EEG signals are acquired using a textile electrodes integrated into the fabric of the wearer. The acquired ECG and EEG signals are processed to remove noises and the parameters are extracted and trend analysis is carried out. The physiological parameters are monitored at the remote monitoring station using a ZigBee wireless communication.

Applications for mobile platforms are being developed at a tremendous rate, but often without proper security implementation. Insecure mobile applications can cause serious information security and data privacy issues and can have severe repercussions on users and organizations alike.


Question: SecuWear: An Open-Source, Multi-component Hardware/Software Framework for Investigating Wearable Security Solutions

Tackling Security and Privacy Threats in Mobile Software Development

The rapid proliferation of mobile applications has outpaced the implementation of robust security measures, leading to significant vulnerabilities in information security and data privacy. Insecure mobile apps pose substantial risks to both individual users and organizations, potentially resulting in severe consequences. As the demand for mobile apps continues to surge, it is imperative to address the security and privacy risks inherent in their development to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access. This requires a comprehensive approach that integrates security protocols at every stage of the software development lifecycle, from design to deployment. By prioritizing security and privacy in mobile applications, developers can mitigate potential threats and ensure the trust and safety of their users.

Network Function Virtualization has received a large amount of research and recent efforts have been made to further leverage the cloud to enhance NFV. However, since there are privacy and security issues with using cloud computing, work has been done to allow for operating on encrypted data, which introduces a large amount of overhead in both computation and data, while only providing a limited set of operations, since these encryption schemes are not fully homomorphic. We propose using trusted computing to circumvent these limitations by having hardware enforce data privacy and provide guaranteed computation. Prior work has shown that Intel's Software Guard Extensions can be used to protect the state of network functions, but there are still questions about the usability of SGX in arbitrary NFV applications and the performance of SGX in these applications. We extend prior work to show how SGX can be used in network deployments by extending the Click modular router to perform secure packet processing with SGX. We also present a performance evaluation of SGX on real hardware to show that processing inside of SGX has a negligible performance impact, compared to performing the same processing outside of SGX.

Telecommunication systems integrated within garments and wearable products are such methods by which medical devices are making an impact on enhancing healthcare provisions around the clock. These garments when fully developed will be capable of alerting and demanding attention if and when required along with minimizing hospital resources and labour. Furthermore, they can play a major role in preventative ailments, health irregularities and unforeseen heart or brain disorders in apparently healthy individuals. This work presents the feasibility of investigating an Ultra-WideBand (UWB) antenna made from fully textile materials that were used for the substrate as well as the conducting parts of the designed antenna. Simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna design meets the requirements of wide working bandwidth and provides 17GHz bandwidth with compact size, washable and flexible materials. Results in terms of return loss, bandwidth, radiation pattern, current distribution as well as gain and efficiency are presented to validate the usefulness of the current manuscript design. The work presented here has profound implications for future studies of a standalone suite that may one day help to provide wearer (patient) with such reliable and comfortable medical monitoring techniques. Received 12 April 2011, Accepted 23 May 2011, Scheduled 10 June 2011 * Corresponding author: Mai A. Rahman Osman (mai.rahman@fkegraduate.utm.my).

The continuous increase in complexity in automotive electronics has led to cars that include up to 80 Electronic Control Units (ECUs). As a consequence, in-car networks are currently up to their limit in terms of data load, flexibility and bandwidth. The Ethernet backbone is thus considered as the best performing solution. On the other hand, the growing interconnection of cars with the external world requires high security standards in order to prevent safety risks for car passengers. The IEEE 802.1AE MAC Security Standard (MACSec) solves the security issues of Ethernet networks by providing confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of data. This paper presents an efficient hardware implementation of the MACSec standard for the automotive world. The system was synthesized on a Stratix V FPGA and on a 28nm standard-cell CMOS technology. In terms of maximum throughput, the FPGA results in 1.1 Gbps while the standard-cell technology reaches 3.9 Gbps. The FPGA implementation occupies 4.5% of the Adaptive Logic Modules (ALMs) while the standard-cell one gives a 285 kgate size. The proposed architecture represents a suitable implementation for a low area and high-performance solution as usually required by in-car network controllers.

Mobile authentication is indispensable for preventing unauthorized access to multi-touch mobile devices. Existing mobile authentication techniques are often cumbersome to use and also vulnerable to shoulder-surfing and smudge attacks. This paper focuses on designing, implementing, and evaluating TouchIn, a two-factor authentication system on multi-touch mobile devices. TouchIn works by letting a user draw on the touchscreen with one or multiple fingers to unlock his mobile device, and the user is authenticated based on the geometric properties of his drawn curves as well as his behavioral and physiological characteristics. TouchIn allows the user to draw on arbitrary regions on the touchscreen without looking at it. This nice sightless feature makes TouchIn very easy to use and also robust to shoulder-surfing and smudge attacks. Comprehensive experiments on Android devices confirm the high security and usability of TouchIn.

In the elemental technologies, it is necessary to realize the Internet service of things (IoT), sensors and devices, network, platform (hardware platforms, open software platform, such as specific OS platforms). Web services, data analysis and prediction, big data processing, such as security and privacy protection technology, there are a variety of techniques. These elements technology provide a specific function. The element technology is integrated with each other. However, by several techniques are integrated, it can be problems with integration of security technologies that existed for each element technology. Even if individual technologies basic security features are constituting Internet Services (CIA: Confidentiality, integrity, authentication or authorization). It also offers security technology not connected to each other. Therefore, I will look at the security technology and proposes a lightweight routing protocol indispensable for realizing a secure Internet services things.

Sanctum offers the same promise as Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information from a program’s memory access patterns. Sanctum shuns unnecessary complexity, leading to a simpler security analysis. We follow a principled approach to eliminating entire attack surfaces through isolation, rather than plugging attack-specific privacy leaks. Most of Sanctum’s logic is implemented in trusted software, which does not perform cryptographic operations using keys, and is easier to analyze than SGX’s opaque microcode, which does. Our prototype targets a Rocket RISC-V core, an open implementation that allows any researcher to reason about its security properties. Sanctum’s extensions can be adapted to other processor cores, because we do not change any major CPU building block. Instead, we add hardware at the interfaces between generic building blocks, without impacting cycle time. Sanctum demonstrates that strong software isolation is achievable with a surprisingly small set of minimally invasive hardware changes, and a very reasonable overhead.

We propose a novel wireless access monitoring and control system based on the digital door lock, which is explosively used as a digital consumer device. Digital door lock is an electronic locking system operated by the combination of digital key, security password or number codes. This paper presents a prototype of the proposed system and shows a scheme for the implementation. To implement the system with ZigBee network protocol, four types of modules are developed, ZigBee module, digital door lock module, human detection module, and ZigBee relay module. ZigBee module is designed to support wireless sensor network and also used for the ZigBee tag to identify the access objects. Digital door lock module is implemented as a digital consumer device to control the access system as well as locking system. It is very convenient system for the consumers and has extensible and flexible characteristics. That is, it can be used as a home security system by the ZigBee network with additional sensor devices. Therefore, it can be a good practical product for the realization of an access monitoring and control system. It also can be applied to the real market for home networking system. Furthermore, the system can be extended to another service such as a connection between mobile phone and home networking system.

This paper takes an initial step forward in bringing to life the certification mechanisms according to Art. 42 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These newly established methods of legal specification act not only as a central vehicle for overcoming widely articulated and discussed legal challenges, but also as a sandbox for the much needed close collaboration between computer sciences and legal studies. In order to illustrate, for example, what data protection seals could look like in the future, the authors propose a methodology for "translating" legal requirements into technical guidelines: architectural blueprints designed using legal requirements. The purpose of these blueprints is to show developers how their solutions might comply with the principle of Privacy by Design (Art. 25 GDPR). To demonstrate this methodology, the authors propose an architectural blueprint that embodies the legal concept of the data subject’s consent (Art. 6 sec. 1 lit. a GDPR) and elevates best practice to a high standard of Privacy by Design. Finally, the authors highlight further legal problems concerning blockchain technology under the GDPR that will have to be addressed in order to achieve a comprehensive certification mechanism for Privacy by Blockchain Design in the future. ACM Classification

Businesses often interact with users via web-browsers and applications on mobile devices, and host services on cloud servers they may not own. Such highly-exposed environments employ white-box cryptography (WBC) for security protection. WBC operates on a security model far different from the traditional black-box model. The modern business world includes large commercial segments in which end-users are directly exposed to business application software hosted on web browsers, mobile phones, web-connected tablets, and an increasing number of other devices: the `internet of things' (IoT). Software applications and their communication activities now dominate much of the commercial world, and there have been countless hacks on such software, and on devices hosting it, with targets as diverse as mobile phones, web browser applications, vehicles, and even refrigerators! The business advantages of deploying computational power near the user encourage software migration to exposed network end-points, but this increasing exposure provides an ever growing attack surface. Here, we discuss goals and challenges of white-box cryptography and emerging approaches in a continual attempt to stay at least one step ahead of the attackers. We list some WBC techniques, both traditional and recent, indicating how they might be incorporated into a WBC AES implementation.

Hardware-based malware detectors (HMDs) are a promising new approach to defend against malware. HMDs collect low-level architectural features and use them to classify malware from normal programs. With simple hardware support, HMDs can be always on, operating as a first line of defense that prioritizes the application of more expensive and more accurate software-detector. In this paper, our goal is to increase the accuracy of HMDs, to improve detection, and reduce overhead. We use specialized detectors targeted towards a specific type of malware to improve the detection of each type. Next, we use ensemble learning techniques to improve the overall accuracy by combining detectors. We explore detectors based on logistic regression (LR) and neural networks (NN). The proposed detectors reduce the false-positive rate by more than half compared to using a single detector, while increasing their sensitivity. We develop metrics to estimate detection overhead; the proposed detectors achieve more than 16.6x overhead reduction during online detection compared to an idealized software-only detector, with an 8x improvement in relative detection time. NN detectors outperform LR detectors in accuracy, overhead (by 40%), and time-to-detection of the hardware component (by 5x). Finally, we characterize the hardware complexity by extending an open-core and synthesizing it on an FPGA platform, showing that the overhead


Question: SecuWear: An open-source, multi-component hardware/software framework for investigating wearable security.

This study delves into a comprehensive security analysis of the Fitbit Flex ecosystem, focusing on the data collection and dissemination practices of Fitbit devices. The primary goals are to delineate (1) the types of data Fitbit gathers from its users, (2) the data Fitbit shares with its users, and (3) techniques for retrieving data that is not accessible to device owners. The investigation encompasses four unique attack vectors. Firstly, the security and privacy aspects of the Fitbit device itself are scrutinized. Secondly, the Bluetooth traffic exchanged between the Fitbit device and a smartphone or computer during synchronization is monitored. Thirdly, the security of the Fitbit Android application is examined. Lastly, the security features of the network traffic between the Fitbit application on a smartphone or computer and the Fitbit web service are assessed. Evidence is presented indicating that Fitbit collects superfluous information about nearby Flex devices under specific conditions. Moreover, it is revealed that Fitbit does not disclose all collected data to device owners; specifically, per-minute activity data is transmitted to the Fitbit web service but withheld from the user. The study also uncovers that Fitbit devices never change their MAC addresses, facilitating user correlation attacks. Additionally, BTLE credentials are exposed on the network during device pairing over TLS, potentially susceptible to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Lastly, the study confirms that actual user activity data is indeed authenticated and not transmitted in plaintext, ensuring end-to-end security from the device to the Fitbit web service.

The development of techniques for quantitative, model-based evaluation of computer system dependability has a long and rich history. A wide array of model-based evaluation techniques is now available, ranging from combinatorial methods, which are useful for quick, rough-cut analyses, to state-based methods, such as Markov reward models, and detailed, discrete-event simulation. The use of quantitative techniques for security evaluation is much less common, and has typically taken the form of formal analysis of small parts of an overall design, or experimental red team-based approaches. Alone, neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory, and we argue that there is much to be gained through the development of a sound model-based methodology for quantifying the security one can expect from a particular design. In this work, we survey existing model-based techniques for evaluating system dependability, and summarize how they are now being extended to evaluate system security. We find that many techniques from dependability evaluation can be applied in the security domain, but that significant challenges remain, largely due to fundamental differences between the accidental nature of the faults commonly assumed in dependability evaluation, and the intentional, human nature of cyber attacks.

This survey discusses the security level of the signature scheme implemented in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Preserving a person's privacy in an efficient manner is very important for critical, life-saving infrastructures like body sensor networks (BSN). This paper presents a novel key agreement scheme which allows two sensors in a BSN to agree to a common key generated using electrocardiogram (EKG) signals. This EKG-based key agreement (EKA) scheme aims to bring the "plug-n-play" paradigm to BSN security whereby simply deploying sensors on the subject can enable secure communication, without requiring any form of initialization such as pre-deployment. Analysis of the scheme based on real EKG data (obtained from MIT PhysioBank database) shows that keys resulting from EKA are: random, time variant, can be generated based on short-duration EKG measurements, identical for a given subject and different for separate individuals.

We present SABER (Survivability Architecture: Block, Evade, React), a proposed survivability architecture that blocks, evades and reacts to a variety of attacks by using several security and survivability mechanisms in an automated and coordinated fashion. Contrary to the ad hoc manner in which contemporary survivable systems are built-using isolated, independent security mechanisms such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems and software sandboxes-SABER integrates several different technologies in an attempt to provide a unified framework for responding to the wide range of attacks malicious insiders and outsiders can launch.
 This coordinated multi-layer approach will be capable of defending against attacks targeted at various levels of the network stack, such as congestion-based DoS attacks, software-based DoS or code-injection attacks, and others. Our fundamental insight is that while multiple lines of defense are useful, most conventional, uncoordinated approaches fail to exploit the full range of available responses to incidents. By coordinating the response, the ability to survive successful security breaches increases substantially.
 We discuss the key components of SABER, how they will be integrated together, and how we can leverage on the promising results of the individual components to improve survivability in a variety of coordinated attack scenarios. SABER is currently in the prototyping stages, with several interesting open research topics.

Digital Technology is constantly improving as information becomes wireless. These advances demand more wearable and mobile form factors for products that access information. A product that is wearable should have wearability. This paper explores the concept of dynamic wearability, through design research. Wearability is defined as the interaction between the human body and the wearable object. Dynamic wearability extends that definition to include the human body in motion. Our research has been to locate, understand, and define the spaces on the human body where solid and flexible forms can rest-without interfering with fluid human movement. The result is a set of design guidelines embodied in a set of wearable forms. These wearable forms describe the three dimensional spaces on the body best suited for comfortable and unobtrusive wearability by design.

During the last several years the advancements in technology made it possible for small sensor nodes to communicate wirelessly with the rest of the Internet. With this achievement the question of securing such IP-enabled Wireless Sensor Networks (IP-WSNs) emerged and has been an important research topic since. In this thesis we discuss our implementation of TLS and DTLS protocols using a pre-shared key cipher suite (TLS PSK WITH AES 128 CCM 8) for the Contiki operating system. Apart from simply adding a new protocol to the set of protocols supported by the Contiki OS, this project allows us to evaluate how suitable the transport-layer security and pre-shared key management schemes are for IP-WSNs.

Although computer security technologies are the first line of defence to secure users, their success is dependent on individuals’ behaviour. It is therefore necessary to persuade users to practice good computer security. Our interview analysis of users’ conceptualization of security password guessing attacks, antivirus protection, and mobile online privacy shows that poor understanding of security threats influences users’ motivation and ability to practice safe behaviours. We designed and developed an online interactive comic series called Secure Comics based on instructional design principles to address this problem. An eye-tracking experiment suggests that the graphical and interactive components of the comics direct users’ attention and facilitate comprehension of the information. In our evaluations of Secure Comics, results from several user studies show that the comics improve understanding and motivate positive changes in security management behaviour. We discuss the implication of the findings to better understand the role of instructional design and persuasion in education technology.

Computing platforms deployed in many critical infrastructures, such as smart grid, financial systems, governmental organizations etc., are subjected to security attacks and potentially devastating consequences. Computing platforms often get attacked 'physically' by an intruder accessing stored information, studying the internal structure of the hardware or injecting a fault. Even if the attackers fail to gain sensitive information stored in hardware, they may be able to disrupt the hardware or deny service leading to other kinds of security failures in the system. Hardware attacks could be covert or overt, based on the awareness of the intended system. This work classifies existing hardware attacks. Focusing mainly on covert attacks, they are quantified using a proposed schema. Different countermeasure techniques are proposed to prevent such attacks.

Wearable computers are one of the new technologies that are expected to be a part of users' lives extensively in near future. While some of the users have positive attitudes towards these new products, some users may reject to use them due to different reasons. User experience is subjective, and effected by various parameters. Among these the first impression, namely the perceived qualities has an important impact on product acceptance. This paper aims to explore the perceived qualities of wearables and define the relations between them. An empirical study is conducted, to find out the hierarchy and meaningful relationships between the perceived qualities of smart wearables. The study is based on personal construct theory and data is presented by Cross-Impact Analysis. The patterns behind affection and affected qualities are explored to understand the design requirements for the best integration of wearables into daily lives.

The mobile crowdsourcing network (MCN) is a promising network architecture that applies the principles of crowdsourcing to perform tasks with human involvement and powerful mobile devices. However, it also raises some critical security and privacy issues that impede the application of MCNs. In this article, in order to better understand these critical security and privacy challenges, we first propose a general architecture for a mobile crowdsourcing network comprising both crowdsourcing sensing and crowdsourcing computing. After that, we set forth several critical security and privacy challenges that essentially capture the characteristics of MCNs. We also formulate some research problems leading to possible research directions. We expect this work will bring more attention to further investigation on security and privacy solutions for mobile crowdsourcing networks.


Question: SecuWear: An open-source, multi-component hardware/software framework for investigating wearable security.

This paper introduces B-MAC, an innovative, low-power media access protocol designed specifically for wireless sensor networks, offering a versatile framework for achieving ultra-low power consumption, effective collision avoidance, and high channel efficiency. To minimize power usage, B-MAC implements an adaptive preamble sampling technique, significantly reducing the duty cycle and the time spent in idle listening mode. Moreover, B-MAC enables dynamic reconfiguration and provides bidirectional interfaces for system services, allowing for optimized performance tailored to specific requirements such as throughput, latency, or power conservation. An analytical model is constructed to represent a category of sensor network applications, which is then utilized to illustrate the impact of varying B-MAC's parameters and forecast the behavior of sensor network applications. Through comparative analysis with conventional protocols inspired by 802.11, particularly S-MAC, the paper thoroughly evaluates B-MAC's performance across diverse network conditions. The findings reveal that B-MAC's adaptability leads to superior packet delivery rates, throughput, latency, and energy efficiency. A real-world monitoring application, incorporating multihop networking, is deployed to substantiate the protocol design and model predictions. The results emphasize the critical role of adaptable protocols in facilitating energy-efficient sensor network applications.

In this paper, we present SwiPIN, a novel authentication system that allows input of traditional PINs using simple touch gestures like up or down and makes it secure against human observers. We present two user studies which evaluated different designs of SwiPIN and compared it against traditional PIN. The results show that SwiPIN performs adequately fast (3.7 s) to serve as an alternative input method for risky situations. Furthermore, SwiPIN is easy to use, significantly more secure against shoulder surfing attacks and switching between PIN and SwiPIN feels natural.

Wireless Sensor and Actuators Networks (WSANs) constitute one of the most challenging technologies with tremendous socio-economic impact for the next decade. Functionally and energy optimized hardware systems and development tools maybe is the most critical facet of this technology for the achievement of such prospects. Especially, in the area of agriculture, where the hostile operating environment comes to add to the general technological and technical issues, reliable and robust WSAN systems are mandatory. This paper focuses on the hardware design architectures of the WSANs for real-world agricultural applications. It presents the available alternatives in hardware design and identifies their difficulties and problems for real-life implementations. The paper introduces SensoTube, a new WSAN hardware architecture, which is proposed as a solution to the various existing design constraints of WSANs. The establishment of the proposed architecture is based, firstly on an abstraction approach in the functional requirements context, and secondly, on the standardization of the subsystems connectivity, in order to allow for an open, expandable, flexible, reconfigurable, energy optimized, reliable and robust hardware system. The SensoTube implementation reference model together with its encapsulation design and installation are analyzed and presented in details. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, certain use cases have been studied in order to demonstrate the benefits of migrating existing designs based on the available open-source hardware platforms to SensoTube architecture.

This paper gives a new approach called Component based software engineering for designing an intrusion detection system. This paper also tells that before this component based software approach, other traditional approaches were used for designing intrusion detection system. But due to various drawbacks we proposed this component based approach for intrusion detection system. A comparison table is also illustrated in this paper on the basis of class diagram designed using UML language in a simulated environment. This comparison table will illustrate main difference between the traditional and component based approach and also shows that which parameters make this approach a better approach. Keywords—Component based software engineering, intrusion detection system, Classes etc.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a smart device that can assist women when they feel unsafe. This smart device will be clipped to the footwear of the user and can be triggered discreetly. On tapping one foot behind the other four times, an alert is sent via Bluetooth Low Energy communication to an application on the victim's phone, programmed to generate a message seeking help with the location of the device attached. The results obtained were analysed using Naïve Bayes classifier and this low cost device showed an overall accuracy of 97.5%.

In the context of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), a proliferation of wireless connectivity can be expected. That ubiquitous wireless communication will be hard to centrally manage and control, and can be expected to be opaque to end users. As a result, owners and users of physical space are threatened to lose control over their digital environments. In this work, we propose the idea of an IoTScanner. The IoTScanner integrates a range of radios to allow local reconnaissance of existing wireless infrastructure and participating nodes. It enumerates such devices, identifies connection patterns, and provides valuable insights for technical support and home users alike. Using our IoTScanner, we attempt to classify actively streaming IP cameras from other non-camera devices using simple heuristics. We show that our classification approach achieves a high accuracy in an IoT setting consisting of a large number of IoT devices. While related work usually focuses on detecting either the infrastructure, or eavesdropping on traffic from a specific node, we focus on providing a general overview of operations in all observed networks. We do not assume prior knowledge of used SSIDs, preshared passwords, or similar.

Google's Android platform is a widely anticipated open source operating system for mobile phones. This article describes Android's security model and attempts to unmask the complexity of secure application development. The authors conclude by identifying lessons and opportunities for future enhancements.

Resource and information protection plays a relevant role in distributed systems like the ones present in the Internet of Things (IoT). Authorization frameworks like RBAC and ABAC do not provide scalable, manageable, effective, and efficient mechanisms to support distributed systems with many interacting services and are not able to effectively support the dynamicity and scaling needs of IoT contexts that envisage a potentially unbound number of sensors, actuators and related resources, services and subjects, as well as a more relevance of short-lived, unplanned and dynamic interaction patterns. Furthermore, as more end-users start using smart devices (e.g. smart phones, smart home appliances, etc.) the need to have more scalable, manageable, understandable and easy to use access control mechanisms increases. This paper describes a capability based access control system that enterprises, or even individuals, can use to manage their own access control processes to services and information. The proposed mechanism supports rights delegation and a more sophisticated access control customization. The proposed approach is being developed within the European FP7 IoT@Work project to manage access control to some of the project’s services deployed in the shop floor.

In this paper, we consider the design of a system in which Internet-connected mobile users contribute sensor data as training samples, and collaborate on building a model for classification tasks such as activity or context recognition. Constructing the model can naturally be performed by a service running in the cloud, but users may be more inclined to contribute training samples if the privacy of these data could be ensured. Thus, in this paper, we focus on privacy-preserving collaborative learning for the mobile setting, which addresses several competing challenges not previously considered in the literature: supporting complex classification methods like support vector machines, respecting mobile computing and communication constraints, and enabling user-determined privacy levels. Our approach, Pickle, ensures classification accuracy even in the presence of significantly perturbed training samples, is robust to methods that attempt to infer the original data or poison the model, and imposes minimal costs. We validate these claims using a user study, many real-world datasets and two different implementations of Pickle.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology which brings enormous productivity benefits in applications where objects have to be identified automatically. This paper presents issues concerning security and privacy of RFID systems which are heavily discussed in public. In contrast to the RFID community, which claims that cryptographic components are too costly for RFID tags, we describe a solution using strong symmetric authentication which is suitable for today’s requirements regarding low power consumption and low die-size. We introduce an authentication protocol which serves as a proof of concept for authenticating an RFID tag to a reader device using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as cryptographic primitive. The main part of this work is a novel approach of an AES hardware implementation which encrypts a 128-bit block of data within 1000 clock cycles and has a power consumption below 9 μA on a 0.35 μm CMOS process.

In this paper we introduce FELICS, a free and open-source benchmarking framework designed for fair and consistent evaluation of software implementations of lightweight cryptographic primitives for embedded devices. The framework is very flexible thanks to its modular structure, which allows for an easy integration of new metrics, target devices and evaluation scenarios. It consists of two modules that can currently asses the performance of lightweight block and stream ciphers on three widely used microcontrollers: 8-bit AVR, 16-bit MSP and 32-bit ARM. The metrics extracted are execution time, RAM consumption and binary code size. FELICS has a simple user interface and is intended to be used by cipher designers to compare new primitives with the state of the art. The extracted metrics are very detailed and assist embedded software engineers in selecting the best cipher to match the requirements of a particular application. The tool aims to increase the transparency and trust in benchmarking results of lightweight primitives and facilitates a fair comparison between different primitives using the same evaluation conditions.


Question: SecuWear: An open-source, multi-component hardware/software framework for investigating wearable security.

This paper delves into the security and privacy challenges inherent in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) specifically applied to healthcare settings. With the rapid proliferation of WSNs in healthcare, encompassing applications such as heart rate monitoring, blood pressure tracking, and endoscopic capsule usage, a specialized domain known as wireless body area networks (WBANs) has arisen. Given the wireless nature of these devices and their applications, security and privacy issues have risen to the forefront of concerns. The direct involvement of human subjects amplifies the sensitivity of these concerns. Regardless of whether patient data is collected with consent or as a necessity for the system's functionality, the potential for misuse and privacy breaches can deter individuals from fully embracing the benefits of such systems. Concerns over safety for daily use may also arise. There is a looming threat of social unrest, fueled by the fear that these devices could be exploited for surveillance and tracking by governmental or private entities. In this paper, we comprehensively examine these issues, critically analyzing the problems and proposing potential solutions to mitigate the risks.

Connected health care has several applications including telecare medicine information system, personally controlled health records system, and patient monitoring. In such applications, user authentication can ensure the legality of patients. In user authentication for such applications, only the legal user/patient himself/herself is allowed to access the remote server, and no one can trace him/her according to transmitted data. Chang et al. proposed a uniqueness-and-anonymity-preserving remote user authentication scheme for connected health care (Chang et al., J Med Syst 37:9902, 2013). Their scheme uses the user’s personal biometrics along with his/her password with the help of the smart card. The user’s biometrics is verified using BioHashing. Their scheme is efficient due to usage of one-way hash function and exclusive-or (XOR) operations. In this paper, we show that though their scheme is very efficient, their scheme has several security weaknesses such as (1) it has design flaws in login and authentication phases, (2) it has design flaws in password change phase, (3) it fails to protect privileged insider attack, (4) it fails to protect the man-in-the middle attack, and (5) it fails to provide proper authentication. In order to remedy these security weaknesses in Chang et al.’s scheme, we propose an improvement of their scheme while retaining the original merit of their scheme. We show that our scheme is efficient as compared to Chang et al.’s scheme. Through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against possible attacks. Further, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to ensure that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. In addition, after successful authentication between the user and the server, they establish a secret session key shared between them for future secure communication.

Both distributed healthcare systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) are currently hot topics. The latter is a new computing paradigm to enable advanced capabilities in engineering various applications, including those for healthcare. For such systems, the core social requirement is the privacy/security of the patient information along with the technical requirements (e.g., energy consumption) and capabilities for adaptability and personalization. Typically, the functionality of the systems is predefined by the patient’s data collected using sensor networks along with medical instrumentation; then, the data is transferred through the Internet for treatment and decision-making. Therefore, systems creation is indeed challenging. In this paper, we propose a model-driven framework to develop the IoT-based prototype and its reference architecture for personalized health monitoring (PHM) applications. The framework contains a multi-layered structure with feature-based modeling and feature model transformations at the top and the application software generation at the bottom. We have validated the framework using available tools and developed an experimental PHM to test some aspects of the functionality of the reference architecture in real time. The main contribution of the paper is the development of the model-driven computational framework with emphasis on the synergistic effect of security and energy issues.

Rubén Prieto-Díaz Commonwealth Information Security Center James Madison University prietodiaz@cisat.jmu.edu

The deployment of building automation systems (BAS) allows to increase comfort, safety and security and to reduce operational cost. Today such systems typically follow a two-layered hierarchical approach. While control networks interconnect distributed sensors, actuators and controllers, a backbone provides the necessary infrastructure for management tasks hosted by configuration and management devices. In addition, devices interconnecting the control network with the backbone and the backbone with further networks (e.g., the Internet) play a strategic role. All BAS devices contributing to a particular functionality differ in their requirements for hardware. This paper discusses requirements for devices used in the building automation domain and presents our work in progress to assemble platforms with different purposes relying on a modular architecture.

Securing software systems, is of paramount importance today. This is especially true for cloud systems, as they can be attacked nearly anytime from everywhere over the Internet. Ensuring security in general, however, typically has a negative impact on performance, usability, and increases the system’s complexity. For cloud systems, which are built for high performance and availability as well as elastic scalability, security, therefore, may annihilate many of these original quality properties. Consequently, security, especially for cloud systems, can be understood as a trade-off problem where security mechanisms, applied to protect the system from specific threats and to achieve specific security goals, trade in security for other quality properties. For Cloud Storage Systems (CSS)—i.e., distributed storage systems that replicate data over a cluster of nodes in order to manage huge data amounts, highly volatile query load (elastic scalability), and extraordinary needs for availability and fault-tolerance—this trade-off problem is particularly prominent. Already, the different original quality properties of CSS cannot be provided at the same time and, thus, lead to fundamental trade-offs such as the trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (see, e.g.: [53]). The piggybacked trade-offs coming from considering security as an additionally wanted quality property of such systems lead to further trade-offs that must be decided and managed. In this thesis, we focus on the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS. In order to not contradict the original design goals of CSS, a sensible management of these trade-offs in CSS requires a high degree of understanding of the relationships between security and performance in the security mechanisms of a specific CSS. Otherwise, this can lead to a badly configured CSS which is a security risk or consumes a lot of resources unnecessarily. This thesis, hence, aims at enhancing the understanding of the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS as well as at improving the management of these trade-offs in such systems. For this, we present three independent contributions in this thesis. The first contribution intends to improve the overall understanding of security in and security requirements for CSS. We present two reference usage models that support a security engineer in understanding the general usage of cloud storage

With recent advances in technology, various wearable sensors have been developed for the monitoring of human physiological parameters. A Body Sensor Network (BSN) consisting of such physiological and biomedical sensor nodes placed on, near or within a human body can be used for real-time health monitoring. In this paper, we describe an on-going effort to develop a system consisting of interconnected BSNs for real-time health monitoring of soldiers. We discuss the background and an application scenario for this project. We describe the preliminary prototype of the system and present a blast source localization application.

We present results of a systematic investigation of leakage of compromising information via electromagnetic (EM) emanations from CMOS devices. These emanations are shown to consist of a multiplicity of signals, each leaking somewhat different information about the underlying computation. We show that not only can EM emanations be used to attack cryptographic devices where the power side–channel is unavailable, they can even be used to break power analysis countermeasures.

SCADA systems have historically been isolated from other computing resources. However, the use of TCP/IP as a carrier protocol and the trend to interconnect SCADA systems with enterprise networks introduce serious security threats. This paper describes two strategies for securing SCADA networks, both of which have been implemented in a laboratory-scale Modbus network. The first utilizes a security services suite that minimizes the impact on time-critical industrial process systems while adhering to industry standards. The second engages a sophisticated forensic system for SCADA network traffic collection and analysis. The forensic system supports the post mortem analysis of security breaches and the monitoring of process behavior to optimize plant

Cloud computing promises a more cost effective enabling technology to outsource storage and computations. Existing approaches for secure outsourcing of data and arbitrary computations are either based on a single tamper-proof hardware, or based on recently proposed fully homomorphic encryption. The hardware based solutions are not scaleable, and fully homomorphic encryption is currently only of theoretical interest and very inefficient. In this paper we propose an architecture for secure outsourcing of data and arbitrary computations to an untrusted commodity cloud. In our approach, the user communicates with a trusted cloud (either a private cloud or built from multiple secure hardware modules) which encrypts and verifies the data stored and operations performed in the untrusted commodity cloud. We split the computations such that the trusted cloud is mostly used for security-critical operations in the less time-critical setup phase, whereas queries to the outsourced data are processed in parallel by the fast commodity cloud on encrypted data.

What would you do if you would be instructed to make a secure application built on the Mifare Classic? Arguably, due to the vulnerabilities shown in [5] and hinted at on [6], this is rather difficult and it may be easier to use to another chip. This document explores what the best is you can get, if the only option is Mifare Classic. We propose countermeasures against state restoration and against cloning. The effectiveness of these countermeasures depends on the absense of other vulnerabilities of


Question: PD control with online gravity compensation for robots with elastic joints: theoretical framework and experimental results.

This paper introduces an innovative Cartesian impedance control strategy for robots equipped with flexible joints. The controller's design is grounded in straightforward physical principles, which lead to the augmentation of conventional position feedback with joint torque feedback. This torque feedback mechanism can be understood as a modulation of the perceived motor inertia. Additionally, the paper delves into the challenge of compensating for gravity. It is demonstrated that the resultant closed-loop system can be conceptualized as a network of interconnected passive systems. Building on the passivity characteristic, a rigorous proof of asymptotic stability is provided. This new approach to impedance control for flexible joint robots not only enhances system stability but also optimizes performance by effectively addressing gravity compensation and motor inertia scaling.

Abstract. This paper covers the mechanical design process of an omni-directional mobile robot developed for the Ohio University RoboCup team player. It covers each design iteration, detailing what we learned from each phase. In addition, the kinematics of the final design is derived, and its inverse Jacobian matrix for the design is presented. The dynamic equations of motion for the final design is derived in a symbolic form, assuming that no slip occurs on the wheel in the spin direction. Finally, a simulation example demonstrates simple independent PID wheel control for the complex coupled nonlinear dynamic system.

This paper proposes an underactuated modular climbing robot with flat dry elastomer adhesives. This robot is designed to achieve high speed, high payload, and dexterous motions that are typical drawbacks of previous climbing robots. Each module is designed as a tread-wheeled mechanism to simultaneously realize high speed and high adhesive force. Two modules are connected by compliant joints, which induce a positive preload on the front wheels resulting in stable climbing and high payload capacity. Compliant joints also help the robot to perform various transitions. An active tail is adopted to regulate the preload of the second module. Force transfer equations are derived and stable operating conditions are verified. The stiffness coefficients of the compliant joints and the active tail force are determined optimally to satisfy the constraints of stable operation. The prototype two-module robot achieves 6-cm/s speed and 500-g payload capacity on vertical surfaces. The abilities of flat surface locomotion, internal, external, and thin-wall transitions, and overcoming various sized obstacles are validated through experiment. The principle of joint compliance can be adopted in other climbing robots to enhance their stability and transition capability.

The soft exosuit is a new approach for applying assistive forces over the wearer's body through load paths configured by the textile architecture. In this paper, we present a body-worn lower-extremity soft exosuit and a new control approach that can independently control the level of assistance that is provided during negative- and positive-power periods at the ankle. The exosuit was designed to create load paths assisting ankle plantarflexion and hip flexion, and the actuation system transmits forces from the motors to the suit via Bowden cables. A load cell and two gyro sensors per leg are used to measure real-time data, and the controller performs position control of the cable on a step-by-step basis with respect to the power delivered to the wearer's ankle by controlling two force parameters, the pretension and the active force. Human subjects testing results demonstrate that the controller is capable of modulating the amount of power delivered to the ankle joint. Also, significant reductions in metabolic rate (11%-15%) were observed, which indicates the potential of the proposed control approach to provide benefit to the wearer during walking.

A major issue in the field of human-robot interaction for assistance to manipulation is transparency. This basic feature qualifies the capacity for a robot to follow human movements without any human-perceptible resistive forces. In this paper we address the issue of human motion prediction in order to increase the transparency of a robotic manipulator. Our aim is not to predict the motion itself, but to study how this prediction can be used to improve the robot transparency. For this purpose, we have designed a setup for performing basic planar manipulation tasks involving movements that are demanded to the subject and thus easily predictable. Moreover, we have developed a general controller which takes a predicted trajectory (recorded from offline free motion experiments) as an input and feeds the robot motors with a weighted sum of three controllers: torque feedforward, variable stiffness control and force feedback control. Subjects were then asked to perform the same task but with or without the robot assistance (which was not visible to the subject), and with several sets of gains for the controller tuning. First results seems to indicate that when a predictive controller with open loop torque feedforward is used, in conjunction with force- feedback control, the interaction forces are minimized. Therefore, the transparency is increased.

We have developed the exoskeletal robotics suite HAL (Hybrid Assisitve Leg) which is integrated with human and assists suitable power for ‘lower limb of people with goit disorder. This study proposes the method of assist motion and ossist torque to realize a power assist corresponding to the operator’s intention. In the method of a,ssist motion, we adopted Phase Sequence control which generates a series of assist m,otions hi/ transiti.n,q .some simple basic motions called Phase. w e used the feedback controller to adjust the assist torque to m.ointain myoelectricity signals which were generated while performing the power assist uiolking. The experiment xsults showed the effective power assist according to operator’s intention b y using these control methods.

This paper presents a novel stabilized platform with three UPS-type and one RPU-type active limbs based on the shipboard helicopter's landing process and its kinematics are studied systematically. First, a prototype of this stabilized platform is constructed and its dof is analyzed, Second, analytic formulas for solving the inverse displacement kinematics are derived Third, analytic formulas for solving the forward displacement kinematics are derived and verified. Theoretical formulas and results provide a basis for the further optimization, control, and manufacturing.

This paper presents an advanced controller design for an Inertial stabilization system. The system has a 2-DOF gimbal which will be attached to an aviation vehicle. Due to dynamics modeling errors, and friction and disturbances from the outside environment, the tracking accuracy of an airborne gimbal may severely degrade. So, an advanced controller is needed. Robust inverse dynamics control and the adaptive control are used in the inner loop or gimbal servo-system to control the gimbal motion. An indirect line of sight (LOS) stabilization will be controlled by the outer loop controller. A stabilizer is mounted on the base of the system to measure base rate and orientation of the gimbal in reference to the fixed reference frame. It can withstand high angular slew rates. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed controllers are capable enough to overcome the disturbances and the impact of LOS disturbances on the tracking performance.

We describe a combined force and distance sensor using a commodity infrared distance sensor embedded in a transparent elastomer with applications in robotic manipulation. Prior to contact, the sensor works as a distance sensor (0–10 cm), whereas after contact the material doubles as a spring, with force proportional to the compression of the elastomer (0– 5 N). We describe its principle of operation and design parameters, including polymer thickness, mixing ratio, and emitter current, and show that the sensor response has an inflection point at contact that is independent of an object’s surface properties. We then demonstrate how two arrays of eight sensors, each mounted on a standard Baxter gripper, can be used to (1) improve gripper alignment during grasping, (2) determine contact points with objects, and (3) obtain crude 3D models that can serve to determine possible grasp locations.

In this paper, a graphical, flexible, interactive, and systematic 3D simulation helps facilitate analyzing and previewing kinematics of PA10-7C robot arm in terms of forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, and the Denavit-Hartenberg convention. Modeling and control are of critical importance when the robot arm is used for practical applications. In the paper, the D-H model of PA10-7C robot arm is given first to describe the relationship between two consecutive frames of joints. Based on this D-H model, forward kinematics is calculated efficiently. To describe the relationship between joint angular velocities in the joint space and the end effector's velocities in Cartesian space, Jacobian matrix for PA10-7C robot arm is derived. By Jacobian matrix, inverse kinematics approach is obtained in the paper. VRML-based model of PA10-7C is built in the paper for the simulation. Finally, simulation results are discussed and the paper is concluded.

In this letter, we present a novel gripper, whose design was inspired by chuck clamping devices, for transferring heavy objects and assembling parts precisely in industrial applications. The developed gripper is lightweight (0.9 kg), can manipulate heavy payloads (over 23 kgf), and can automatically align its position and posture via a grasping motion. A fingertip design criterion is presented for the position alignment, while a control strategy is presented for the posture alignment. With one actuator, this gripper realized the above features. This letter describes the mathematical analyses and experiments used to validate these key metrics.


Question: PD control with online gravity compensation for robots with elastic joints: theoretical framework and experimental results.

This paper outlines a comprehensive methodology for the analysis and control of robot manipulator systems, focusing on the dynamic performance of their end-effectors. Initially, the discussion centers on defining end-effector tasks that encompass both constrained motion and active force control. Subsequently, the operational space formulation is introduced, laying the foundation for a unified strategy for motion and force control. The paper then proceeds to extend this formulation to redundant manipulator systems, deriving the equations of motion for the end-effector and elucidating their relationship to joint forces. These insights are pivotal in the formulation of a novel and systematic methodology to address challenges that emerge at kinematic singularities. Specifically, at singular configurations, the manipulator is reimagined as a redundant system concerning the motion of the end-effector within the operational space, but orthogonal to the singular direction. This approach ensures a more robust and effective control strategy, especially in scenarios where the manipulator's configuration poses limitations to its operational capabilities.

The paper is inspired from a challenging experiment conducted with undergraduate students for bachelor project within Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Faculty, Iaşi. A bicycle type system was implemented, analyzed and some control strategies were implemented and tested in order to self-stabilize the system. The bicycle study is enjoyable both to undergraduate students and researchers because it uses a “hi-tech” relevant concrete example. This work encompasses and uses a full range of system-theoretic aspects which covers knowledge from analytical, computational and experimental point of view. The dynamic description of the bicycle is done using a set of dynamic equations that describes the location and orientation of the body, considering four rigid subsystems that form the bicycle. The control issues were conducted in order to follow a desired forward speed using classical PI controller, followed by the LQR approach for steering angle.

This paper proposes an underactuated modular climbing robot with flat dry elastomer adhesives. This robot is designed to achieve high speed, high payload, and dexterous motions that are typical drawbacks of previous climbing robots. Each module is designed as a tread-wheeled mechanism to simultaneously realize high speed and high adhesive force. Two modules are connected by compliant joints, which induce a positive preload on the front wheels resulting in stable climbing and high payload capacity. Compliant joints also help the robot to perform various transitions. An active tail is adopted to regulate the preload of the second module. Force transfer equations are derived and stable operating conditions are verified. The stiffness coefficients of the compliant joints and the active tail force are determined optimally to satisfy the constraints of stable operation. The prototype two-module robot achieves 6-cm/s speed and 500-g payload capacity on vertical surfaces. The abilities of flat surface locomotion, internal, external, and thin-wall transitions, and overcoming various sized obstacles are validated through experiment. The principle of joint compliance can be adopted in other climbing robots to enhance their stability and transition capability.

This article presents an open-source MATLAB toolbox for the motion control of KUKA robot manipulators. The KUKA Control Toolbox (KCT) is a collection of MATLAB functions developed at the Univer sity of Siena. The toolbox, which is compatible with all 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) small and low-payload KUKA robots that use the Eth.RSIXML, runs on a remote computer connected with the KUKA controller via transmission control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). KCT includes more than 40 functions, spanning operations such as forward and inverse kine matics computation, point-to-point joint and Cartesian control, trajectory gen eration, graphical display, three-dimensional (3-D) animation and diagnostics. Applicative examples show the flexibility of KCT and its easy interfacing with other toolboxes and external devices.

This paper is about the use of control algorithms to animate dynamic legged locomotion. Control could free the animator from specifying the details of joint and limb motion while producing both physically realistic and natural looking results. We implemented computer animations of a biped robot, a quadruped robot, and a kangaroo. Each creature was modeled as a linked set of rigid bodies with compliant actuators at its joints. Control algorithms regulated the running speed, organized use of the legs, and maintained balance. All motions were generated by numerically integrating equations of motion derived from the physical models. The resulting behavior included running at various speeds, traveling with several gaits (run, trot, bound, gallop, and hop), jumping, and traversing simple paths. Whereas the use of control permitted a variety of physically realistic animated behavior to be generated with limited human intervention, the process of designing the control algorithms was not automated: the algorithms were "tweaked" and adjusted for each new creature.

We consider the trajecto ry tracking control problem for a 4-wheel differentially driven mobile robot moving on an outdoor terrain. A dynamic model is presented accounting for the effects of wheel skidding. A model-based nonlinear controller is designed, following the dynamic feedback linearization paradigm. A n operational nonholonomic constraint is added at this stage, so as to obtain a predictable behavior for the instantaneous center of rotation thus preventing excessive skidding. The controller is then robustijied, using conventional linear techniques, against uncertainty in the soil parameters at the ground-wheel contact. Simulation results show the good performance in tracking spline-type trajectories on a virtual terrain with varying characteristics.

Current robotics have failed to replicate the great dexterity of the animal’s motions. We believe that it is because most of the works have focused on the controller part rather than on its body structure. Indeed, the musculoskeletal system is essential to produce the animal’s motions and several researchers have attempted to exploit it [1][2][3]. However, most of them have used simple mono-articular muscles and torque control which cannot replicate the nonlinearity of the living tissues, muscles and nerves [4]. In contrast, bipedal robots with monoand bi-articular muscles for performing adaptive motions [5][6][7] have been produced. To further investigate the role of the musculoskeletal system for animal motions, we desgned a quadruped robot with monoand bi-articular muscles. We used artificial pneumatic muscles as actuators due to their high mass/power ratio and their high compliance. Although these actuators replicate several characteristics of biological muscles in terms of damping and elasticity, the length-tension relation differs from them [8][9]. In the result, the angle-torque relation of the robot with pneumatic muscles differed substantially from the one of animals. Thus, we tried to bring the angle-torque relation as close as the one of living tissues by devising the angle-moment arm relation.

Exoskeleton robots are promising assistive/rehabilitative devices that can help people with force deficits or allow the recovery of patients who have suffered from pathologies such as stroke. The key component that allows the user to control the exoskeleton is the human machine interface (HMI). Setting the HMI at the neuro-muscular level may lead to seamless integration and intuitive control of the exoskeleton arm as a natural extension of the human body. At the core of the exoskeleton HMI there is a model of the human muscle, the "myoprocessor," running in real-time and in parallel to the physiological muscle, that predicts joint torques as a function of the joint kinematics and neural activation levels. This paper presents the development of myoprocessors for the upper limb based on the Hill phenomenological muscle model. Genetic algorithms are used to optimize the internal parameters of the myoprocessors utilizing an experimental database that provides inputs to the model and allows for performance assessment. The results indicate high correlation between joint moment predictions of the model and the measured data. Consequently, the myoprocessor seems an adequate model, sufficiently robust for further integration into the exoskeleton control system

Haptic virtual fixtures are software-generated force and position signals applied to human operators in order to improve the safety, accuracy, and speed of robot-assisted manipulation tasks. Virtual fixtures are effective and intuitive because they capitalize on both the accuracy of robotic systems and the intelligence of human operators. In this paper, we discuss the design, analysis, and implementation of two categories of virtual fixtures: guidance virtual fixtures, which assist the user in moving the manipulator along desired paths or surfaces in the workspace, and forbidden-region virtual fixtures, which prevent the manipulator from entering into forbidden regions of the workspace. Virtual fixtures are analyzed in the context of both cooperative manipulation and telemanipulation systems, considering issues related to stability, passivity, human modeling, and applications.

To perform essential daily activities the movement of shoulder, elbow, and wrist play a vital role and therefore proper functioning of upper-limb is very much essential. We therefore have been developing an exoskeleton robot (ExoRob) to rehabilitate and to ease upper limb motion. Toward to make a complete (i.e., 7DOF) upper-arm motion assisted robotic exoskeleton this paper focused on the development of a 2DOF exoskeleton robot to rehabilitate the elbow and forearm movements. The proposed 2DOF ExoRob is supposed to be worn on the lateral side of forearm and provide naturalistic range movements of elbow (flexion/extension) and forearm (pronation/supination) motions. This paper also focuses on the modeling and control of the proposed ExoRob. A kinematic model of the ExoRob has been developed based on modified Denavit-Hartenberg notations. Nonlinear sliding mode control technique is employed in dynamic simulation of the proposed ExoRob, where trajectory tracking that corresponds to typical rehab (passive) exercises has been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed model and controller. Simulated results show that the controller is able to maneuver the ExoRob efficiently to track the desired trajectories, which in this case consisted in passive arm movements. These movements are widely used in rehab therapy and could be performed efficiently with the developed ExoRob and the controller.

We report on the model-based approach to dynamic trotting and pronking gait generation for a leg-wheel transformable robot. The rolling spring-loaded inverted pendulum (R-SLIP) model served as the template for robot locomotion by programming the robot's motion according to the stable fixed-point trajectories of the model. Two strategies are developed to match the robot leg motions to the virtual model leg: First, using the two active degrees of freedom on each leg to simulate the passive spring effect of the R-SLIP model leg. Second, installing a torsion spring on the leg-wheel module to render the leg-wheel morphology identical to that of the model leg. This model-based approach to dynamic behavior generation for the robot is experimentally evaluated. The robot can successfully generate an R-SLIP-like stable pronking gait with a flight phase.


Question: PD control with online gravity compensation for robots equipped with elastic joints: theoretical framework and experimental results.

This paper introduces a passivity-based Cartesian impedance controller designed for robots equipped with flexible joints, focusing on the utilization of the system's complete state feedback, including motor position, joint torque, and their derivatives. The methodology is applied to a comprehensive robot model that incorporates a damping component alongside the joint stiffness. A key feature of this controller is its ability to maintain passivity and asymptotic stability even when the damping matrices vary, allowing for the design of gain matrices that are responsive to changes in the inertia matrix. The controller's passivity is achieved through the exclusive use of motor-side measurements for position feedback. An innovative technique is presented to accurately determine the desired link-side stiffness using only motor position information. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is substantiated through experimental results, demonstrating its practical viability and performance enhancement for flexible joint robots.

This paper shows how to control a robot with omnidirectional wheels, using as example robots with four motors, and generalizing to n motors. More than three wheels provide redundancy: many combinations of motors speeds can provide the same Euclidean movement. Since the system is over-determined, we show how to compute a set of consistent and optimal motor forces and speeds using the pseudoinverse of coupling matrices. This approach allows us also to perform a consistency check to determine whether a wheel is slipping on the floor or not. We show that it is possible to avoid wheel slippage by driving the robot with a motor torque under a certain threshold or handle it and make high accelerations possible.

This paper proposes a fuzzy adaptive sliding mode controller in Cartesian space coordinates for trajectory tracking of the 6 DOF parallel manipulator with considering dynamics of electromechanical actuators. The 6-DOF sensors, may be very expensive or impossible to find at the desired accuracies; and also, especially at constant speeds, will contain errors; therefore, it is better to use LVDT position sensors and then, solving the forward kinematics problem using an iterative artificial neural network strategy, Instead of using the Numerical methods such as the Newton-Raphson method, that heavy computational load imposes to the system. This controller consists of a sliding mode control and adaptive learning algorithms to adjust uncertain parameters of system, that relax the requirement of bounding parameter values and not depending upon any parameter initialization conditions, and fuzzy approximators to estimate the plant’s unknown nonlinear functions, and robustifying control terms to compensate of approximation errors; so that closedloop stability and finite-time convergence of tracking errors can be guaranteed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy can achieve favorable control performance with regard to uncertainties, nonlinearities and external disturbances.

In this study, a two-wheeled autonomous balance robot has been designed and implemented practically. A visual computer interface based on Qt-Creator has been created. Thanks to the computer interface, different control algorithms can be performed on the robot easily, control parameters can be set up online, filter algorithms in various structures can be tried and the reaction of these changeable values to the system can be observed. The effects of some controllers such as Proportional (P), Proportional-Integral (PI), Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) on developed robot have been viewed successfully. Kalman Filters have been used for a stable control of the system and it has seen that the system can balance itself for a long time with optimum PID control parameters obtained.

The paper presents the performance enhanced humanoid robot LOLA which is currently being manufactured. The goal of the project is the realization of a fast, human-like walking motion. The robot is characterized by its lightweight construction, a modular, multi-sensory joint design with brushless motors and an electronics architecture using decentralized joint controllers. The fusion of motor, gear and sensors into a highly integrated, mechatronic joint module has several advantages for the whole system, including high power density, good dynamic performance and reliability. Additional degrees of freedom are introduced in elbow, waist and toes. Linear actuators are employed for the knee joints for a better mass distribution in the legs

For practical use, a myoelectric prosthetic hand needs to (1) have a human-like structure, (2) be lightweight, (3) have multiple degrees of freedom (DoFs), and (4) have a high grip force. We have developed a myoelectric prosthetic hand with an interactive-tendon driven mechanism. This paper describes the control method by which the interactive-tendon driven mechanism produces fine and precise actions, as well as an approximate model for the control method. The approximate model was developed based on a geometry model and an equilibrium model for the joint torque. Experimental results show that the joint motions of the actual robotic hand are controlled with errors of between 9 and 15% using the approximate model.

In this paper, we propose a design method for the mechanism of a robotic arm suitable for a multicopter. The motion of an arm attached to a multicopter can possibly disturb the multicopter attitude. Our aim is to suppress this attitude disturbance by mechanical methods. In the proposed design method, the arm has the following features for suppressing the disturbance of the multicopter attitude. 1. The robotic arm can adjust its center of gravity (COG). 2. In the simplified model, the sum of the angular momentum of the rotating parts constituting the robot arm is equal to zero. These features can compensate for both the displacement of the COG of the arm and the counter torque generated from rotating parts, which cause the disturbance to the multicopter attitude. Since the disturbance of the multicopter attitude can be suppressed mechanically, the robotic arm does not require a special flight control law. In other words, this robotic arm has the advantage of being attached to a multicopter using a common, off-the-shelf, multipurpose flight controller. Furthermore, we discuss the mass distribution, power transmission method, and the moment of inertia of rotating parts, such as the speed reducer, motor, and arm. Additionally, we fabricate a prototype robotic arm with four joints and three degrees of freedom (DOFs), based on the proposed design method. Finally, the experiments showed that the robotic arm suppressed the disturbance of the multicopter attitude caused by the arm motion.

Grasp stability estimation with complex robots in environments with uncertainty is a major research challenge. Analytical measures such as force closure based grasp quality metrics are often impractical because tactile sensors are unable to measure contacts accurately enough especially in soft contact cases. Recently, an alternative approach of learning the stability based on examples has been proposed. Current approaches of stability learning analyze the tactile sensor readings only at the end of the grasp attempt, which makes them somewhat time consuming, because the grasp can be stable already earlier. In this paper, we propose an approach for grasp stability learning, which estimates the stability continuously during the grasp attempt. The approach is based on temporal filtering of a support vector machine classifier output. Experimental evaluation is performed on an anthropomorphic ARMAR-IIIb. The results demonstrate that the continuous estimation provides equal performance to the earlier approaches while reducing the time to reach a stable grasp significantly. Moreover, the results demonstrate for the first time that the learning based stability estimation can be used with a flexible, pneumatically actuated hand, in contrast to the rigid hands used in earlier works.

In this paper we introduce STEPPR (Sandia Transmission-Efficient Prototype Promoting Research), a bipedal robot designed to explore efficient bipedal walking. The initial iteration of this robot achieves efficient motions through powerful electromagnetic actuators and highly back-drivable synthetic rope transmissions. We show how the addition of parallel elastic elements at select joints is predicted to provide substantial energetic benefits: reducing cost of transport by 30 to 50 percent. Two joints in particular, hip roll and ankle pitch, reduce dissipated power over three very different gait types: human walking, human-like robot walking, and crouched robot walking. Joint springs based on this analysis are tested and validated experimentally. Finally, this paper concludes with the design of two unique parallel spring mechanisms to be added to the current STEPPR robot in order to provide improved locomotive efficiency.

This paper gives an overview of the Lucy project. What is special is that the biped is not actuated with the classical electrical drives, but with pleated pneumatic artificial muscles. In an antagonistic setup of such muscles both the torque and the compliance are controllable. From human walking there is evidence that joint compliance plays an important role in energy-efficient walking and running. To be able to walk at different walking speeds and step lengths, a trajectory generator and joint trajectory tracking controller are combined. The first generates dynamically stable trajectories based on the objective locomotion parameters which can be changed from step to step. The joint trajectory tracking unit controls the pressure inside the muscles so the desired motion is followed. It is based on a computed torque model and takes the torque– angle relation of the antagonistic muscle setup into account. With this strategy the robot is able to walk at a speed up to 0.15 m/s. A compliance controller is developed to reduce the energy consumption by combining active trajectory control with the exploitation of the natural dynamics. A mathematical formulation was developed to find an optimal compliance setting depending on the desired trajectory and physical properties of the system. This strategy is experimentally evaluated on a single pendulum structure and not implemented on the real robot because the walking speed of the robot is currently too slow. At the end a discussion is given about the pros and cons of building a pneumatic biped, and the control architecture used. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 2008

Variable Impedance Actuators (VIA) have received increasing attention in recent years as many novel applications involving interactions with an unknown and dynamic environment including humans require actuators with dynamics that are not well-achieved by classical stiff actuators. This paper presents an overview of the different VIAs developed and proposes a classification based on the principles through which the variable stiffness and damping are achieved. The main classes are active impedance by control, inherent compliance and damping actuators, inertial actuators, and combinations of them, which are then further divided into subclasses. This classification allows for designers of new devices to orientate and take inspiration and users of VIA’s to be guided in the design and implementation process for their targeted application.