The Devices for Assisted Living(DALi ) project is a research initiative sponsored by the European Commission under the FP7 programme aiming for the development of a robotic device to assist people with cognitive impairments in navigating complex environments. The project revisits the popular paradigm of the walker enriching it with sensing abilities (to perceive the environment), with cognitive abilities (to decide the best path across the space) and with mechanical, visual, acoustic and haptic guidance devices (to guide the person along the path). In this paper, we offer an overview of the developed system and describe in detail some of its most important technological aspects

Abstract-Sensor networks are increasingly used to control and monitor industrial and manufacturing processes. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing a cost function for wireless sensor networks of this kind under energy consumption constraints. We focus, in particular, on the problem of coverage optimization through scheduling. Following existing approaches, we use a mixed integer linear program formulation. We show how to use partitioning techniques to decompose the problem into separate subproblems, solved individually, overcoming the exponential complexity typical of integer linear programming, while minimizing the loss in optimality. In addition, we evaluate the achieved degree of optimality by computing relatively tight bounds with respect to the optimal solution. Finally, we employ simple but effective heuristics to further improve our solution. The results show that our procedure is very efficient and scalable, and is able to find solutions that are very close to optimal. These characteristics make our approach a perfect fit for large and fixed deployments of wireless sensors, typical in factory automation and industrial applications. To show the generality of the approach, we apply our methodology to three different models of varying complexity.

Abstract-In this paper, we consider the optimal motion planning problem for an autonomous race car. A competitive autonomous car must acquire environmental and opponent information to compute, in real time, the minimum time collision free path and the low level control to track the chosen path. To cope with those requirements, we first solve the problem for a car running in isolation considering the optimal sequence of manoeuvres to approach bends and straight stretches of track. We then propose a discrete abstraction to derive a problem of graph optimisation that has a very efficient, albeit suboptimal, solution. In this context, an overtake manoeuvre against a slower car will be obtained excluding from the path the arcs that could potentially generate a collision. Finally, a control algorithm is used to ensure that the car always remains close to the planned path.

Abstract-This paper presents a position tracking technique based on multisensor data fusion for rollators helping elderly people to move safely in large indoor spaces such as public buildings, shopping malls or airports. The proposed technique has been developed within the FP7 project DALi, and relies on an extended Kalman filter processing data from dead-reckoning sensors (i.e. encoders and gyroscopes), a short-range radio frequency identification (RFID) system and a front Kinect camera. As known, position tracking based on dead-reckoning sensors only is intrinsically affected by growing uncertainty. In order to keep such uncertainty within wanted boundaries, the position values are occasionally updated using a coarse-grained grid of low-cost passive RFID tags with known coordinates in a given map-based reference frame. Unfortunately, RFID tag detection does not provide any information about the orientation of the rollator. Therefore, a front camera detecting some markers on the walls is used to adjust direction. Of course, the data rate from both the RFID reader and the camera is not constant, as it depends on the actual user's trajectory and on the distance between pairs of RFID tags and pairs of markers. Therefore, the average distance between tags and markers should be properly set to achieve a good trade-off between overall deployment costs and accuracy. In the paper, the results of a simulation-based performance analysis are reported in view of implementing the proposed localization and tracking technique in a real environment.