ROS2 and Real-Time Performance: The Key to Driving Embodied Intelligence towards Commercialization

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, we have witnessed the widespread application and tremendous success of generative AI, such as ChatGPT. However, in real-world AI applications, such as autonomous driving, autonomous machines, and embodied robots, despite continuous technological breakthroughs, commercialization still faces many challenges. Among them, how to achieve efficient and seamless interaction between these intelligent systems and…

Automated Configuration Framework for TSN

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE standards designed to ensure real-time guarantees for data communication over switched Ethernet. The TSN standards offer a wide range of features, including various traffic shaping mechanisms, precise clock synchronization, and network management. A key challenge arising from this wide array of features is determining how to effectively combine and evaluate them in…

MAST: A Comprehensive Tool Suite for Real-Time Systems Analysis and Optimization

MAST Analysis Tool input/outputs and internal execution flow Real-time systems are special embedded systems that must respond to external events within a strict timeframe. They are the backbone of many critical applications, from industrial automation and automotive systems, to avionics and medical devices. In these domains, a delayed response can have serious consequences, ranging from production downtime to life-threatening situations.…

Lightweight Instrumentation for Accurate Performance Monitoring in RTOSes

Discussions about the accuracy of Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs) are common in forums. These hardware-implemented registers track specific events within a processor’s microarchitecture, providing metrics for performance tuning or monitoring unusual activity. However, the accuracy of these counters can be compromised by system noise, other applications, the operating system, and asynchronous hardware events, especially in complex benchmarks on Intel and…

Can Machines Collectively Think?

The idea of creating machines able to reason like humans is not new and has been introduced by Alan Turing in his seminal paper ”Can Machines Think?” which gave raise to the imitation test, together with other work on computability and the premises of artificial intelligence. Today, with the increased prevalence of i) autonomy, and ii) connectivity of compute systems,…

New Editor Selected for the SIGBED Blog

For the last two years, Chuchu Fan and Stanley Bak have served as the SIGBED Blog editors. The blog has continued to publish a stream of content related to technical topics in embedded systems, such as overviews of best papers and recent NSF CAREER awards, as well as posts aimed for a wider audience. One of our posts written by…

[HSCC 23 Test of Time Award] Verification of Linear Hybrid Automata through Set Propagation

In the domain of cyber-physical systems, linear hybrid automata have emerged as a pivotal tool for modeling and verifying complex behaviors that involve both event-driven (discrete) and time-driven (continuous) changes. This blog post highlights the significant strides made in symbolic analysis techniques, particularly in the efficiency and scalability of these methods. The concept of Hybrid Automata emerged in the early…

EMSOFT’23 PC Chairs’ Report

Welcome to the report on the 23rd ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT’23)! EMSOFT is held as part of Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK), the annual highlight event of the embedded systems community. ESWEEK also features the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) and the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS).…

[HSCC 23 Best Paper] Distributionally Robust Strategy Synthesis for Switched Stochastic Systems

Introduction Cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as automated vehicles or robotics systems, are often characterized by two common features: i) they are safety-critical, hence formal guarantees of correctness are required, ii) they are affected by uncertainty, which is generally modeled through stochastic noise. Various formal verification and synthesis algorithms have been developed for these systems, with approaches including stochastic barrier functions…

[IPSN’23 Best Paper] Network On or Off? Instant Global Binary Decisions over UWB with Flick

In a nutshell: Flick is a novel network primitive that can establish a binary decision over a large wireless network in a fraction of a millisecond, with order-of-magnitude improvement over state of the art. Introduction: Low-power wireless & concurrent transmissions Low-power wireless networks are used in a wide range of applications, from sensing to localization. With no cabling involved, installation…