This year gets exciting as new projects come up, and we meet interesting technology companies. This year we decided to visit DEFEA in Greece, to see the landscape of technology companies involved in the security and defense sectors.
AI Zerocaliber Team in DEFEA
It was interesting to see the different technologies demonstrated, but we also had the great pleasure to meet our friends of EM-Tech.
AI Zerocaliber and EM-Tech Selfie!
Overall our visit to DEFEA left us with good impressions along with a nice view of the technology landscape of the sector.
This year we will present how to create heterogeneous embedded platforms using Coldfire or Kinetis microcontrollers and FPGAs. We will touch on some interesting points related to such implementations.
Compact Heterogeneous Computing Platforms
We hope that you will enjoy this talk and the small demonstration of integration between MCUs and FPGAs.
“Breaking The Surface 2021” event was very successful and interesting. Many scientists of all over thw world presented the latest developments in archeology, marine robotics, sensing and other applications.
We were honored to present our maritime IoT platforms and share our knowledge on embedded system design and hardware acceleration.
We discussed things like power management, showcasing the power management board for the MARI-Sense ASV, hardware acceleration, and versatile heterogeneous platforms.
Ready for the Tutorial with all HardwarePower Management GUI
For anyone attending the multi-disciplinary conference of “Breaking The Surface 2021” event, I will be giving a tutorial on multiple topics on using embedded computing in maritime applications.
In Larnaca, 17-21 June 2021, there was this great event, where we had the opportunity to show our latest developments for the MARI-Sense project in collaboration with CMMI.
On Sunday 21 of June, at Europe Square CMMI and MARI-Sense exhibited various vehicles for maritime applications.
The underwater remote controlled robotic vehicle (ROV) has the capability to provide underwater images or use manipulators to perform delicate actions as required for research or other applications.
Front view of the CMMI’s Robotic Underwater Vehicle
A smart-boat is also developed named “Kerkouros” from the ancient Cyprus ship with oars. “Kerkouros” is under development with the ultimate goal to be an autonomous surface vehicle; a challenging task for the development team.
Prototype of Autonomous Smart Boat Developed at CMMI
For helping development efforts for the MARI-Sense project another platform was exhibited, the Smart-Float. The Smart Float will be used as a technology evaluation platform, where different sensors will be mounted and tested along with radio links, like WiFi, LoRa, thrusters, maneuverability, or other technologies and embedded systems. This platform will help improve the know-how of the team and will lead to new improved models. The main advantage of this platform is its low-cost and large transport capacity (more than 20Kgr net for payload). The team is already thinking of other potential applications where this platform can be used effectively. AI Zerocaliber Ltd is involved with this platform from the concept phases till now, helping with the hull and system design, and specific embedded components.
Smart-Float Platform Shown During EMD-2021 Event
For more information on the MARI-Sense project you may check the project’s website.
Last May we conducted the first experiment of the program. Purpose was to create a dataset of underwater sounds and respective surface images, that would be used to develop and test our algorithms. Various kinds of equipment were used, from RIBs, Sailboats up to underwater ROVs and gliders. You can take a taste of the process on how the experiment was conducted and at the same time hear the respective underwater sounds.
In May 2020, we presented a compact heterogeneous computing embedded platform.
The platform is based on a coldfire Microcontroller and a Spartan6 LX9 device all put on a two layer board. Simple and effective. We also demonstrated two of the prototype systems live showing the configuration of the FPGA from the microcontroller and then the seamless register mapping into the microcontroller memory space.
Last Friday (2020-05-15) in the 7th ICT handshake organized by University Of Nicosia we presented technologies that will be used for the Mari-Sense project. In this presentation we explained the function and design process of embedded systems and how these will be used to enhance processing at the edge (in Greek).