RUNES
Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems

Dr Costis Koumpis represented RUNES at meeting of The Advanced Technology Awareness Club, which took place on Thursday 30 March 2006 at the Manchester Conference Centre. The main theme for the day was the use of new technologies including wireless in the Process Control and SCADA areas. The agenda included speakers from organisations such as the University of Manchester, Invensys, NPL, Yorkshire Water and PA Consulting.

The title of Dr Koumpis' talk was "Wireless communication technologies in industrial monitoring and control" and discussed what equipment and architectures available for wirelessly networking sensors and actuators. He explained how operational requirements in industrial environments raise significant challenges and how many competing vendors and several of the standards are still evolving. A summary of the strengths and weaknesses of short-range wireless standards such as Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee, and UWB was provided along with examples of successful deployments. The talk continued with the recent results produced as part of the RUNES project covering the technology roadmapping, the middleware architecture, the wireless gateways and autonomous robots. The video for the small scale demonstrator (Road tunnel in a road tunnel) was also featured. Finally, an approach to indoor localisation for gas canister monitoring was presented.

A copy of the presentation is available here.