Efficient COgnition and COntrol in COverage and COmmunication in wireless sensor and robot networks

The main goal of the ECO4 project is to develop a cognitive framework for artificial, heterogeneous, complex and multi-degree-of-freedom (sensor and robot) systems by exploiting the principles of optimisation, component-based design, wireless networking, information processing, learning and distributed decision-making and control, in a fashion that mimics features and behaviour of human perception. The desirable synthesis of the above basic principles will primarily correspond to top-down specification of requirements and consideration of the data-centric nature of the environments under consideration, which can be realized through the analysis, intelligent processing and inference of sensor data, with bottom-up assembly of reusable components. ECO4 aims at dividing a complex system into components and sub-components in order to separate the design concerns and provide a framework for systematic and modular design of large complex systems. Cognition and knowledge representation of the collected/provided sensor data will enable building components with module and environmental awareness, which in turn will be used for reasoning and perception of the system state locally and as a whole. Through combining communications with robotics and cognitive capabilities, ECO4 will promote wireless complex system to a new level of scalability, manageability and performance by making such system smarter towards setting the norm for future autonomous and distributed systems. Every designed component will be integrated in the final framework and evaluated and validated through experimentation and real use case, motivated by intelligent transportation systems area, namely traffic monitoring and control. To achieve its objectives, ECO4 gathers disjoint disciplines such as engineering, computer, control sciences and cognition, and promotes integrating environmental settings in the design of every component in a novel and efficient fashion.