Project in Electrical Engineering: Integration of wireless embedded sensing systems

Teacher(s)

Bol David (coordinator); Jacques Laurent; Louveaux Jérôme; Standaert François-Xavier;

Language

English
> French-friendly

Main themes

In information and communication technologies (ICTs), embedded systems are computing systems that interact with the physical world with a dedicated function. They fill up our industrial world: from cash machines to consumer connected objects and IoT devices to automotive regulation systems to production-line control systems to medical equipment.
This integrated project deals with wireless embedded sensing systems and their core technologies from both the disciplines of the Master degree in electrical engineering (electronic circuits and systems, communication systems, information and signal processing, cryptography, electronic materials and devices, and energy) and from embedded software programming. We will specifically practice the multi-objective optimization of these embedded systems with respect to sensing performance, communication range, robustness, power consumption and resource usage.
Within the social-ecological transition, an important point is to use technologies like ICTs for meaningful applications with positive societal and/or environmental outcomes. In this project, we will focus on an audio monitoring system for natural ecosystem preservation.

Content

• Embedded systems: bare metal and OS-based programming in C/C++ and/or higher-level language, inputs/outputs and hardware abstraction layer (HAL), timing and sequencing, memory management, implementation of DSP algorithms.
• Wireless communications: digital modulation schemes, synchronization, simple medium-access control techniques, baseband processing.
• Digital electronic systems: microcontroller and FPGA-based embedded system architecture and operation, power management, fixed-point arithmetic, hardware acceleration on FPGA.
• Audio signal processing: sampling and quantization effects, denoising, spectro-temporal feature extraction and basic statistical/machine-learning classification methods.
• Data security / cryptography: private-key encryption and authentication.

Teaching methods

The teaching method is based on a few lectures to introduce the scope of the project and the basic notions of the central technologies involved followed by hands-on sessions to practice the concepts on the project development framework and provided hardware equipment. A significant part of the work consists in the project realization in groups, with regular consultancy sessions with the teaching team.
The topic of this project was specifically selected for its target contribution to sustainability and the socio-ecological transition through the preservation of natural forest ecosystems.

Evaluation methods

See the French version.

Online resources

https://moodle.uclouvain.be/course/view.php?id=4829

Teaching materials

• Slides and/or podcasts of the introduction lectures.

Faculty or entity

ELEC