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RAWFIE-INFRASTRUCTURE-2016 call
Date de clôture : 14 mars 2016  
APPEL À PROJET CLÔTURÉ

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Announcement of the 1st RAWFIE Open Call for recipients of financial support

 

Project acronym: RAWFIE

Project grant agreement number: 645220

Project full name: Road-, Air-, Water-based Future Internet Experimentation

 

Project RAWFIE (www.rawfie.eu), co-funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 645220, foresees as an eligible activity the provision of financial support to third parties, as a means to achieve its own objectives.

The types of activities that qualify for receiving financial support are the following:

  • Testbed additions;
  • UxV additions and customization;
  • Software enhancements.

 

Deadline: 14 March 2016 (Monday), at 17:00 CET (Brussels local time)

Expected duration of participation: 30 months (starting from July, 2016 to December, 2018)

Maximum amount of financial support for each proposal: € 150 000

Call identifier: RAWFIE-INFRASTRUCTURE-2016 call

Language in which proposal should be submitted: English

Email address for further information: rawfie-contact@cnl.di.uoa.gr [Please use the call identifier "RAWFIE-INFRASTRUCTURE-2016" in the subject of your email]

Tel: (+30) 2107275148, (+30) 2107275127

  

The proposer:

  • Proposals will only be accepted from a single party or a consortium of up to two parties eligible for participation in the EC H2020-projects.
  • Evaluation and ranking will be carried out by an external jury of individual experts.
  • Multiple proposals may be submitted by the same party. However, only the best ranked proposal may be selected among them.

 

Other conditions:

  • Proposals must follow the provided template.
  • Proposals must be submitted through the EasyChair system.
  • Once a proposal is positively evaluated for funding, the respective proposer(s) will be contracted by the project coordinator (UoA) as Third Parties.

 

Call Objectives

RAWFIE (Road-, Air- and Water- based Future Internet Experimentation) is a project funded by the European Commission (Horizon H2020 programme) under the FIRE initiative aiming to provide research and experimentation facilities through the growing domain of unmanned networked devices.  The FIRE initiative (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) creates an open research environment which facilitates strategic research and development of new Future Internet concepts, giving researchers the tools they need to conduct large-scale experiments on new paradigms.

The purpose of the RAWFIE project is to create a federation of different testbeds that will work together to make their resources available under a common framework. Specifically, it aims at delivering a unique, mixed experimentation environment across the space and technology dimensions. RAWFIE integrates numerous testbeds for experimenting in vehicular (road), aerial and maritime environments. Vehicular Testbeds (VT) will deal with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) while Aerial Testbeds (AT) and Maritime Testbeds (MT) will deal with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), respectively. The RAWFIE Consortium includes all the possible actors of this highly challenging experimentation domain, from technology creators to integrators and facility owners. The basic idea behind the RAWFIE effort is the automated, remote operation of a large number of robotic devices (UGVs, UAVs, USVs) for the purpose of assessing the performance of different technologies in the networking, sensing and mobile/autonomic application domains. RAWFIE features a significant number of UxV nodes for exposing the experimenter to an extensive test infrastructure. All these items are managed by a central controlling entity, which will be programmed per case and fully overview/drive the operation of the respective mechanisms (e.g., auto-pilots, remote controlled ground vehicles). Internet connectivity will be extended to the mobile units to enable the remote programming (over-the-air), control and data collection. Support software for experiment management, data collection and post-analysis will be virtualized to enable experimentation from anywhere in the world. The vision of Experimentation-as-a-Service (EaaS) is promoted through RAWFIE. The IoT paradigm is fully adopted and further refined for supporting highly dynamic node architectures. 

The main objective of the 1st RAWFIE Open Call is to enhance certain parts and characteristics of the federated infrastructure. Specifically, the project searches for improvements in terms of hardware, software and new facilities that could host experiments. Each proposal should target exactly one of the three types of activities (termed directions of enhancement), as stated in the next paragraphs. In case a proposer intends to cover more than one directions of enhancement, this should be addressed through the submission of separate proposals. All the proposals should fully comply with the public deliverables D3.1, D4.1, D4.2 (can be found in http://rawfie.eu/deliverables) that have been produced so far by the RAWFIE Consortium and provide system requirements as well as technical description and implementation details for the RAWFIE architecture and specific components.

 

  • Activity / Direction of enhancement 1: Testbed additions.

RAWFIE integrates numerous testbeds for experimenting in vehicular (road), aerial and maritime environments. The actual RAWFIE platform considers three kinds of areas within which the considered unmanned vehicles could operate in order to accomplish a task or execute a drill. Specifically, the project searches for facilities belonging to (at least) one of the following categories:

  1. Indoor and/or Outdoor Vehicular Testbeds (VT) that will deal with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs);
  2. Indoor and/or Outdoor Aerial Testbeds (AT) that will deal with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs);
  3. Indoor and/or Outdoor Maritime Testbeds (MT) that will deal with Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs).

In the context of the 1st RAWFIE Open Call, the project invites Testbed operators (i.e., owners and managers of testbed facilities) to participate and expand the existing RAWFIE infrastructure. The proposers should provide either indoor or outdoor facilities capable of hosting at least one of the three considered kinds of vehicles (UGVs, USVs, UAVs).

Such facilities should be closely monitored and controlled environments. In the general case, facilities should be able to receive, inspect, assemble/fix and store UxVs, provide emergency services (i.e., crash, fire or rescue) and have the appropriate equipment, both ground-based and mobile, to monitor and control the vehicles including but not limited to:

 -       Radar facilities or other kinds of equipment (e.g., cameras) for tracking and surveillance;

 -       Telemetry facilities such as antennas, receivers, display instrumentation systems;

 -       Command uplink and optical tracking facilities;

 -       Premier digital photographic and video services including operation of still cameras, high speed and video systems for Range Safety support, surveillance, and post-launch analysis (e.g., failure analysis).

 

The use of the new testbeds can be three-fold:

 a)     Testing of technologies that directly pertain to the IoT paradigm (its mobile and variety of environment facets in particular) under controlled and replicable conditions. This is the horizontal nature of the testbed, i.e., the assessment of technologies that relate to smart sensors and 4/5G networking. This particular aspect of RAWFIE is used to show the feasibility of a certain technical solution and its performance under different conditions (fully dynamic nature of the testbed).

 b)     Testing of applications that rely heavily on the above technologies and associated characteristics (e.g., advanced/smart sensing, machine-to-machine communications, context and situation awareness). This is the vertical nature of the testbed. This aspect of the RAWFIE ecosystem shows the applicability of the above mentioned technologies/systems in real life applications (e.g., environmental control, safety).

 c)     Testing of integrated solutions, i.e., testing of new mobile devices that carry advanced equipment implementing the IoT paradigm and, in addition, facilitate advanced applications in all possible domains.

 

The proposals should present clearly the features and characteristics of the proposed testbed facilities that may be considered as future extensions of the project infrastructure. These features include, but are not limited to, the following aspects of the facilities:

 -       On-site personnel for the physical management of the devices (e.g., technical support, battery charging, maintenance and upgrades);

 -       RAWFIE-dedicated computational resources (e.g., committed PCs and/or VMs) able to host the RAWFIE software required to establish communication with the back-end RAWFIE platform infrastructure using standard based communication means;

 -      Time availability of the respective indoor/outdoor area that is proposed to host experiments (on a monthly basis). For the convenience of the proposers, a time shift can be determined by themselves, i.e., the exact days within a month that the facility will be available to the experimenters;

 -       Space availability, e.g., the size of the respective indoor/outdoor area that is proposed to host experiments (in terms of km2);

 -       Available communication means within the experimentation area;

 -       Existing means to monitor vehicles (e.g., location, current conditions and status);

 -       Existing equipment of the facility (e.g., sensors and weather stations that monitor weather conditions that could affect the seamless operation of the robotic devices);

 -       Support of privacy and security mechanisms;

 -       Compliance with local legal (mostly safely-related) restrictions.

 

  • Activity / Direction of enhancement 2: UxV additions and customization.

The basic idea behind the RAWFIE effort is the automated, remote operation of a large number of robotic devices for the purpose of assessing the performance of different technologies in the networking, sensing and mobile/autonomic application domains. RAWFIE considers three kinds of vehicles; UGVs, USVs and UAVs. The project aims to feature a significant number of UxV nodes in order to establish an extended test infrastructure for RAWFIE related experimentation purposes. All these items will be managed by a central controlling entity which will be programmed per case and fully overview/drive the operation of the respective mechanisms (e.g., auto-pilots, remote controlled ground vehicles). Internet connectivity will be extended to the mobile units to enable remote programming (over-the-air), control and data collection.

In the context of the 1st RAWFIE Open Call, the project invites manufacturers and providers of robotic devices to participate and expand the existing RAWFIE equipment. The project expects proposals that will provide a considerable number of devices (between 5 and 10) that belong to exactly one of the considered types of vehicles (UGVs, USVs and UAVs). The exact number of devices considered by each proposal should comply with the requested funding and will be part of the evaluation process. Proposals considering higher number of devices will be considered favorably.

The proposers should present clearly within the proposal text a number of features and characteristics of the unmanned vehicles that will be possibly considered as future additions to the project. These features include, but are not limited to, the following aspects of the vehicles:

-       Processing capabilities (type of processors, number of cores, speed);

-       Size and dimensions;

-       Weight;

-       Payload;

-       Battery;

-       Number and type or sensors;

-       Number and type of integrated network components and supported communication interfaces;

-       Minimum and maximum autonomy of the device;

-       Auto-return capability (return to the base station automatically);

-       Ability of the vehicle to operate as an access point;

-       (Remote) Control interface;

-       Over-the-air programming capabilities;

-       Provision of collision avoidance mechanism;

-       Compatibility with Apache Kafka architecture;

-       Data storage of the vehicle;

-       Support of “safe mode” operation;

-       Localization capabilities (e.g., GNSS);

-       Ability to operate in indoor/outdoor/mixed environments;

-       Compliance with standards;

-       Operational conditions (e.g., day/night) and temperature limitations.

Upon the completion of the project, the designed UxV equipment will become property of the RAWFIE Consortium.

 

  • Activity / Direction of enhancement 3: Software enhancements.

Apart from the testbed facilities and the robotic devices, RAWFIE also comprises software architectures and developments for experimentation management, data collection and post-analysis. Virtualization is used to enable remote experimentation from everywhere in the world. In this Open Call, the project does not target to attract new experiments and applications that could be supported by the infrastructure. Such application will be subject of the 2nd Open Call for Proposals (that will follow later within the project lifetime). At the current stage, RAWFIE foresees the enhancement of the existing RAWFIE developments by bringing into the infrastructure software that could belong to the following categories:

  1. Horizontal applications. The project is looking for cross-layer applications and software that could provide added value to the infrastructure by bringing into RAWFIE novel features in different types of experimentation. Indicative examples of expected software include network administration software and resource management tools.
  2. Supporting software at testbed-tier. This category refers to the addition and/or the extension of existing software architectures and products that could be included in the RAWFIE architecture and become part of the RAWFIE software stack in order to improve existing functionality.

In both categories, the adoption of open technologies, specifications and standards (including open source software and Semantic Web technologies) that will enable the openness of the RAWFIE platform towards possible future expansion through the integration with other testbed infrastructures will be preferred.



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