Rugged Embedded Systems: Computing in Harsh Environments

Rugged Embedded Systems: Computing in Harsh Environments describes how to design reliable embedded systems for harsh environments, including architectural approaches, cross-stack hardware/software techniques, and emerging challenges and opportunities.

A “harsh environment” presents inherent characteristics, such as extreme temperature and radiation levels, very low power and energy budgets, strict fault tolerance and security constraints, etc. that challenge the computer system in its design and operation. To guarantee proper execution (correct, safe, and low-power) in such scenarios, this contributed work discusses multiple layers that involve firmware, operating systems, and applications, as well as power management units and communication interfaces. This book also incorporates use cases in the domains of unmanned vehicles (advanced cars and micro aerial robots) and space exploration as examples of computing designs for harsh environments.

• Provides a deep understanding of embedded systems for harsh environments by experts involved in state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle-related projects
• Covers the most important challenges (fault tolerance, power efficiency, and cost effectiveness) faced when developing rugged embedded systems
• Includes case studies exploring embedded computing for autonomous vehicle systems (advanced cars and micro aerial robots) and space exploration

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Reliable and power-aware architectures: Fundamentals and modeling
Chapter 2. Real-time considerations for rugged embedded systems
Chapter 3. Emerging resilience techniques for embedded devices
Chapter 4. Resilience for extreme scale computing
Chapter 5. Security in embedded systems
Chapter 6. Important Security Concepts
Chapter 7. Security and Network Architecture
Chapter 8. Software Vulnerability and Cyber Attacks
Chapter 9. References
Chapter 10. Reliable electrical systems for micro aerial vehicles and insect-scale robots
Chapter 11. Rugged autonomous vehicles
Chapter 12. Harsh computing in the space domain
Chapter 13. Resilience in next-generation embedded systems