Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are becoming one of the key machines/tools of the modern world, particularly in military applications. Numerous research works are underway to explore the possibility of using these machines in other applications such as parcel delivery, construction work, hurricane hunting, 3D mapping, protecting wildlife, agricultural activities, search and rescue, etc. Since these machines are unmanned vehicles, their functionality is completely dependent upon the performance of their control system. This paper presents a comprehensive approach for dynamic modeling, control system design, simulation and optimization of a quadcopter. The main objective is to study the behavior of different controllers when the model is working under linear and/or non-linear conditions, and therefore, to define the possible limitations of the controllers. Five different control systems are proposed to improve the control performance, mainly the stability of the system. Additionally, a path simulator was also developed with the intention of describing the vehicle’s movements and hence to detect faults intuitively. The proposed PID and Fuzzy-PD control systems showed promising responses to the tests carried out. The results indicated the limits of the PID controller over non-linear conditions and the effectiveness of the controllers was enhanced by the implementation of a genetic algorithm to autotune the controllers in order to adapt to changing conditions.

The proliferation of smart sensor nodes for IoT deployments comes with requirements of energy efficiency and to fulfil functional requirements, but it also demands a fast time to market. As a result, we need to facilitate the design of these IoT nodes, while providing the required performance. In this article, we introduce a design space exploration method focusing on IoT nodes that are data intensive due to the inherent complexity of their high data volume. The proposed method aims to identify areas of the design where processing optimisation would have a greater impact on the overall node energy consumption, define an energy budget for prospective additional tasks in the processing pipeline, and in conclusion evaluate the optimal node offloading configuration.

Computer vision systems in sensor nodes of the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Deep Learning (DL) are demanding because the DL models are memory and computation hungry while the nodes often come with tight constraints on energy, latency, and memory. Consequently, work has been done to reduce the model size or distribute part of the work to other nodes. However, then the question arises how these approaches impact the energy consumption at the node and the inference time of the system. In this work, we perform a case study to explore the impact of partitioning a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) such that one part is implemented on the IoT node, while the rest is implemented on an edge device. The goal is to explore how the choice of partition point, quantization method and communication technology affects the IoT system. We identify possible partitioning points between layers, where we transform the feature maps passed between layers by applying quantization and compression to reduce the data sent over the communication channel between the two partitions in Tiny YOLOv3. The results show that a reduction of transmitted data by 99.8% reduces the network accuracy by 3 percentage points. Furthermore, the evaluation of various IoT communication protocols shows that the quantization of data facilitates CNN network partitioning with significant reduction of overall latency and node energy consumption.

Image processing systems exploit image information for a purpose determined by the application at hand. The implementation of image processing systems in an Internet of Things (IoT) context is a challenge due to the amount of data in an image processing system, which affects the three main node constraints: memory, latency and energy. One method to address these challenges is the partitioning of tasks between the IoT node and a server. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of how the input image size and its content within the conventional image processing systems affect the decision on where tasks should be implemented, with respect to node energy and latency. We focus on explaining how the characteristics of the image are transferred through the system until finally influencing partition decisions. Our results show that the image size affects significantly the efficiency of the node offloading configurations. This is mainly due to the dominant cost of communication over processing as the image size increases. Furthermore, we observed that image content has limited effects in the node offloading analysis.

This paper introduces an enhanced approach for deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained IoT devices by combining model partitioning, autoencoder-based compression, quantization with Time Dependent Clustering Loss (TCL) regularization, and lossless compression, to reduce communication overhead, minimizing latency while maintaining accuracy. The autoencoder compresses feature maps at the partitioning point before quantization, effectively reducing data size and preserving accuracy. TCL regularization clusters activations at the partitioning point to align with quantization levels, minimizing quantization error and ensuring accuracy even with extreme low-bitwidth quantization. Our method is evaluated on classification models (ResNet-50, EfficientNetV2-S) and an object detection model (YOLOv10n) using the TinyImageNet-200 and Pascal VOC datasets. Deployed on Raspberry Pi 4 B and GPU, each model is tested across various partitioning points, quantization bit-widths (1-bit, 2-bit, and 3-bit), communication datarate (1MB/s to 10MB/s), and LZMA lossless compression. For a partitioned ResNet-50 after the convolutional stem block, the speed-up against a server solution is 2.33× and 1.85x compared to the all-in-node solution, with only a minimal accuracy drop of less than one percentage points. The proposed framework offers a scalable solution for deploying high-performance AI models on IoT devices, extending the feasibility of real-time inference in resource-constrained environments.