Today, embedded systems (ES) tend towards miniaturization and the carrying out of complex tasks in applications such as the Internet of Things, medical systems, telecommunications, among others. Currently, ES structures based on artificial intelligence using hardware neural networks (HNNs) are becoming more common. In the design of HNN, the activation function (AF) requires special attention due to its impact on the HNN performance. Therefore, implementing activation functions (AFs) with good performance, low power consumption, and reduced hardware resources is critical for HNNs. In light of this, this paper presents a hardware-based activation function-core (AFC) to implement an HNN. In addition, this work shows a design framework for the AFC that applies a piecewise polynomial approximation (PPA) technique. The designed AFC has a reconfigurable architecture with a wordlength-efficient decoder, i.e., reduced hardware resources are used to satisfy the desired accuracy. Experimental results show a better performance of the proposed AFC in terms of hardware resources and power consumption when it is compared with state of the art implementations. Finally, two case studies were implemented to corroborate the AFC performance in widely used ANN applications.

The hardware of the matrix inversion architecture using QR decomposition with Givens Rotations (GR) and a back substitution (BS) block is required for many signal processing algorithms. However, the hardware of the GR algorithm requires the implementation of complex operations, such as the reciprocal square root (RSR), which is typically implemented using LookUp Table (LUT) and COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDICs), among others, conveying to either high-area consumption or low throughput. This paper introduces an Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based full matrix inversion architecture using hybrid piecewise polynomial approximation systolic cells. In the design, a hybrid segmentation technique was incorporated for the implementation of piecewise polynomial systolic cells. This hybrid approach is composed by an external and internal segmentation, where the first is nonuniform and the second is uniform, fitting the curve shape of the complex functions achieving a better signal-quantization-to noise-ratio; furthermore, it improves the time performance and area resources. Experimental results reveal a well-balanced improvement in the design achieving high throughput and, hence, less resource utilization in comparison to state-of-the-art FPGA-based architectures. In our study, the proposed design achieves 7.51 Mega-Matrices per second for performing 4 × 4 matrix operations with a latency of 12 clock cycles; meanwhile, the hardware design requires only 1474 slice registers, 1458 LUTs in an FPGA Virtex-5 XC5VLX220T, and 1474 slice registers and 1378 LUTs when a FPGA Virtex-6 XC6VLX240T is used.

Earth observation with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers an extraordinary opportunity to bridge the gap between field observations and traditional air and space-borne remote sensing. In this regard, ground landing stations (GLS) systems play a central role to increase the time and area coverage of UAV missions. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) techniques have been proposed for target location during UAV landing. However, these RSSI-based techniques present a lack of precision due to the propagation medium characteristics, which leads to UAV position vagueness. In this sense, the development of a novel low-cost GLS system for UAV tracking and landing is proposed. The GLS system has been embodied for the purpose of testing the UAV landing navigation capability. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) algorithm is addressed on an embedded microcontroller for the position estimation based on the RSSI acquired from an array of BLE devices. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the ground landing station system, achieving average errors of less than 0.04 m with the UAV-MLE target position estimation approach. This 0.04 m distance represents an order of magnitude increase in location precision over other currently available solutions. In many cases, this increased precision can enable more innovative docking mechanisms, less likelihood of mishaps in docking, and also quicker docking. It may also facilitate docking procedures where the docking station is itself moving, which may be the case if the docking unit is a mobile ground rover.

Precision medicine is now evolving to include internet-of-wearable-things (IoWT) applications. This trend requires the development of novel systems and digital signal processing algorithms to process large amounts of data in real time. However, performing continuous measurements and complex computational algorithms in IoWT systems demands more power consumption. A novel solution to this problem consists in developing energy-aware techniques based on low-power machine learning (ML) algorithms to efficiently manage energy consumption. This paper proposes a multimodal dynamic power management strategy (DPMS) based on the ML-decision tree algorithm to implement an autonomous IoWT system. The multimodal approach analyzes the supercapacitor storage level and the incoming biosignal statistics to efficiently manage the energy of the wearable device. A photoplethysmography (PPG) sensing prototype was developed to evaluate the proposed ML-DPMS programmed in a Nordic nRF52840 processor. The experimental results demonstrate an IoWT system’s low consumption of 25.74 J, and a photovoltaic solar power generation capacity of 380 mW. The proposed ML-DPMS demonstrates a battery life extension of $3.87\times$, i.e., 99.72 J of energy harvested, which represents the possibility to achieve at least $2.4\times$ more data transmissions, in comparison with the widely used uniform power management approach. In addition, when the supercapacitor’s energy is compromised, the decision tree technique achieves a good energy conservation balance consuming in the same period of time 39.6% less energy than the uniform power approach.

The use of antenna arrays is indispensable in radar and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications areas, as it permits the treatment of wavefronts in the spatial domain, enabling important applications such as beamforming and target detection. Spatial information is commonly given in terms of spatial correlation functions (SCFs), but its representation in terms of angular domain, such as the power azimuth spectrums (PASs), is sometimes more convenient. Therefore, transforming from SCF to PAS, and vice versa, is often required. This is commonly done by employing so-called beamformers, where the Bartlett beamformer (BB) is the most commonly utilized. However, the use of beamformers alone is not enough for retrieving PAS information from a given SCF. Particularly, this paper shows that a non-linear operation is missing in relating SCFs to PASs as provided by current beamformers. The paper also shows the mathematical expressions that correctly relate SCFs to PASs and wavenumber spectrums (WNSs) for the general case of systems with antenna arrays. The developed theory results in two new beamformers, which, corroborated by simulation results, solve any previous inconsistency in estimating PASs from SCFs.