Smart Devices and IoT
From small sensors to industrial grade devices, our goal is to make the large and diverse world of IoT more approachable for the end-users. We aim to achieve this by both providing a visual tool that would allow the user to describe the interaction process and creating an unified approach, that would allow the integration of custom devices via an user-defined device capability schema. Currently we specialize on devices that are parts of LoRaWAN or Zigbee networks. Other technologies we use include the MQTT protocol, RabbitMQ, ChirpStack, Docker, modern database systems including InfluxDB and CockroachDB. Our latest research resulted in the creation of two visual programming environments grouped under the Pocketix project. Our aim is to provide and improve such tools in the future to allow everyday users to create their own automated interactions, without needing any previous knowledge of programming languages and approaches only utilising their mobile phones. Examples of two versions of the VPL editor can be found in figures bellow.
On the backend side our focus resulted the creation of a real-time data processing platform called RIoT, completed during the outstanding bachelor's work of Michal Bureš under the supervision from both Jiří Hynek and Petr John. This platform leverages an internal message broker and Golang to scale the message ingestion and KPI evaluation capabilities of the solution. While firstly developed as a proof of concept the project is currently being further developed under the Pocketix umbrella. The architecture of the solution (in Czech) can be found bellow.
Other backend work can be represented by the continuous attempts to leverage better approaches to both data evaluation and data storage. Notably these can be seen in the publication Application of Time Series Database for IoT Smart City Platform, which showed how choosing a appropriate database system, together with data handling and ingestion approaches, can improve speed of a Smart City IoT platform while reducing cost simultaneously. Further improvements to data handling were explored in the diploma thesis of Ondřej Šulc Optimization of KPI Processing.
Least but not last our group has always focused on improving the user experience of IoT applications. This has been a long-term mission of many bachelor's and master's theses completed with cooperation of our partner Logimic, but also with another companies like Sanezoo and Soleqa or research groups like in the case of the diploma thesis Analysis and Visualization of Beekeeping Big Data. Examples of applications or UI improvements can be found bellow.
Selected Products
Recent Publications
External Cooperation
Cooperation with Students
Each year we supervise a number of bachelor and master theses. We emphasize the applicability of the results to practice and good final grades.
Contact
Dexter@FIT
Faculty of Information Technology
Brno University of Technology
Božetěchova 2, 612 66 Brno, Czech Republic
