Computer Systems

The course equips students with an understanding of fundamental concepts and terminology of real-time systems, enables them to construct task schedules under real-world constraints, analyse the timing behaviour of a systems and discuss effects of hardware and software interferences on the timing behaviour of systems. In lab sessions, students learn to identify parameters of a scheduling scheme, derive the system specification from a given implementation, evaluate the scheduling overheads of an implementation, and implement event-based scheduling policies on a microcontroller.

This multi-disciplinary course comes with a lab project where teams of four students develop an embedded control unit for a tethered electrical model quad rotor aerial vehicle (Quadrupel drone),  provide stabilization such that it can hover and fly, with only limited user control. The control algorithm must be mapped onto a PCB holding, a modern RF SoC interfacing a sensor module, and the motor controllers. The students will be exposed to simple physics, signal processing, sensors, actuators , and basic control principles.

The course provides an introduction to the current research trends in the area of smartphones. The course is based on a programming project, where students collaborate in pairs to develop a smartphone application. To prepare for the project, students are familiarized with the signals and data that smartphones can gather and the mathematical tools necessary to process this data. During the lectures the latest research papers from this emerging field are analysed to understand how techniques from algorithms, signal processing and machine learning are used to develop exciting smartphone applications.