Forum Numerica - Autonomous smart connected objects for IoT in remote area through LEO satellites

In a few years, our homes, cities, vehicles and industries will be populated by billions of connected devices. This is what we call the Internet of Things (IoT). A large number of these objects could be deployed to monitor the planet's environmental parameters, for example to check the health of the oceans, the glaciers or to monitor volcanic or seismic activity. As these locations do not have access to the terrestrial communication network, LEAT is designing innovative antennas that allows communication to low-earth orbit satellites at low throughput and energy costs. To compensate the limited communication datarate, LEAT is developing a promising research approach: deploying machine learning directly on connected devices with low-power microcontrollers (miniature embedded computers) to enable calculations close to data sources (edge computing) and reduce the energy and network footprints of the IoT.

Fabien Ferrero (SM’03) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2007 from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. From 2008 to 2009, he worked for IMRA Europe (Aisin Seiki research center) as a research engineer and developed automotive antennas. In 2010, he is recruited as an Associate Professor at the Polytechnic school of the Université Nice Sophia-Antipolis. Since 2018, he is full Professor at Université Côte d’Azur. He is doing his research at the LEAT (Laboratoire d’Electronique, Antennes et Telecommunications). His studies concerned design and measurement of millimetric antennas, IoT systems and reconfigurable antennas.

Benoit Miramond obtained in 2000 a master in microelectronics from University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris and received the Ph.D. degree in computer science in 2003 from the University Evry Val d’Essonne. From 2004 to 2005 he worked as postdoctoral researcher at INRIA Rocquencourt on embedded real-time systems. He was recruited as Associate Professor at University of Cergy Pontoise in 2005 and started a reconversion towards cognitive neurosciences and robotics. Since 2015 he is Full Professor in electronics at LEAT laboratory from University Côte d’Azur. From 2020, he holds the chair of Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence from 3AI Cote d’Azur institute and develop embedded bio-inspired AI models and neuromorphic architectures.

Laurent Rodriguez, received a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies from the University of Cergy-Pontoise in 2015 for a research work done at the ETIS Laboratory of Cergy-Pontoise on the topic of self-adaptive neuromorphic architectures. Until 2018 he is a contractual teacher-researcher at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and carries out several R&D missions in the industry. He joined the LEAT laboratory for a postdoctoral research work in 2018. In 2020 he was recruited as Associate Professor at the University Côte d'Azur, attached to Polytech Nice Sophia and the LEAT (Laboratoire d’Electronique, Antennes et Telecommunications). He is doing his research in the eBrain group of the EDGE team of the LEAT on the topic of neuromorphic architectures and embedded artificial intelligence based on bio-inspired approaches.