C. Kouzinopoulos

Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Marcel L. Meli, Martin Schellenberg et al.

The advance of autonomous Smart Sensor Networks and embedded systems for the Internet of Things, powered by photovoltaic energy harvesting, is severely limited by energy efficiency, especially in low-light environments. While Dynamic Power Management is essential for energy conservation, conventional software-based techniques that rely on processor-managed low-power states incur a persistent quiescent current drain. This current becomes the dominant energy sink in energy-scarce conditions, limiting autonomy. The work of this paper addresses this limitation by introducing a robust, hardware-orchestrated dynamic power management architecture that improves existing configurations for battery-based sensor nodes. The proposed architecture achieves a minimal quiescent drain of 452nA, by completely power-gating the microcontroller and all non-essential peripherals, with wake-up orchestrated by an ultra-low-power PMIC, RTC and a novel latch circuit developed specifically for this work. Our evaluation demonstrates that the dynamic power management architecture is significantly more efficient than traditional software-based sleep modes.

Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Yuri Manna

Weeds significantly reduce crop yields worldwide and pose major challenges to sustainable agriculture. Traditional weed management methods, primarily relying on chemical herbicides, risk environmental contamination and lead to the emergence of herbicide-resistant species. Precision weeding, leveraging computer vision and machine learning methods, offers a promising eco-friendly alternative but is often limited by reliance on high-power computational platforms. This work presents an optimized, low-power edge AI system for weeds detection based on the YOLOv8n object detector deployed on the STM32U575ZI microcontroller. Several compression techniques are applied to the detection model, including structured pruning, integer quantization and input image resolution scaling in order to meet strict hardware constraints. The model is trained and evaluated on the CropAndWeed dataset with 74 plant species, achieving a balanced trade-off between detection accuracy and efficiency. Our system supports real-time, in-situ weeds detection with a minimal energy consumption of 51.8mJ per inference, enabling scalable deployment in power-constrained agricultural environments.

Casper Bröcheler, Thomas Vroom, Derrick Timmermans et al.

Robotic grasping, the ability of robots to reliably secure and manipulate objects of varying shapes, sizes and orientations, is a complex task that requires precise perception and control. Deep neural networks have shown remarkable success in grasp synthesis by learning rich and abstract representations of objects. When deployed at the edge, these models can enable low-latency, low-power inference, making real-time grasping feasible in resource-constrained environments. This work implements Heatmap-Guided Grasp Detection, an end-to-end framework for the detection of 6-Dof grasp poses, on the GAP9 RISC-V System-on-Chip. The model is optimised using hardware-aware techniques, including input dimensionality reduction, model partitioning, and quantisation. Experimental evaluation on the GraspNet-1Billion benchmark validates the feasibility of fully on-chip inference, highlighting the potential of low-power MCUs for real-time, autonomous manipulation.