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Overview

Ceres IoT is an operating system for off-grid & occasionally-connected industrial equipment. Ceres is purpose-built to address the delivery of AI-enabled industrial automation at a massive scale. It allows the central administration, provisioning & analysis of equipment in mines. At scale, equipment powered by Ceres can be connected over a geographically distributed network using wired, wireless or mobile networks.
Ceres IoT is designed to operate in highly constrained and hostile physical environments. It is, therefore, ideally suited for deployment in a farm where computers are expected to work with minimal power, often on batteries, and are exposed to harsh environmental conditions like dust, rain and heat. The capabilities of Ceres allow it to:

• Augment existing industrial infrastructure with intelligence deployed either on the cloud or on-site
• Facilitate rapid reconfiguration and upgrade of autonomous equipment on a large scale using existing mobile or wireless networks.
• Dramatically reduce the cost of industrial automation deployment & maintenance by leveraging wireless interconnects, 5G networks & enhanced capabilities of modern low-cost embedded devices
• Allow a heterogeneous set of sensors & switches from disparate vendors to interoperate over a shared network
• Facilitate the acquisition of large amounts of real-time sensor measurements for further analysis and monitoring.
• Allow big data, machine learning, and AI to power the industrial transformation of mining using data sciences.
• Synchronize execution of distributed tasks based on a universal clock, scheduled by a fleet of connected devices, thus enabling large-scale orchestration.

Design Principles

Ceres takes the approach of standardizing the entire network architecture around a common portable, managed operating-system environment allows us to simultaneously simplify the deployment use cases and accelerate solution development of field apparatus (like sensors and controllers). It also enables a versatile communication fabric that spans the entire industrial site, with assured interoperability across devices. This design approach allowed us to offload a substantial amount of the computing capability to the edge, reducing the throughput demands on the network while also making the platforms highly resilient to zonal outages and accidents.

Although not a comprehensive list of current solutions – and it will undoubtedly continue to evolve, the following classes of devices are implemented entirely using Ceres IoT in the current generation of the platform.

• Wireless Sensor Networks: A growing family of sensor devices is either delivered or under development on-premises. The sensors include air quality & toxic gas sensors, micro-seismometers, environmental sensors, activity monitors and incendiary sensors.
• Networking Components: A family of low-cost, industrial-grade gateways & hubs provide the main communication backbone that integrates a wide range of technologies like smart switches or environmental sensors using WIFI-over-radio, over long distances. The current generation of solution includes a suite of routers built using LoRa-based, wireless LPWAN (low-power, wide-area network) technologies. These routers make deploying and integrating Wi-Fi-capable Ceres-compatible devices easier over long distances.
• Wearable Pagers A smart wearable, called ‘pagers’, operating on a personal area network (PAN) that interfaces with an indigenously developed LPWAN-based wireless mesh networking technology that bridges over a wide range of conventional backbone network (5G, SPE or RS485) to provide ubiquitous tracking and communication capability for miners.

For details on the rationale for this please refer the project abstract.

Code Layout

The framework provides over 300+ highly reusable classes, and over 2000+ fully documented functions. The framework is organized into four layers.

• Kernel Layer: The kernel layer consists of classes implementing the micro-kernel runtime of the operating system.
• Services Layer: The services layer implements several system services that are spawned by the kernel upon boot-up.
• Scripting Layer: As a hosted operating system, Ceres also runs on the cloud as a digital twin runtime in a private cloud. The libraries in this layer provides runtime support for scripting extensions on a twin environment.

Useful Links

• Online Class Reference : You will find the documentation for the last major release here.
• Class Catalog : This is a quick link to the entire class catalog.
• Module Catalog : This is a quick link to the modules that make the framework.
• Empact Foundation Class Library : The C++ foundation class library used to build Ceres.
• Project Abstract: A description of the project and the rationale for building this platform.
• Screen Shots: Screenshot of the running software.

Project Members:

• Ashok Kumar
• Deepesh Kumar S
• Puneet Kohli
• Shobhith Menon
• Sreekant Sreedharan (admin)