AVANGARD – Advanced manufacturing solutions tightly aligned with business needs

The AVANGARD project (EU/H2020 GA No 869986, Oct. 2019 – Oct. 2022) addresses the integration of three novel processing units into an existing Microfactory test bed conceived to produce urban electric vehicles. The units are state of-the-art multipurpose and multifunctional demonstrators on their own, specifically:

  • Robotized integration of laser cutting-shaping-welding for 3D components
  • Supersonic deposition of metallic powders for high speed 3D printing
  • Large volume and high-speed 3D polymeric printing

The operation of the AVANGARD pilot will be demonstrated on manufacturing I-Bikes, I-CARS and innovative battery packs.

Official project website

ISCA-Lab team develops AVANGARD LoRaWAN-based Industrial IoT (IIoT) solution for a fully automated and trusted industrial environment. The focus also involves secure firmware execution, networking and life-cycle management.

A. Secure Industrial IoT and LoRaWAN Communications

LoRaWAN underpins the IoT infrastructure in AVANGARD IIoT, to fulfill the gaps composed of limitations to battery life, coexistence, and communication range of IoT devices.

LoRaWAN architecture for Industrial IoT environment

The innovative LoRaWAN gateway (STM32MP157c-DK2 with a LoRa Concentrator module based on Semtech SX1301) is equipped with ARM Trustzone, STM security extensions and adds an extra layer of security at the existing LoRaWAN infrastructure via the secure (verified) boot and the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This robust binding guarantees peripherals and memory isolation, secure storage, secure cryptographic functions and kernel image trusted boot-chain. Supported key features include:

  • Secure, trusted boot-chain of LoRaWAN Gateway (STM32MP157c device)
  • Crypto, key management, storage & certificate management, trusted Applications
  • Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) by using OP-TEE framework
  • LoRaWAN end-to-end secure communication
  • Cloud integration (Google spreadsheets via HTTPS webhooks and InfluxDB via MQTTs)
Secure LoRaWAN gateway through supporting trusted boot-chain and TEE

IoT sensor data stored in the cloud are visualized through connected visualization services by Grafana.

Dashboard instance to monitor sensors readings transmitted via an STM32 B-L072Z-LRWAN1 LoRa end-node

B. Firmware-over-the-air (FOTA) Updating for Automotive

Publications

  • G. Kornaros, “Hardware-Assisted Machine Learning in Resource-Constrained IoT Environments for Security: Review and Future Prospective”, IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 58603-58622, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3179047 [pdf]
  • Marcello Coppola and George Kornaros, “Automation for Industry 4.0 by using Secure LoRaWAN Edge Gateways”, in L. Andrade, F. Rousseau, (eds), Multi-Processor System-on-Chip, vol. 2.,  ISTE Ltd, London, and Wiley, New York, March 2021, https://iste.co.uk/book.php?id=1739, ISBN : 9781789450224 [pdf]

Conferences

  • D. Bakoyiannis, O. Tomoutzoglou, G. Kornaros, M. Coppola, “Secure Multi-tenant Provisioning of IoT Devices by Combining On-chip Cortex-M TrustZone with Secure Element”, International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), Oct 3-5, Linz, Austria, 2022 [pdf]
  • S. Leivadaros, G. Kornaros and M. Coppola, “Secure Asset Tracking in Manufacturing through Employing IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology”, in The 21th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGRID’21), 2nd Workshop on Secure IoT, Edge and Cloud systems (SIoTEC), May 10-13, 2021, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia [pdf][slides][video]
  • D. Bakoyiannis, O. Tomoutzoglou, G. Kornaros and M. Coppola, “From Hardware-Software Contracts to Industrial IoT-Cloud Block-chains for Security, Privacy and Authenticity”, in Smart Systems Integration Conference, Virtual Edition 2021, April 27th – 29th [pdf][slides]
  • F.G. Kolimbianakis, G. Kornaros, “Software-Defined Hardware-Assisted Isolation for Trusted Next-Generation IoT Systems”, in Proc. of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC’22), April 2022, Pages 139–146, https://doi.org/10.1145/3477314.3508378 [pdf]

Demonstration

  • Manufacturing equipment monitoring through LoRaWAN-based dashboard [video]
  • NFC-based device commissioning simplify cumbersome processes [video]
  • NFC-based device firmware updating [video]

Project resources