ICOS; building tomorrow’s Meta-Operating System to remove boundaries between IoT, Edge and Cloud

The first ICOS face-to-face meeting took place earlier this month in sunny Vilanova I la Geltru, Catalunya, Spain, uniting more than 20 Consortium partners including SixSq. This Horizon Europe project has the ambition of delivering a Meta-Operating System within 3 years, bridging IoT devices to the cloud through edge computing devices.

ICOS, code name for ‘IoT2Cloud Operating System’, is a unique computing system supporting the interconnection of IoT, edge and cloud resources.

The concept of a continuum between IoT, edge and cloud aims to tackle the challenges linked to the ever-growing sector of computing and sensing devices, and to the increasing demand for data-intensive applications, especially at the edge and in the cloud.

By enabling this continuum, in a way which is both technology and device-agnostic, ICOS will facilitate data generation, transfer, and processing - thanks to AI.

ICOS System architecture, functional requirements and use cases were at the heart of the discussions during this 2-day meeting. Indeed, ICOS will address real-life challenges in various fields, with a positive impact on reliability and sustainability.

4 relevant use cases were brought by project partners:

• Bring precision agriculture to the next step by embarking ICOS into agricultural robots, or agrobots, in the fields. Thanks to AI modules, the robots will be able to detect a disease among a plantation, calculate the real amount of fertiliser needed by each plant, etc.

• Improve railway maintenance thanks to a combination of IoT sensors and edge devices, enabling real-time monitoring of the infrastructure metrics and optimising decision-making process.

• Enhance “in-car” user experience thanks to immersive content display linked to touristic trips, and shared media streaming.

• Optimise household energy consumption thanks to an autonomous system based on continuum management.

Fruitful interactions took place during the “ICOS match” workshop between technologies and user stories. The SixSq team was glad to see that Nuvla/NuvlaEdge had a lot of matches and will bring value to all of the use cases in the project by facilitating management of IoT devices and applications.

Thanks to this working group, all Consortium members (technology and use cases providers) had a chance to draw a mental map of the combination of technologies needed to perform each use case.

Finally, these two days were a great opportunity for partners to meet in-person, but also to taste Catalan gastronomy – especially tapas!

Next step from our side: start working on the component that will be used to manage edge devices, and data flow through the IoT to cloud continuum. We are looking forward to bringing further updates during the life of the project.

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