Centro de investigación en Mecatrónica y Sistemas Interactivos

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Universidad Indoamérica

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From simulation to reality: a learning methodology for understanding control systems and robotic arms with the ARCHIE robot
(Frontiers Media SA, 2026-04-10)
Saeteros, Juan
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Mendoza, Erick
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Ramirez, Jefferson
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Fajardo-Pruna, Marcelo
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Buele, Jorge
Bridging the gap between theoretical concepts and real-world implementation remains a critical challenge in the teaching of control systems and robotics. This paper presents an education method using ARCHIE, a low-cost, open-source articulated robot with six degrees of freedom, as an educational platform designed to enhance students’ understanding of control theory through practical learning. The study combines simulation (using MATLAB’s Simscape) with hands-on practice using the physical robot, following a Sim2Real methodology. A two-hour workshop was conducted with undergraduate mechatronics engineering students, incorporating pre- and post-assessments to evaluate learning gains. Preliminary results suggest a statistically significant improvement in students’ understanding of PID control concepts, with average test scores rising from 46.6% to 63.3% (p = 0.0454, two-tailed). The study also highlights the benefits of active learning, allowing students to experience real-world control system behavior and reflect on discrepancies between simulations and physical implementation. ARCHIE proves to be a valuable educational tool for fostering deeper comprehension of control systems in engineering curricula. © 2026 Saeteros, Mendoza, Ramirez, Fajardo-Pruna, Buele, Yumbla and Saldarriaga.
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Real-Time Industrial Risk Mitigation through an IIoT-Based Acoustic Alert System with Embedded Edge Processing and Remote Monitoring
(Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026)
Vargas-Bustamante, Miguel
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Álvarez-Tello, Jorge
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Cevallos-Sornoza, Angie
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Zapata, Mireya
Environmental monitoring schemes have been transformed by the incorporation of IoT technologies in industrial environments, enabling a shift toward continuous monitoring models and immediate response to risk situations. However, many available solutions rely on highly complex and costly SCADA infrastructures, which limits their adoption in facilities with budgetary constraints. In this context, the present research posed as its central question whether it is possible to design and implement a low-cost IoT system, based on open-source technologies, capable of providing real-time environmental monitoring with immediate acoustic alerts and reliable remote notifications. To address this question, an experimental architecture was developed based on Arduino and ESP32 platforms, integrating temperature and gas sensors, a DFPlayer Mini module for customized acoustic feedback, and a wireless transmission scheme to a remote platform. The system was validated through controlled tests involving the exceedance of critical thresholds, evaluating detection accuracy, alert activation latency, and communication stability during continuous operation. The results showed a correct detection rate above 95%, an average alert activation time below 1.5 s, and remote transmission stability greater than 97%. In addition, an approximate 40% reduction in operator response time was observed compared to traditional manual schemes. Consequently, the study demonstrates that an open and scalable IoT architecture can achieve adequate performance levels for industrial safety, contributing a robust human–computer interaction approach and establishing a solid foundation for future extensions toward predictive and interoperable capabilities.
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J-DEAS: A Jamming-Driven Exponential Adaptive Sleeping Technique for Energy-Aware Mitigation in LoRa Networks
(MDPI AG, 2026-07-02)
Del-Valle-Soto, Carolina
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Mex-Perera, Carlos
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Velazquez, Eduard
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Varela Aldas, José
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Valdivia, Leonardo J.
Low-Power Wide-Area Networks based on LoRa are widely deployed in smart city, agricultural, and environmental monitoring, where their constrained energy budget makes them vulnerable to radio-frequency jamming. (1) Background: a node that keeps transmitting into a jammed channel wastes energy on undeliverable packets, yet detection and energy management are usually treated separately. (2) Methods: we present J-DEAS, a Jamming-Driven Exponential Adaptive Sleeping technique that couples a lightweight, threshold-based detector with an exponential sleep back-off scheduler. The detector uses only the RSSI and SNR reported by commodity transceivers, and a single exponentially weighted confidence variable drives the sleep interval; we analyze the decision boundary, confidence dynamics, steady-state duty cycle, and latency–energy trade-off in closed form. (3) Results: on a measurement dataset the detector reaches an AUC of 0.985 and an F1 of 0.969; under sustained jamming, J-DEAS cuts the duty cycle from 100% to 5.5% and wasted transmissions from 94.3% to 8.3%, with a single-slot median latency and a sub-2% false-sleep rate on clean channels. (4) Conclusions: the technique needs no training and no extra hardware, making it suitable for resource-constrained end devices. © 2026 by the authors.
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Invasion Status, Distribution, and Environmental Preferences of Non-Native Ornamental Thunbergia Species (Acanthaceae) in Ecuador: An Emerging Threat to Tropical Montane Forests
(2026)
Ana Reyes-Hernández
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Ileana Herrera
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Anahí Vargas
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Oleas Gallo, Nora Helena
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Josue Alvarez
Species of the genus Thunbergia, native to Africa, Asia, and Australia, are widely cultivated as ornamental plants; however, their ability to escape cultivation and establish themselves in novel environments poses a growing threat to tropical forests. Here, we provide the first nationwide assessment of Thunbergia species occurring in Ecuador, integrating data from citizen science platforms, herbarium collections, and field surveys. We analyzed spatiotemporal patterns of occurrence, evaluated invasion status based on wild persistence and spread, and assessed environmental preferences using climatic niche analyses. Species distributions were further examined across land-cover types, conservation areas, and forest–non-forest interfaces. We confirmed the presence of five Thunbergia species in Ecuador, two of which also occur in the Galapagos Islands. All species were recorded both in cultivation and in the wild, indicating ornamental horticulture as the main introduction pathway for the genus, and occurrences were documented within 24 conservation areas. Thunbergia alata, T. fragrans, and T. grandiflora were categorized as invasive in Ecuador. Among them, T. fragrans exhibited broad environmental tolerance across bioregions. Wild occurrences were predominantly associated with human-modified landscapes but frequently occurred near forest edges, indicating ongoing encroachment into natural forests. These findings highlight the urgent need for preventive and targeted management strategies, particularly against T. alata, which represents an emerging threat to Andean forest ecosystems.
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Multipath Routing Protocol: For Wireless Ad-hoc Networks Based on Fibonacci
(Zarqa University, 2026-07-04)
Sun, Haiyun
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Varela Aldas, José
A WANET, which stands for Wireless Ad hoc Network, is a temporary network in which nodes are connected to each other via wireless links and there is no central management. Due to its adaptive structure, WANET is very useful in situations when quick communication link setup is necessary. On the other hand, Channel Contention (CC), degrades the performance of WANET and is a major contributor to packet drops. To solve the CC problem, this paper proposes a routing protocol called Multipath Channel Contention Based Routing (MCCBR). Using MCCBR, several paths are discovered for data transmission that have minimal contention between the source and destination. Then the packets are distributed over the discovered routes based on the Fibonacci sequence. The process of searching for new paths for transmission is initiated when the number of found paths becomes less than 50%. The proposed routing protocol was tested and verified using NS2 simulator. The performance of MCCBR was evaluated against the Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Channel Contention Based Routing (CCBR) protocols. MCCBR outperformed AODV and CCBR in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), End-to-End (E2E) delay, and normalized Media Access Control (MAC) overhead. © 2026, Zarka Private University. All rights reserved.
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Immersive Digital Twin for Industrial Control Education
(Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026-08-15)
Andaluz, Víctor H.
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Carvajal, Christian
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Culqui-Tipan, Javier
This paper presents the development and implementation of an immersive Digital Twin for industrial control education, conceived as an experiential learning tool that integrates a real industrial control system, a three-dimensional virtual environment, and a real-time communication infrastructure. The proposed approach follows a layered architecture linking a smart tomato greenhouse as the physical process, a Siemens S7-1500 programmable logic controller, a human–machine interface for supervision and variable adjustment, a Unity-based virtual environment for immersive interaction, and an IoT platform for real-time data transmission and remote visualization. The Digital Twin synchronously replicates the physical process, enabling users to analyze the relationship between environmental variables, control decisions, and system response, as well as to identify normal and critical operating conditions. The system was evaluated through an experimental study with twenty undergraduate engineering students, considering usability and learning outcomes. The System Usability Scale yielded an average score of 82.5 (SD = 6.1), indicating high user acceptance. Learning performance, assessed through a test–retest strategy, increased from 55.3 (pre-test) to 76.8 (post-test), corresponding to a mean gain of 21.5 points after two weeks. Statistical analysis confirmed a significant improvement (p < 0.001) with a large effect size, demonstrating the positive impact of the immersive Digital Twin on understanding industrial control systems. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2027.
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Advances in end-user water conservation technologies: a scoping review
(Frontiers Media SA, 2026-04-15)
Fernández-Vizcarra, Luis
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Chambilla-Zuñiga, Josué
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Gutiérrez-Aguilar, Olger
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Buele, Jorge
Introduction Water scarcity, intensified by climate change, urbanization, and increasing demand, requires sustainable strategies aimed at reducing consumption among end users. In this context, this article develops a scoping review to examine what types of sustainable technologies aimed at water conservation among end users have been investigated, how they are evaluated, and what types of evidence are reported regarding their effectiveness. Methods Studies published between 2020 and 2025 were retrieved from the Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Wiley Online Library, and EBSCO Engineering Source databases following PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The review integrates a bibliometric analysis of the field and a synthesis of 14 selected empirical studies addressing domestic efficiency technologies, adoption dynamics, digital monitoring systems, and resource management approaches. Results The evidence shows high methodological diversity and limited standardization of effective metrics, as only a small proportion of studies explicitly report quantified or directly measured water savings. Nevertheless, consistent patterns emerge depending on the type of intervention. Circular water management and decentralized reuse strategies report the highest potential impacts, with potable water savings ≥30% through greywater treatment and reductions of up to 80% in integrated urban scenarios. Rainwater harvesting and green infrastructure report runoff reductions between 58.3 and 94.1%, generating indirect benefits for urban water management. In contrast, informational and behavioral interventions tend to produce moderate but consistent reductions in consumption. Digital technologies based on IoT, smart metering, and advanced analytics demonstrate strong technical performance in monitoring and leak detection, although they rarely quantify post-implementation water savings. Conclusion The findings suggest that effective water conservation among end users depends on approaches that combine technological solutions, user engagement, and standardized evaluation frameworks capable of linking technological performance with verifiable reductions in water consumption.
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Experimental and data-driven evaluation of transport-layer and application-layer security for MQTT-based IoT networks
(Elsevier BV, 2026-12)
Del-Valle-Soto, Carolina
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Alvarez-Garcia, Maria Fernanda
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Valdivia, Leonardo J.
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Del-Puerto-Flores, José A.
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Varela Aldas, José
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments has intensified the need for secure and efficient communication mechanisms tailored to resource-constrained devices. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is widely adopted due to its lightweight design; however, it lacks native security support, requiring external protection mechanisms that may significantly affect system performance. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental and data-driven evaluation of two security paradigms for MQTT-based IoT networks implemented on ESP32 microcontrollers: transport-layer security using TLS and application-layer encryption based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for key exchange combined with AES symmetric encryption. The analysis jointly evaluates memory utilization, end-to-end latency, energy consumption, and resistance to passive traffic interception under identical experimental conditions. In addition to conventional metric-based comparisons, multivariate statistical analysis and unsupervised learning techniques are employed as exploratory tools to characterize the system-level behavior induced by each security scheme. Results show that Transport Layer Security (TLS) offers stronger confidentiality guarantees at the cost of higher memory overhead, while the ECC–(Advanced Encryption Standard) AES approach significantly reduces memory footprint with moderate latency penalties and comparable energy consumption. Multivariate analysis further reveals that each security mechanism induces a distinct performance regime, providing a compact joint characterization of the security–performance trade-offs across the evaluated configurations.
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Low-Cost IoT System with Containerized AI and Telegram Bot for Real-Time Air Quality Risk Communication and Preventive Behavior Change
(Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026)
Zapata, Mireya
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Álvarez-Tello, Jorge
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Rugel-Sanchez, Keyla
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Vargas-Bustamante, Miguel
Air pollution constitutes one of the main environmental risk factors for public health, particularly in urban environments with limited real time monitoring infrastructure. Although low-cost IoT architectures have emerged as scalable alternatives to extend the spatial coverage of measurements, many implementations lack statistically validated risk classification models capable of translating the environmental data into information to service the public. This study presents the development and statistically validates in real time a risk index for air quality, implemented though a low-cost IoT architecture which integrates supervised artificial intelligence (AI) models deployed at the edge. The system was implemented for eight weeks the Universidad de Guayaquil campus, taking records of PM2.5, PM10 concentrations, temperature and humidity using calibrated sensors. The classification model based on Classification and Regression Trees reached a global accuracy greater which surpassed 90%, with 91.7% concordance to data retrieved from official stations for moderate conditions of PM2.5. K-fold method was used during the validation process and direct comparison with certified infrastructure. Additionally, user evaluation (n = 85) showed 82% adoption of preventive behavior after the implementation of proactive communication with a conversational bot. The results show that the integration of the presented low-cost IoT with validated risk models and user focused communication can generate reliable environmental intelligence and supports preventive decision-making in urban contexts with infrastructure constraints.
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Does the use of dedicated mobile devices in magnetism classes improve student learning?
(Frontiers Media SA, 2026-04-21)
Varela Aldas, José
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Collay, Washington
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Del-Valle-Soto, Carolina
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Palacios-Navarro, Guillermo
Mobile devices have been evaluated from multiple perspectives as tools to support classroom learning; however, devices specifically dedicated to learning activities still require further research to elucidate their influence in the classroom. This study aimed to evaluate whether the use of dedicated mobile devices for teaching basic magnetism content improves learning among secondary school students. A quantitative, comparative quasi-experimental study with non-equivalent groups was conducted ((Formula presented)) with secondary school students in Ecuador. The experimental group used an educational application running on a dedicated mobile device (M5Stack Core2) and interacted with an electromagnet as a didactic peripheral, whereas the control group received a traditional teacher-centered lesson supported by slides. Learning outcomes were measured using a teacher-designed theoretical test administered at the end of a 90-min session. Mean scores were similar between groups (experimental: 7.32; control: 7.58). After verifying assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variance, an independent-samples t-test showed no statistically significant differences ((Formula presented)), and the effect size was small (Cohen’s (Formula presented)). Under the conditions evaluated, the dedicated mobile device did not produce measurable gains in knowledge performance compared to the traditional lesson. Longer interventions, larger samples, and longitudinal study designs are needed to clarify when and how this technology may provide educational benefits.

Centro de investigación en Mecatrónica y Sistemas Interactivos

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