The Design Challenges of Drone Swarm Control

It is widely recognised that swarms are the likely next step for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone technology. Although substantially increased autonomy for navigation, data collection and decision-making is very much part of the “collective artificial intelligence” vision, this expected development raises questions about the most...

Self-Swarming for Multi-Robot Systems Deployed for Situational Awareness

Machine-based situational awareness is a key element to conscious and intelligent interaction with the complex world we live in, be it for the individual unit, a complex dynamical system, or even complex systems. To create this awareness, the frequent gathering of accurate and real-time intelligence data is required to ensure timely, accurate,...

IoT Technologies for Connected and Automated Driving Applications

The applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies connect multiple devices directly and through the Internet. Autonomous vehicles utilise connectivity when updating their algorithms based on user data, interact with the infrastructure to get environmental information, communicate with other vehicles. They exchange information with...

Review: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as Mobile Sensing Platforms (MSPs) for Disaster Response, Civil Security and Public Safety

The use of UAVs in areas ranging from agriculture over urban services to entertainment or simply as a hobby has rapidly grown over the last years. Regarding serious/commercial applications, UAVs have been considered in the literature, especially as mobile sensing/actuation platforms (i.e., as a delivery platform for an increasingly wide range of...

Intelligent autonomous vehicles with an extendable knowledge base under meaningful human control

Intelligent robotic autonomous systems (unmanned aerial/ground/surface/underwater vehicles) are attractive for military application to relieve humans from tedious or dangerous tasks. These systems require awareness of the environment and their own performance to reach a mission goal. This awareness enables them to adapt their operations to...

The sail framework for implementing human-machine teaming concepts

Human-machine teaming (HMT) is a promising paradigm to approach situations in which humans and autonomous systems must closely collaborate. This paper describes SAIL, a software framework for implementing HMT-concepts. The approach of SAIL is to integrate existing autonomous systems in a framework, that serves as a social layer between...

Telling autonomous systems what to do

Recent progress in Artificial Intelligence, sensing and network technology, robotics, and (cloud) computing has enabled the development of intelligent autonomous machine systems. Telling such autonomous systems "what to do" in a responsible way, is a non-trivial task. For intelligent autonomous machines to function in human society and...

Approaching full autonomy in the maritime domain: paradigm choices and Human Factors challenges

There are different opinions and strategies on how to deal with the transition to fully autonomous systems. In this paper, we will address the human factors challenges when a mixed-control approach is chosen, and develop the key concepts for human-automation collaboration design for highly automated settings. In addressing autonomy and the role...

Maximising effectiveness of distributed mobile observation systems in dynamic situations

The trend in modern day observation systems is towards distributed (often mobile) systems that are able to automatically adapt themselves in dynamic situations. They have to make most of their resources to maximise the system's effectiveness, all at reasonable cost. Currently, there is no formal framework of reasoning to design and implement the...

Cross-layer utility-based system optimization

Multilevel fusion systems need provisions to optimally schedule scarce processing and communication resources. To this end, we explore the idea of using utility-based metrics to optimize the run-time operation of a computation and communication constrained multilevel system, including automatic decision support measures such as course of action...

Pluggable Brains: Separating the Intelligent Behavior from the Simulated Player

The use of simulated environments in the military domain has increased significantly over the past years, and with it the demand for more realistically behaving autonomous systems. The autonomous systems become ever more complex and need to support advanced human-machine interactions when applied for training and instruction (virtual role...

Advisory and autonomous cooperative driving systems

In this paper, the traffic efficiency of an advisory cooperative driving system, Advisory Acceleration Control is examined and compared to the efficiency of an autonomous cooperative driving system, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control. The algorithms and implementation thereof are explained. The results of both systems are presented and...

System design for distributed adaptive observation systems

Currently, there is no clear-cut approach or design methodology available for designing distributed adaptive observation systems, partly due to the necessity to combine elements and approaches from several technological and scientific communities. Recently, an effort was made addressing this issue in an integrated manner, resulting in the...

Energy autonomous sensor systems: Towards a ubiquitous sensor technology

Energy efficiency of electronic systems has emerged as one of the most important trends in integrated circuits research in recent years. The results of this continued effort are visible in all kinds of electronic functions: DSPs (reaching the 10 μW/MMAC according Gene's law), data converters (the FOM of recent ADCs is approaching 15 fJ...

Intelligent route surveillance

Intelligence on abnormal and suspicious behaviour along roads in operational domains is extremely valuable for countering the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) threat. Local sensor networks at strategic spots can gather data for continuous monitoring of daily vehicle activity. Unattended intelligent ground sensor networks use simple sensing...

Robustness of networks against viruses: The role of the spectral radius

In this paper we study the spectral radius of a number of real-life networks. This study is motivated by the fact that the smaller the spectral radius, the higher the robustness of a network against the spread of viruses. First we study how wellknown upper bounds for the spectral radius of graphs match to the spectral radii of the social network...

AFFIRM; A system for Autonomous Early and Reliable Forest Fire Detection

The AFFIRM project is aimed at the development and demonstration of a system for early