This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehicle networks performing distributed sensing tasks where each vehicle plays the role of a mobile tunable sensor. The paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for a class of utility functions which encode optimal coverage and sensing policies. The resulting closed-loop behavior is adaptive, distributed, asynchronous, and verifiably correct.

Coverage control for mobile sensing networks

With the objective to improve road safety, the automotive industry is moving toward more “intelligent” vehicles. One of the major challenges is to detect dangerous situations and react accordingly in order to avoid or mitigate accidents. This requires predicting the likely evolution of the current traffic situation, and assessing how dangerous that future situation might be. This paper is a survey of existing methods for motion prediction and risk assessment for intelligent vehicles. The proposed classification is based on the semantics used to define motion and risk. We point out the tradeoff between model completeness and real-time constraints, and the fact that the choice of a risk assessment method is influenced by the selected motion model.

/pdf/a-survey-on-motion-prediction-and-risk-assessment-for-39io9df2mm.pdf

A survey on motion prediction and risk assessment for intelligent vehicles

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand, and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Spec...

Human motion trajectory prediction: a survey:

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement.

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Despite early attempts to use Ethernet in the industrial context, only recently has it attracted a lot of attention as a support for industrial communication. A number of vendors are offering industrial communication products based on Ethernet and TCP/IP as a means to interconnect field devices to the first level of automation. Others restrict their offer to communication between automation devices such as programmable logic controllers and provide integration means to existing fieldbuses. This paper first details the requirements that an industrial network has to fulfill. It then shows how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the real-time requirements in particular in the industrial context. Finally, we show how the requirements that cannot be fulfilled at layer 2 of the OSI model can be addressed in the higher layers adding functionality to existing standard protocols.

/pdf/ethernet-based-real-time-and-industrial-communications-3n4fzeyqz3.pdf

Ethernet-Based Real-Time and Industrial Communications

We show, under which conditions switched Ethernet can be called deterministic. The influence of the service strategies in switched Ethernet is investigated by simulation and compared with analytical bounds on the delays.

Deterministic real-time communication with switched Ethernet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term “envirofied” Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management).

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/11/4/3874/pdf

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

We consider the recognition of dangerous situations in vehicle traffic. Unscented Kalman filters are used to predict vehicle trajectories within a short prediction horizon [t 0 , t 0 + Δt]. Based on this prediction, for each vehicle pair the mutual distance is computed for [t 0 , t 0 + Δt], whereby the distance accounts for the geometric distance, for the prediction uncertainties as well as for the spatial dimensions of the vehicles. If at least one of the mutual distances falls below a distance threshold ∈ within [t 0 , t 0 + Δt], then a dangerous situation arises for the cooperative group and may lead to an autonomous cooperative driving manoeuvre. This approach allows the usage of the system in a mixed environment (only some vehicles are cooperative and cognitive). Obstacles can also be handled. The key issues in this ongoing research work are the recognition and classification of dangerous situations and the formation of a cooperative group constituting an operational unit. A common relevant picture within a group coordinator fuses the necessary information from all cooperative vehicles of the group and forms the basis for situation recognition and classification. This paper is a step to expand a Cooperative Collision Warning System (CCWS) to an integrated Cooperative Collision Avoidance and Cooperative Collision Mitigation System (CCAMS).

Kym Watson

Papers

Deterministic real-time communication with switched Ethernet

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

Recognition of dangerous situations within a cooperative group of vehicles

SANY: an open service architecture for sensor networks

Multilingual Analysis of Twitter News in Support of Mass Emergency Events