Situation awareness

About: Situation awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7380 publications have been published within this topic receiving 108695 citations. The topic is also known as: SA & situational awareness.

Development of a Novel Platform for Greater Situational Awareness in the Urban Military Terrain

Abstract: The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the more recent war in the Gaza Strip have emphasized the need for novel platforms which provide for greater situational awareness in the urban terrain. Without intelligent systems, which can accurately provide real-time information, collateral damage to property will result, together with unnecessary civilian deaths. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that within the next decade 75% of the world's population will be living in urban areas. This paper outlines the current state of unmanned aerial vehicles throughout the world and presents a novel design of a multiple rotary wing platform which has great potential for both military and civilian application areas.

Improving the Global Information Grid's Performance through Satellite Communications Layer Enhancements

Abstract: With the information age in full and rapid development, users are becoming accustomed to having immediate access to information. Users demand more capabilities from every kind of electronic device: more processing power, more features, and better connectivity. Users are also realizing the benefits of collaborating with others in their communities to help expand the body of knowledge. One user that understands the benefits of information sharing is the United States Department of Defense. The DoD's Network-Centric Enterprise Services initiative, along with the concept of pushing the "power to the edge," aims to enable end users with maximum situational awareness and the most comprehensive battlespace, all in a secure networking environment. Providing so much data and capabilities to the end user, however, will require an increase in communications capability and efficiency. To address increased capability needs, the DoD is continually developing and enhancing the global information grid (GIG) throughout its various "layers" of communication infrastructure. One such layer of infrastructure involves the use of cooperative low Earth orbiting satellites for efficient multicasting communications. In this article we review the network-centric concept and the GIG infrastructure. We then discuss the potential benefits to adding a low Earth orbit satellite communications infrastructure to the GIG model. Finally, we show how multicasting protocols can enhance the efficiency within the GIG and reduce some of the long-haul communications burdens

Lane Change Intention Awareness for Assisted and Automated Driving on Highways

Abstract: Today the automotive industry faces a robust trend toward assisted and automated driving. The technology to accomplish this ambition has evolved rapidly over the last few years, and yet there are still a lot of algorithmical challenges left to make an automation of the driving task a safe and comfortable experience. One of the main remaining challenges is the comprehension of the current traffic situation and the anticipation of all traffic participants’ future driving behavior, which is needed for the technical system to obtain situation awareness: an indispensable foundation for successful decision-making. In this paper, a prediction framework is presented that is able to infer a driver's maneuver intention. This is achieved via a hybrid Bayesian network whose hidden layers represent a driver's lane contentedness. A pre-training of the network's parameters with simulated data provides for human interpretable parameters even after running the expectation maximization algorithm based on data gathered on German highways. Moreover, the future driving path of any traffic participant is predicted by solving an optimal control problem, whereby the parameters of the optimal control formulation are found via inverse reinforcement learning.

UAVs for humanitarian missions: Autonomy and reliability

Abstract: Information plays a key role in natural disaster crisis management and relief. A new generation of lightweight UAVs may help improve the situational awareness and assessment. They may first of all relieve rescue teams from time-consuming data collection tasks. At the same time, those UAVs may assist research operations through a more insightful and automated guidance thanks to advanced sensing capabilities. In order to achieve this vision, two challenges must be addressed though. The first one is to achieve a sufficient autonomy for such vehicles, both in terms of navigation and of interpretation of the data sensed. The second one relates to the reliability of the UAV with respect to accidental (safety) or malicious (security) risks. This paper first discusses the potential of UAV assistance in several humanitarian scenarios, as well as potential problems in such situations. The question of autonomy is then addressed. Finally, a secure embedded UAV architecture that relies on cryptographic protocols and on specific hardware capabilities is sketched.