The North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University (NC A&T) in collaboration with Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed methodologies for creating simulation-based technology tools that are capable of inferring the perceptions and behavioral states of autonomous systems. These methodologies have the potential to provide the Test and Evaluation (T&E) community at the Department of Defense (DoD) with a greater insight into the internal processes of these systems. The methodologies use only external observations and do not require complete knowledge of the internal processing of and/or any modifications to the system under test. This paper presents an example of one such simulation-based technology tool, named as the Data-Driven Intelligent Prediction Tool (DIPT). DIPT was developed for testing a multi-platform Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system capable of conducting collaborative search missions. DIPT's Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables the testers to view the aircraft's current operating state, predicts its current target-detection status, and provides reasoning for exhibiting a particular behavior along with an explanation of assigning a particular task to it.
Today's cyber defense tools are mostly watchers. They are not active doers. To be sure, watching too is a demanding affair. These tools monitor the traffic and events; they detect malicious signatures, patterns and anomalies; they might classify and characterize what they observe; they issue alerts, and they might even learn while doing all this. But they don't act. They do little to plan and execute responses to attacks, and they don't plan and execute recovery activities. Response and recovery - core elements of cyber resilience are left to the human cyber analysts, incident responders and system administrators. We believe things should change. Cyber defense tools should not be merely watchers. They need to become doers - active fighters in maintaining a system's resilience against cyber threats. This means that their capabilities should include a significant degree of autonomy and intelligence for the purposes of rapid response to a compromise - either incipient or already successful - and rapid recovery that aids the resilience of the overall system. Often, the response and recovery efforts need to be undertaken in absence of any human involvement, and with an intelligent consideration of risks and ramifications of such efforts. Recently an international team published a report that proposes a vision of an autonomous intelligent cyber defense agent (AICA) and offers a high-level reference architecture of such an agent. In this paper we explore this vision.
Lane change for autonomous vehicles (AVs) is an important but challenging task in complex dynamic traffic environments. Due to difficulties in guarantee safety as well as a high efficiency, AVs are inclined to choose relatively conservative strategies for lane change. To avoid the conservatism, this paper presents a cooperation-aware lane change method utilizing interactions between vehicles. We first propose an interactive trajectory prediction method to explore possible cooperations between an AV and the others. Further, an evaluation is designed to make a decision on lane change, in which safety, efficiency and comfort are taken into consideration. Thereafter, we propose a motion planning algorithm based on model predictive control (MPC), which incorporates AV's decision and surrounding vehicles' interactive behaviors into constraints so as to avoid collisions during lane change. Quantitative testing results show that compared with the methods without an interactive prediction, our method enhances driving efficiencies of the AV and other vehicles by 14.8$\%$ and 2.6$\%$ respectively, which indicates that a proper utilization of vehicle interactions can effectively reduce the conservatism of the AV and promote the cooperation between the AV and others.
Manually monitoring water quality is very exhausting and requires several hours of sampling and laboratory testing for a particular body of water. This article presents a solution to test water properties like electrical conductivity and pH with a remote-controlled floating vehicle that minimizes time intervals. An autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) has been designed mathematically and operated via MATLAB \& Simulink simulation where the Proportional integral derivative (PID) controller has been considered. A PVC model with Small waterplane area twin-hull (SWATH) technology is used to develop this vehicle. Manually collected data is compared to online sensors, suggesting a better solution for determining water properties such as dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), temperature, conductivity, total alkalinity, and bacteria. Preliminary computational results show the promising result, as Sungai Pasu rivers tested water falls in the safe range of pH (~6.8-7.14) using the developed ASV.
In many scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka drones, need to have the capability of autonomous flying to carry out their mission successfully. In order to allow these autonomous flights, drones need to know their location constantly. Then, based on the current position and the final destination, navigation commands will be generated and drones will be guided to their destination. Localization can be easily carried out in outdoor environments using GPS signals and drone inertial measurement units (IMUs). However, such an approach is not feasible in indoor environments or GPS-denied areas. In this paper, we propose a localization scheme for drones called PILOT (High-Precision Indoor Localization for Autonomous Drones) that is specifically designed for indoor environments. PILOT relies on ultrasonic acoustic signals to estimate the target drone's location. In order to have a precise final estimation of the drone's location, PILOT deploys a three-stage localization scheme. The first two stages provide robustness against the multi-path fading effect of indoor environments and mitigate the ranging error. Then, in the third stage, PILOT deploys a simple yet effective technique to reduce the localization error induced by the relative geometry between transmitters and receivers and significantly reduces the height estimation error. The performance of PILOT was assessed under different scenarios and the results indicate that PILOT achieves centimeter-level accuracy for three-dimensional localization of drones.
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) typically consist of a wide set of integrated, heterogeneous components; consequently, most of their critical failures relate to the interoperability of such components.Unfortunately, most CPS test automation techniques are preliminary and industry still heavily relies on manual testing. With potentially incomplete, manually-generated test suites, it is of paramount importance to assess their quality. Though mutation analysis has demonstrated to be an effective means to assess test suite quality in some specific contexts, we lack approaches for CPSs. Indeed, existing approaches do not target interoperability problems and cannot be executed in the presence of black-box or simulated components, a typical situation with CPSs. In this paper, we introduce data-driven mutation analysis, an approach that consists in assessing test suite quality by verifying if it detects interoperability faults simulated by mutating the data exchanged by software components. To this end, we describe a data-driven mutation analysis technique (DaMAT) that automatically alters the data exchanged through data buffers. Our technique is driven by fault models in tabular form where engineers specify how to mutate data items by selecting and configuring a set of mutation operators. We have evaluated DaMAT with CPSs in the space domain; specifically, the test suites for the software systems of a microsatellite and nanosatellites launched on orbit last year. Our results show that the approach effectively detects test suite shortcomings, is not affected by equivalent and redundant mutants, and entails acceptable costs.
By seamlessly integrating everyday objects and by changing the way we interact with our surroundings, Internet of Things (IoT) is drastically improving the life quality of households and enhancing the productivity of businesses. Given the unique IoT characteristics, IoT applications have emerged distinctively from the mainstream application types. Inspired by the outlook of a programmable world, we further foresee an IoT-native trend in designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. However, although the challenges of IoT software projects are frequently discussed, addressing those challenges are still in the "crossing the chasm" period. By participating in a few various IoT projects, we gradually distilled three fundamental principles for engineering IoT-native software systems, such as just enough, just in time, and just for "me". These principles target the challenges that are associated with the most typical features of IoT environments, ranging from resource limits to technology heterogeneity of IoT devices. We expect this research to trigger dedicated efforts, techniques and theories for the topic IoT-native software engineering.
Adding renewable energy sources and storage units to an electric grid has led to a change in the way energy is generated and billed. This shift cannot be managed without a unified view of energy systems and their components. This unified view is captured within the idea of a Smart Local Energy System (SLES). Currently, various isolated control and market elements are proposed to resolve network constraints, demand side response and utility optimisation. They rely on topology estimations, forecasting and fault detection methods to complete their tasks. This disjointed design has led to most systems being capable of fulfilling only a single role or being resistant to change and extensions in functionality. By allocating roles, functional responsibilities and technical requirements to bounded systems a more unified view of energy systems can be achieved. This is made possible by representing an energy system as a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) environment where each individual demand energy resource (DER) on the consumer's side of the meter is responsible for their portion of the network and can facilitate trade with numerous entities including the grid. Advances in control engineering, markets and services such as forecasting, topology identification and cyber-security can enable such trading and communication to be done securely and robustly. To enable this advantage however, we need to redefine how we view the design of the sub-systems and interconnections within smart local energy systems (SLES). In this paper we describe a way in which whole system design could be achieved by integrating control, markets and analytics into each system. We propose the use of physical, control, market and service layers to create system of systems representation.
Robot systems are increasingly integrating into numerous avenues of modern life. From cleaning houses to providing guidance and emotional support, robots now work directly with humans. Due to their far-reaching applications and progressively complex architecture, they are being targeted by adversarial attacks such as sensor-actuator attacks, data spoofing, malware, and network intrusion. Therefore, security for robotic systems has become crucial. In this paper, we address the underserved area of malware detection in robotic software. Since robots work in close proximity to humans, often with direct interactions, malware could have life-threatening impacts. Hence, we propose the RoboMal framework of static malware detection on binary executables to detect malware before it gets a chance to execute. Additionally, we address the great paucity of data in this space by providing the RoboMal dataset comprising controller executables of a small-scale autonomous car. The performance of the framework is compared against widely used supervised learning models: GRU, CNN, and ANN. Notably, the LSTM-based RoboMal model outperforms the other models with an accuracy of 85% and precision of 87% in 10-fold cross-validation, hence proving the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Since DARPA Grand Challenges (rural) in 2004/05 and Urban Challenges in 2007, autonomous driving has been the most active field of AI applications. Almost at the same time, deep learning has made breakthrough by several pioneers, three of them (also called fathers of deep learning), Hinton, Bengio and LeCun, won ACM Turin Award in 2019. This is a survey of autonomous driving technologies with deep learning methods. We investigate the major fields of self-driving systems, such as perception, mapping and localization, prediction, planning and control, simulation, V2X and safety etc. Due to the limited space, we focus the analysis on several key areas, i.e. 2D and 3D object detection in perception, depth estimation from cameras, multiple sensor fusion on the data, feature and task level respectively, behavior modelling and prediction of vehicle driving and pedestrian trajectories.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are found to be vulnerable against adversarial examples, which are carefully crafted inputs with a small magnitude of perturbation aiming to induce arbitrarily incorrect predictions. Recent studies show that adversarial examples can pose a threat to real-world security-critical applications: a "physical adversarial Stop Sign" can be synthesized such that the autonomous driving cars will misrecognize it as others (e.g., a speed limit sign). However, these image-space adversarial examples cannot easily alter 3D scans of widely equipped LiDAR or radar on autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we reveal the potential vulnerabilities of LiDAR-based autonomous driving detection systems, by proposing an optimization based approach LiDAR-Adv to generate adversarial objects that can evade the LiDAR-based detection system under various conditions. We first show the vulnerabilities using a blackbox evolution-based algorithm, and then explore how much a strong adversary can do, using our gradient-based approach LiDAR-Adv. We test the generated adversarial objects on the Baidu Apollo autonomous driving platform and show that such physical systems are indeed vulnerable to the proposed attacks. We also 3D-print our adversarial objects and perform physical experiments to illustrate that such vulnerability exists in the real world. Please find more visualizations and results on the anonymous website: //sites.google.com/view/lidar-adv.