Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with such onboard autonomous capabilities has not been studied to a level of detail sufficient for consideration in mission concepts. These autonomy capabilities will require changes to current operations processes, practices, and tools. We have developed a case study to assess the changes needed to enable operators and scientists to operate an autonomous spacecraft by facilitating a common model between the ground personnel and the onboard algorithms. We assess the new operations tools and workflows necessary to enable operators and scientists to convey their desired intent to the spacecraft, and to be able to reconstruct and explain the decisions made onboard and the state of the spacecraft. Mock-ups of these tools were used in a user study to understand the effectiveness of the processes and tools in enabling a shared framework of understanding, and in the ability of the operators and scientists to effectively achieve mission science objectives.
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.
The automation of the driving task affects both the primary driving task and the automotive user interfaces. The liberation of user interface space and cognitive load on the driver allows for new ways to think about driving. Related work showed that activities such as sleeping, watching TV, or working will become more prevalent in the future. However, social aspects according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs have not yet been accounted for. We provide insights of a focus group with N=5 experts in automotive user experience revealing current practices such as social need fulfillment on journeys and sharing practices via messengers and a user study with N=12 participants of a first prototype supporting these needs in various automation levels showing good usability and high potential to improve user experience.
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.
There is a growing need for authentication methodology in virtual reality applications. Current systems assume that the immersive experience technology is a collection of peripheral devices connected to a personal computer or mobile device. Hence there is a complete reliance on the computing device with traditional authentication mechanisms to handle the authentication and authorization decisions. Using the virtual reality controllers and headset poses a different set of challenges as it is subject to unauthorized observation, unannounced to the user given the fact that the headset completely covers the field of vision in order to provide an immersive experience. As the need for virtual reality experiences in the commercial world increases, there is a need to provide other alternative mechanisms for secure authentication. In this paper, we analyze a few proposed authentication systems and reached a conclusion that a multidimensional approach to authentication is needed to address the granular nature of authentication and authorization needs of a commercial virtual reality applications in the commercial world.
Modeling the whole cardiac function involves several complex multi-physics and multi-scale phenomena that are highly computationally demanding, which makes calling for simpler yet accurate, high-performance computational tools still a paramount challenge to be addressed. Despite all the efforts made by several research groups worldwide, no software has progressed as a standard reference tool for whole-heart fully-coupled cardiac simulations in the scientific community yet. In this work we present the first publicly released package of the heart module of life$^x$, a high-performance solver for multi-physics and multi-scale problems, aimed at cardiac applications. The goal of life$^x$ is twofold. On the one side, it aims at making in silico experiments easily reproducible and accessible to the wider public, targeting also users with a background in medicine or bio-engineering, thanks to an extensive documentation and user guide. On the other hand, being conceived as an academic research library, life$^x$ can be exploited by scientific computing experts to explore new modeling and numerical methodologies within a robust development framework. life$^x$ has been developed with a modular structure and will be released bundled in different modules/packages. This initial release includes a generator for myocardial fibers based on Laplace-Dirichlet-Rule-Based-Methods (LDRBMs). This report comes with an extensive technical and mathematical documentation to welcome new users to the core structure of a prototypical life$^x$ application and to provide with them a possible approach to include the generated cardiac fibers into more sophisticated computational pipelines.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Breakthroughs in machine learning in the last decade have led to `digital intelligence', i.e. machine learning models capable of learning from vast amounts of labeled data to perform several digital tasks such as speech recognition, face recognition, machine translation and so on. The goal of this thesis is to make progress towards designing algorithms capable of `physical intelligence', i.e. building intelligent autonomous navigation agents capable of learning to perform complex navigation tasks in the physical world involving visual perception, natural language understanding, reasoning, planning, and sequential decision making. Despite several advances in classical navigation methods in the last few decades, current navigation agents struggle at long-term semantic navigation tasks. In the first part of the thesis, we discuss our work on short-term navigation using end-to-end reinforcement learning to tackle challenges such as obstacle avoidance, semantic perception, language grounding, and reasoning. In the second part, we present a new class of navigation methods based on modular learning and structured explicit map representations, which leverage the strengths of both classical and end-to-end learning methods, to tackle long-term navigation tasks. We show that these methods are able to effectively tackle challenges such as localization, mapping, long-term planning, exploration and learning semantic priors. These modular learning methods are capable of long-term spatial and semantic understanding and achieve state-of-the-art results on various navigation tasks.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
Deep structured models are widely used for tasks like semantic segmentation, where explicit correlations between variables provide important prior information which generally helps to reduce the data needs of deep nets. However, current deep structured models are restricted by oftentimes very local neighborhood structure, which cannot be increased for computational complexity reasons, and by the fact that the output configuration, or a representation thereof, cannot be transformed further. Very recent approaches which address those issues include graphical model inference inside deep nets so as to permit subsequent non-linear output space transformations. However, optimization of those formulations is challenging and not well understood. Here, we develop a novel model which generalizes existing approaches, such as structured prediction energy networks, and discuss a formulation which maintains applicability of existing inference techniques.