Wireless Local Area Network Technologies as Communication Solutions for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

As the number of research activities and practical deployments of unmanned vehicles has shown a rapid growth, topics related to their communication with operator and external infrastructure became of high importance. As a result a trend of employing IP communication for this purpose is emerging and can be expected to bring significant advantages. However, its employment can be expected to be most effective using broadband communication technologies such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). To verify the effectiveness of such an approach in a specific case of surface unmanned vehicles, the paper includes an overview of IP-based MAVLink communication advantages and requirements, followed by a laboratory and field-experiment study of selected WLAN technologies, compared to popular narrowband communication solutions. The conclusions confirm the general applicability of IP/WLAN communication for surface unmanned vehicles, providing an overview of their advantages and pointing out deployment requirements.

A Review of Unmanned System Technologies with Its Application to Aquaculture Farm Monitoring and Management

This paper aims to provide an overview of the capabilities of unmanned systems to monitor and manage aquaculture farms that support precision aquaculture using the Internet of Things. The locations of aquaculture farms are diverse, which is a big challenge on accessibility. For offshore fish cages, there is a difficulty and risk in the continuous monitoring considering the presence of waves, water currents, and other underwater environmental factors. Aquaculture farm management and surveillance operations require collecting data on water quality, water pollutants, water temperature, fish behavior, and current/wave velocity, which requires tremendous labor cost, and effort. Unmanned vehicle technologies provide greater efficiency and accuracy to execute these functions. They are even capable of cage detection and illegal fishing surveillance when equipped with sensors and other technologies. Additionally, to provide a more large-scale scope, this document explores the capacity of unmanned vehicles as a communication gateway to facilitate offshore cages equipped with robust, low-cost sensors capable of underwater and in-air wireless connectivity. The capabilities of existing commercial systems, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence combined with drones are also presented to provide a precise aquaculture framework.

Performance Evaluation of Downlink Coordinated Multipoint Joint Transmission under Heavy IoT Traffic Load

Emerging 5G network cellular promotes key empowering techniques for pervasive IoT. Evolving 5G-IoT scenarios and basic services like reality augmented, high dense streaming of videos, unmanned vehicles, e-health, and intelligent environments services have a pervasive existence now. These services generate heavy loads and need high capacity, bandwidth, data rate, throughput, and low latency. Taking all these requirements into consideration, internet of things (IoT) networks have provided global transformation in the context of big data innovation and bring many problematic issues in terms of uplink and downlink (DL) connectivity and traffic load. These comprise coordinated multipoint processing (CoMP), carriers’ aggregation (CA), joint transmissions (JTs), massive multi-inputs multi-outputs (MIMO), machine-type communications, centralized radios access networks (CRAN), and many others. CoMP is one of the most significant technical enhancements added to release 11 that can be implemented in heterogonous networks implementation approaches and the homogenous networks’ topologies. However, in a massive 5G-IoT device scenario with heavy traffic load, most cell edge IoT users are severely suffering from intercell interference (ICI), where the users have poor signal, lower data rates, and limited QoS. This work is aimed at addressing this problematic issue by proposing two types of DL-JT-CoMP techniques in 5G-IoT that are compliant with release 18. Downlink JT-CoMP with two homogeneous network CoMP deployment scenarios is considered and evaluated. The scenarios used are IoT intrasite and intersite CoMP, which performance evaluated using downlink system-level simulator for long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) and 5G. Numerical simulation scenarios were results under high dense scenario—with IoT heavy traffic load which shows that intersite CoMP has better empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF) of average UE throughput than intrasite CoMP approximately 4%, inter-site CoMP has better ECDF of average user entity (UE) spectral efficiency than intrasite CoMP almost 10%, and intersite CoMP has approximately same ECDF of average signal interference noise ratio (SINR) as intrasite CoMP and intersite CoMP has better fairness index than intrasite CoMP by 5%. The fairness index decreases when the users’ number increase since the competition among users is higher.

Potential Cyber Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Protections of Unmanned Vehicles

This study seeks to contribute to the literature by presenting a discussion of potential cyber risks and precautionary measures concerning unmanned vehicles as a whole. In this study, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) spoofing, jamming, password cracking, Denial-of-Service (DoS), injecting malware, and modification of firmware are identified as potential cyberattack methods against unmanned vehicles. Potential deterrents against the aforementioned cyberattack methods are suggested as well. Illustrations of such safeguards include creating an architecture of the multi-agent system, using solid-state storage components, applying distributed programming tools and techniques, implementing sophisticated encryption techniques for data storage and transmission, deploying additional sensors and systems, and comparing the data received from different sensors.

IASF-2021 results

On October 19–20, 2021, the annual International Automotive Scientific Forum IASF-2021 “Ground innovative vehicles with a low carbon footprint” was held. The format of the event assumed full-time and remote participation. The problems of design, creation and operation of environmentally friendly vehicles were discussed at the forum. A specialized exhibition was held during the entire period of the Forum’s work in the building of the Design Center. This year, the developments of FSUE “NAMI” have been presented by vehicles hybrid and electric drive, as well as their component base. In addition, the presented AURUS cars included a hydrogen one. GAZ and KAMAZ demonstrated their developments of vehicles with zero emissions. Moscow universities presented unmanned vehicles developed by the students. A competition of students, postgraduates and young scientists’ research works was held.

Unsupervised Image-Generation Enhanced Adaptation for Object Detection in Thermal Images

Object detection in thermal images is an important computer vision task and has many applications such as unmanned vehicles, robotics, surveillance, and night vision. Deep learning-based detectors have achieved major progress, which usually need large amount of labelled training data. However, labelled data for object detection in thermal images is scarce and expensive to collect. How to take advantage of the large number labelled visible images and adapt them into thermal image domain is expected to solve. This paper proposes an unsupervised image-generation enhanced adaptation method for object detection in thermal images. To reduce the gap between visible domain and thermal domain, the proposed method manages to generate simulated fake thermal images that are similar to the target images and preserves the annotation information of the visible source domain. The image generation includes a CycleGAN-based image-to-image translation and an intensity inversion transformation. Generated fake thermal images are used as renewed source domain, and then the off-the-shelf domain adaptive faster RCNN is utilized to reduce the gap between the generated intermediate domain and the thermal target domain. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Artificial intelligence in the digital twins: State of the art, challenges, and future research topics

Advanced computer technologies such as big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing, digital twins, and edge computing have been applied in various fields as digitalization has progressed. To study the status of the application of digital twins in the combination with AI, this paper classifies the applications and prospects of AI in digital twins by studying the research results of the current published literature. We discuss the application status of digital twins in the four areas of aerospace, intelligent manufacturing in production workshops, unmanned vehicles, and smart city transportation, and we review the current challenges and topics that need to be looked forward to in the future. It was found that the integration of digital twins and AI has significant effects in aerospace flight detection simulation, failure warning, aircraft assembly, and even unmanned flight. In the virtual simulation test of automobile autonomous driving, it can save 80% of the time and cost, and the same road conditions reduce the parameter scale of the actual vehicle dynamics model and greatly improve the test accuracy. In the intelligent manufacturing of production workshops, the establishment of a virtual workplace environment can provide timely fault warning, extend the service life of the equipment, and ensure the overall workshop operational safety. In smart city traffic, the real road environment is simulated, and traffic accidents are restored, so that the traffic situation is clear and efficient, and urban traffic management can be carried out quickly and accurately. Finally, we looked forward to the future of digital twins and AI, hoping to provide a reference for future research in related fields.