Unmanned aircraft systems are gaining popularity in commercial and government applications. This, however, makes these systems susceptible to security attacks. This paper overviews some of the security considerations in unmanned aircraft systems and details an encryption protocol implementation. Because encryption can be very expensive in computational resources and battery consumption, an effi...

We present a methodology for the deployment of the maxsum algorithm, a well known decentralised algorithm for coordinating autonomous agents, for problems related to situational awareness. In these settings, unmanned autonomous vehicles are deployed to collect information about an unknown environment. Our methodology then helps identify the choices that need to be made to apply the algorithm to...

In the future, unmanned systems will gain decision-making intelligence that enables them to autonomously operate in clusters to perform collaborative tasks. For successful field deployment of unmanned systems, operators will need confidence that autonomous decision making leads to optimal behaviors in uncertain environments. Adjustable autonomy technologies, concepts, and simulation environment...

The unmanned automatic vehicles are important elements in industrial application, such as unmanned carriers in warehouse. The mechanical vision replaces the human’s eyes to be the feedback component. By the image processing, the necessary information can be figured out. However, due to the complicate calculation of image process, it will take a long calculation time from fetching image to makin...

This paper presents the application of the agent-based multimethod simulation approach to the development of the Unmanned Ground Vehicle(UGV) simulation testbed prototype to support both concept exploration and the performance-based requirement analysis of future UGVs. We describe the UGV simulation testbed prototype (UGVSimp) incorporating 1) UGV mission scenario, 2) the operational concepts o...

Forest fires are an important problem for many countries. Prevention, surveillance and extinguishing tasks are costly and sometimes risky. This paper focuses on the surveillance of the fire embers once the fire is extinguished. This is a post-fire task which requires an important amount of terrestrial resources, especially if the weather conditions may provoke the re-ignition of the fire. We pr...

The ability to emplace stand-alone payloads in hostile territory has long been on the wish list of US warfighters. This type of activity is often conducted at great danger. We have developed a capability for automated payload placement from unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) using the Automatic Payload Deployment System (APDS) that can greatly reduce this danger. For example, payloads equipped wit...

Human operators in unmanned vehicle systems must divide their attention between multiple tasks. This is particularly true of systems that contain multiple unmanned vehicles. In such systems, long-term research goals include determining (a) what dictates how humans allocate their attention, (b) where humans should focus their attention, (c) what can system designers do, via decision support syst...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are being increasingly used in growing number of applications. The use of single vehicle is often not enough due to various limitations, such as available power or sensors installed. Therefore the UAVs are formed into cooperative teams that operate as the distributed processing system realizing the given mission with one or more objectives (tasks) defined. The key...