A Review on Improving the Autonomy of Unmanned Surface Vehicles through Intelligent Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres

In recent years unmanned vehicles have grown in popularity, with an ever increasing number of applications in industry, the military and research within air, ground and marine domains. In particular, the challenges posed by unmanned marine vehicles in order to increase the level of autonomy include automatic obstacle avoidance and conformance with the Rules of the Road when navigating in the presence of other maritime traffic. The USV Master Plan which has been established for the US Navy outlines a list of objectives for improving autonomy in order to increase mission diversity and reduce the amount of supervisory intervention. This paper addresses the specific development needs based on notable research carried out to date, primarily with regard to navigation, guidance, control and motion planning. The integration of the International Regulations for Avoiding Collisions at Sea within the obstacle avoidance protocols seeks to prevent maritime accidents attributed to human error. The addition of these critical safety measures may be key to a future growth in demand for USVs, as they serve to pave the way for establishing legal policies for unmanned vessels.

Stability Analysis and Implementation of a Decentralized Formation Control Strategy for Unmanned Vehicles

This paper presents a new methodology for solving the multi-vehicle formation control problem. It employs a unique extension-decomposition-aggregation scheme to transform the overall complex formation control problem into a group of subproblems, which work via boundary interactions or disturbances. Thus, it is proved that the overall formation system is exponentially stable in the sense of Lyapunov, if all the individual augmented subsystems (IASs) are stable. Linear matrix inequality-based H8 control methodology is employed to design the decentralized formation controllers to reject the impact of the formation changes being treated as boundary disturbances and guarantee the stability of all the IASs, consequently maintaining the stability of the overall formation system. Simulation studies are performed to verify the stability, performance, and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Voltage Sensing Using an Asynchronous Charge-to-Digital Converter for Energy-Autonomous Environments

In future systems with relatively unreliable and unpredictable energy sources such as harvesters, the system power supply may become non-deterministic. For energy effective operations, Vdd is an important parameter in any meaningful system control mechanism. Reliable and accurate on-chip voltage sensors are therefore indispensible for the power and computation management of such systems. Existing voltage sensing methods are not suitable because they usually require a stable and known reference (voltage, current, time, frequency, etc.), which is difficult to obtain in this environment. This paper describes an autonomous reference-free voltage sensor designed using an asynchronous counter powered by the charge on a capacitor and a small controller. Unlike existing methods, the voltage information is directly generated as a digital code. The sensor, fabricated in the 180 nm technology node, was tested successfully through performing measurements over the voltage range from 1.8 V down to 0.8 V.

Autonomous collective agreements as a regulatory device in European labour law:How to read Article 139 EC

This article discusses whether European social partners can derive the competence to autonomously devise European collective labour agreements from Article 139 EC (equals Article III-212 Constitution of Europe). Placing the question in the context of discussions of EU governance and private lawmaking in general, the author starts with a comparative overview of legal conceptions for collective labour agreements in Europe, focusing on three Member States' orders where their effects are not or only partly regulated by state legislation. Based on this comparison, she analyses Article 139(2) and offers a new interpretation of its provisions concerning autonomous implementation of European social partner agreements. She concludes that European social partners do have the competence to agree on a basic agreement stating the rules for European collective bargaining autonomously.