A study of anticipatory non-autonomous systems

Rhythms are manifested ubiquitously in dynamical biological processes. These fundamental processes which are necessary for the survival of living organisms include metabolism, breathing, heart beat, and, above all, the circadian rhythm coupled to the diurnal cycle. Thus, in mathematical biology, biological processes are often represented as linear or nonlinear oscillators. In the framework of nonlinear and dissipative systems (ie. the flow of energy, substances, or sensory information), they generate stable internal oscillations as a response to environmental input and, in turn, utilise such output as a means of coupling with the environment.

Modelling the Provenance of Data in Autonomous Systems

Determining the provenance of data, i.e. the process that led to that data, is vital in many disciplines. For example, in science, the process that produced a given result must be demonstrably rigorous for the result to be deemed reliable. A provenance system supports applications in recording adequate documentation about process executions to answer queries regarding provenance, and provides functionality to perform those queries. Several provenance systems are being developed, but all focus on systems in which the components are textitreactive, for example Web Services that act on the basis of a request, job submission system, etc. This limitation means that questions regarding the motives of autonomous actors, or textitagents, in such systems remain unanswerable in the general case. Such questions include: who was ultimately responsible for a given effect, what was their reason for initiating the process and does the effect of a process match what was intended to occur by those initiating the process? In this paper, we address this limitation by integrating two solutions: a generic, re-usable framework for representing the provenance of data in service-oriented architectures and a model for describing the goal-oriented delegation and engagement of agents in multi-agent systems. Using these solutions, we present algorithms to answer common questions regarding responsibility and success of a process and evaluate the approach with a simulated healthcare example.

Autonomous mobile robots designing for the medical trash collector task

This paper describes the UNESP robotic team in the medical trash collector task, proposed on the 5 rd IEEE Latin American Robots Competition in the LEGO category. We present our understanding of the task and discuss the proposed solution, focusing on the mechanical and computational issues of the robots. The mechanics is based on rigid body capability of transforming rotational into curvilinear movement. With respect to the computational control, the system is modeled as a reactive system with sequential transition of behaviors. A state-machine is proposed to allow this transition, and the synchronization of robotic states is guaranteed by the communication system. The proposed approach has shown itself capable of dealing with the high difficulty degree of this cooperative task. ©2006 IEEE.

Petri nets and autonomous systems: A case study

This work presents the Petri net-based modeling of an autonomous robot's navigation system used for the application of supplies in agriculture. The model was developed theoretically and implemented through the CPNTools software. It simulates the behavior of the robot, capturing environmental characteristics by means of sensors, making appropriate decisions, and forwarding them to the corresponding actuators. By exciting the model using CPNTools it is possible to simulate situations that the robot might undergo, without the need to expose it to real potentially dangerous situations. ©2009 IEEE.

Networked control system for the guidance of a four-wheel steering agricultural robotic platform

A current trend in the agricultural area is the development of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles for precision agriculture (PA). One of the major challenges in the design of these robots is the development of the electronic architecture for the control of the devices. In a joint project among research institutions and a private company in Brazil a multifunctional robotic platform for information acquisition in PA is being designed. This platform has as main characteristics four-wheel propulsion and independent steering, adjustable width, span of 1,80m in height, diesel engine, hydraulic system, and a CAN-based networked control system (NCS). This paper presents a NCS solution for the platform guidance by the four-wheel hydraulic steering distributed control. The control strategy, centered on the robot manipulators control theory, is based on the difference between the desired and actual position and considering the angular speed of the wheels. The results demonstrate that the NCS was simple and efficient, providing suitable steering performance for the platform guidance. Even though the simplicity of the NCS solution developed, it also overcame some verified control challenges in the robot guidance system design such as the hydraulic system delay, nonlinearities in the steering actuators, and inertia in the steering system due the friction of different terrains. Copyright © 2012 Eduardo Pacincia Godoy et al.

Characterization of Stability Region for General Autonomous Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

The existing characterization of stability regions was developed under the assumption that limit sets on the stability boundary are exclusively composed of hyperbolic equilibrium points and closed orbits. The characterizations derived in this technical note are a generalization of existing results in the theory of stability regions. A characterization of the stability boundary of general autonomous nonlinear dynamical systems is developed under the assumption that limit sets on the stability boundary are composed of a countable number of disjoint and indecomposable components, which can be equilibrium points, closed orbits, quasi-periodic solutions and even chaotic invariant sets.

Control concept for autonomous changeable material flow systems

Today’s material flow systems for mass customization or dynamic productions are usually realized with manual transportation systems. However new concepts in the domain of material flow and device control like function-oriented modularization and intelligent multi-agent-systems offer the possibility to employ changeable and automated material flow systems in dynamic production structures. These systems need the ability to react on unplanned and unexpected events autonomously.

Investigation on the evolution of an indoor robotic localization system based on wireless networks

This work addresses the evolution of an artificial neural network (ANN) to assist in the problem of indoor robotic localization. We investigate the design and building of an autonomous localization system based on information gathered from wireless networks (WN). The article focuses on the evolved ANN, which provides the position of a robot in a space, as in a Cartesian coordinate system, corroborating with the evolutionary robotic research area and showing its practical viability. The proposed system was tested in several experiments, evaluating not only the impact of different evolutionary computation parameters but also the role of the transfer functions on the evolution of the ANN. Results show that slight variations in the parameters lead to significant differences on the evolution process and, therefore, in the accuracy of the robot position.

Engineering an Ontology for Autonomous Systems - The OASys Ontology

This paper describes the development of an ontology for autonomous systems, as the initial stage of a research programe on autonomous systems’ engineering within a model-based control approach. The ontology aims at providing a unified conceptual framework for the autonomous systems’ stakeholders, from developers to software engineers. The modular ontology contains both generic and domain-specific concepts for autonomous systems description and engineering. The ontology serves as the basis in a methodology to obtain the autonomous system’s conceptual models. The objective is to obtain and to use these models as main input for the autonomous system’s model-based control system.

Fault Tolerance Analysis and Self-Healing Strategy of Autonomous, Evolvable Hardware Systems

This paper presents an analysis of the fault tolerance achieved by an autonomous, fully embedded evolvable hardware system, which uses a combination of partial dynamic reconfiguration and an evolutionary algorithm (EA). It demonstrates that the system may self-recover from both transient and cumulative permanent faults. This self-adaptive system, based on a 2D array of 16 (4×4) Processing Elements (PEs), is tested with an image filtering application. Results show that it may properly recover from faults in up to 3 PEs, that is, more than 18% cumulative permanent faults. Two fault models are used for testing purposes, at PE and CLB levels. Two self-healing strategies are also introduced, depending on whether fault diagnosis is available or not. They are based on scrubbing, fitness evaluation, dynamic partial reconfiguration and in-system evolutionary adaptation. Since most of these adaptability features are already available on the system for its normal operation, resource cost for self-healing is very low (only some code additions in the internal microprocessor core)

Autonomous vehicle control systems for safe crossroads

This article presents a cooperative manoeuvre among three dual mode cars – vehicles equipped with sensors and actuators, and that can be driven either manually or autonomously. One vehicle is driven autonomously and the other two are driven manually. The main objective is to test two decision algorithms for priority conflict resolution at intersections so that a vehicle autonomously driven can take their own decision about crossing an intersection mingling with manually driven cars without the need for infrastructure modifications. To do this, the system needs the position, speeds, and turning intentions of the rest of the cars involved in the manoeuvre. This information is acquired via communications, but other methods are also viable, such as artificial vision. The idea of the experiments was to adjust the speed of the manually driven vehicles to force a situation where all three vehicles arrive at an intersection at the same time.

Design and modeling of the multi-agent robotic system: SMART

This article presents the design, kinematic model and communication architecture for the multi-agent robotic system called SMART. The philosophy behind this kind of system requires the communication architecture to contemplate the concurrence of the whole system. The proposed architecture combines different communication technologies (TCP/IP and Bluetooth) under one protocol designed for the cooperation among agents and other elements of the system such as IP-Cameras, image processing library, path planner, user Interface, control block and data block. The high level control is modeled by Work-Flow Petri nets and implemented in C++ and C♯♯. Experimental results show the performance of the designed architecture.

Ontology driven description and engineering of autonomous systems: application to process system engineering

Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any form of external control for extended periods of time. Autonomy is a desired goal for every system as it improves its performance, safety and profit. Ontologies are a way to conceptualize the knowledge of a specific domain. In this paper an ontology for the description of autonomous systems as well as for its development (engineering) is presented and applied to a process. This ontology is intended to be applied and used to generate final applications following a model driven methodology.

RECLAMO: virtual and collaborative honeynets based on trust management and autonomous systems applied to intrusion management

Security intrusions in large systems is a problem due to its lack of scalability with the current IDS-based approaches. This paper describes the RECLAMO project, where an architecture for an Automated Intrusion Response System (AIRS) is being proposed. This system will infer the most appropriate response for a given attack, taking into account the attack type, context information, and the trust and reputation of the reporting IDSs. RECLAMO is proposing a novel approach: diverting the attack to a specific honeynet that has been dynamically built based on the attack information. Among all components forming the RECLAMO's architecture, this paper is mainly focused on defining a trust and reputation management model, essential to recognize if IDSs are exposing an honest behavior in order to accept their alerts as true. Experimental results confirm that our model helps to encourage or discourage the launch of the automatic reaction process.

A vision-based strategy for autonomous aerial refueling tasks

Autonomous aerial refueling is a key enabling technology for both manned and unmanned aircraft where extended flight duration or range are required. The results presented within this paper offer one potential vision-based sensing solution, together with a unique test environment. A hierarchical visual tracking algorithm based on direct methods is proposed and developed for the purposes of tracking a drogue during the capture stage of autonomous aerial refueling, and of estimating its 3D position. Intended to be applied in real time to a video stream from a single monocular camera mounted on the receiver aircraft, the algorithm is shown to be highly robust, and capable of tracking large, rapid drogue motions within the frame of reference. The proposed strategy has been tested using a complex robotic testbed and with actual flight hardware consisting of a full size probe and drogue. Results show that the vision tracking algorithm can detect and track the drogue at real-time frame rates of more than thirty frames per second, obtaining a robust position estimation even with strong motions and multiple occlusions of the drogue.