Evaluating Storm Sewer Pipe Condition Using Autonomous Drone Technology

The United States Air Force (USAF) owns a total of 30.9 million linear feet (LF) of storm sewer pipes valued at approximately $2.3B in its vast portfolio of built infrastructure. Current inventory records reveal that 78% of the inventory (24.1 million LF) is over 50 years old and will soon exceed its estimated service life. Additionally, the USAF depends on contract support while its business processes undervalue in-service evaluations from long-term funding plans. Ultimately, this disconnect negatively impacts infrastructure performance and overall strategic success, and the USAF risks making uninformed decisions in a fiscally constrained environment. This research presents a proof of concept effort to automate storm sewer evaluations for the USAF using unmanned ground vehicles and computer vision technology for autonomous defect detection. The results conceptually show that a low-cost autonomous system can be developed using commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software to quantify the condition of underground storm sewer pipes with an efficiency of 36%. While the results show that the prototype developed for this research is not sufficient for operational use, it does demonstrate that the USAF can leverage COTS systems in future AM strategies to improve asset visibility at a significantly lower cost.

Mechatronics for the Design of Inspection Robotic Systems

Recent trends show how mobile robots are being widely used in security and inspection tasks. This chapter reports the requirements, characteristics, and development of mobile robotic systems for security and inspection tasks to demonstrate the feasibility of mechatronic solutions for inspection of sites of interest. The development of such systems can be exploited as a modular plug-in kit to be installed on a mobile system, with the aim to be used for inspection and monitoring, introducing high efficiency, quality, and repeatability in the addressed sector. The interoperability of sensors with wireless communication constitutes a smart sensor toolkit and a smart sensor network with powerful functions to be used efficiently for inspection purposes. A tele-operated robot will be taken as case of study; it is controlled by mobile phone and equipped with internal and external sensors, which are efficiently managed by the designed mechatronic control scheme

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Smart Monitoring and Control in the Future Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and related technologies have the promise of realizing pervasive and smart applications which, in turn, have the potential of improving the quality of life of people living in a connected world. According to the IoT vision, all things can cooperate amongst themselves and be managed from anywhere via the Internet, allowing tight integration between the physical and cyber worlds and thus improving efficiency, promoting usability, and opening up new application opportunities. Nowadays, IoT technologies have successfully been exploited in several domains, providing both social and economic benefits. The realization of the full potential of the next generation of the Internet of Things still needs further research efforts concerning, for instance, the identification of new architectures, methodologies, and infrastructures dealing with distributed and decentralized IoT systems; the integration of IoT with cognitive and social capabilities; the enhancement of the sensing–analysis–control cycle; the integration of consciousness and awareness in IoT environments; and the design of new algorithms and techniques for managing IoT big data. This Special Issue is devoted to advancements in technologies, methodologies, and applications for IoT, together with emerging standards and research topics which would lead to realization of the future Internet of Things

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENT REMOTE CONTROL CAR (AI MOBILE) (A.K.A. REMOTE CONTROL CAR USING MATLAB)

The primary objective of this project is to construct a working prototype of a remote controlled car (a.k.a. AI Mobile) and its ability to control from MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI). It involves several EE areas in microcontroller, wireless communication and MATLAB. Secondary objective will be implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in a robot to perform tasks intelligently and autonomously. The car will be enhanced with systems like obstacles detection sensors, wireless camera, wireless microphone, and speed alteration. These systems will be combined by the PIC microcontroller and controlled from the remote computer with the aid of the MS Visual Basic GUI. With these artificial intelligent systems, successful execution of manyhuman-in-loop manipulation tasks which directlydepend on the operator's skill previously can be improved to: (i) permit easy and rapid incorporation of local sensory information to augment performance, and (ii) provide variable performance (precision- and power-) assist for output motions and forces. Such AI systems have enormous potential both reduce operator error and permit integration of greater autonomy into human and robot interactions which will eventually enhance security, safety, and performance. The AI systems are built on an existing platform modified from a remote controlled car. The processor used to coordinate the AI Mobile is the microcontroller PIC16F84A. The independent subsystems for controlling the AI Mobile via Microsoft Visual Basic include the serial communication interface, switching circuit, microcontroller, RF Transmitter & Receiver and Visual Basic programming

A user centred design evaluation of the potential benefits of advanced wireless sensor networks for fire-in-tunnel emergency response

This study aimed to assess, from an end-user perspective, the potential role of reconfigurable wireless networks in responding to a fire-in-tunnel incident. The study was based on a multi-media, scenario-based simulation of an incident, and assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of the new technology by subject matter experts in relation to their operational goals, with particular emphasis on support for situation awareness. Advanced wireless networks were shown to have considerable potential for improving the effectiveness, efficiency and confidence of emergency responders at various phases in a fire-in-tunnel incident, due to access to more accurate, complete and reliable information. A key requirement was to ensure that new technologies provided the right information, not just more information, at the point of need

A drone-based networked system and methods for combating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. It is similar to influenza viruses and raises concerns through alarming levels of spread and severity resulting in an ongoing pandemic worldwide. Within eight months (by August 2020), it infected 24.0 million persons worldwide and over 824 thousand have died. Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are very helpful in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. This work investigates the drone-based systems, COVID-19 pandemic situations, and proposes an architecture for handling pandemic situations in different scenarios using real-time and simulation-based scenarios. The proposed architecture uses wearable sensors to record the observations in Body Area Networks (BANs) in a push-pull data fetching mechanism. The proposed architecture is found to be useful in remote and highly congested pandemic areas where either the wireless or Internet connectivity is a major issue or chances of COVID-19 spreading are high. It collects and stores the substantial amount of data in a stipulated period and helps to take appropriate action as and when required. In real-time drone-based healthcare system implementation for COVID-19 operations, it is observed that a large area can be covered for sanitization, thermal image collection, and patient identification within a short period (2 KMs within 10 min approx.) through aerial route. In the simulation, the same statistics are observed with an addition of collision-resistant strategies working successfully for indoor and outdoor healthcare operations. Further, open challenges are identified and promising research directions are highlighted

Integration of a mobile autonomous robot in a surveillance multi-agent system

This dissertation aims to guarantee the integration of a mobile autonomous robot equipped with many sensors in a multi-agent distributed and georeferenced surveillance system. The integration of a mobile autonomous robot in this system leads to new features that will be available to clients of surveillance system may use. These features may be of two types: using the robot as an agent that will act in the environment or by using the robot as a mobile set of sensors. As an agent in the system, the robot can move to certain locations when alerts are received, in order to acknowledge the underlying events or take to action in order to assist in resolving this event. As a sensor platform in the system, it is possible to access information that is read from the sensors of the robot and access complementary measurements to the ones taken by other sensors in the multi-agent system. To integrate this mobile robot in an effective way it is necessary to extend the current multi-agent system architecture to make the connection between the two systems and to integrate the functionalities provided by the robot into the multi-agent system

A Computational Architecture Based on RFID Sensors for Traceability in Smart Cities

Information Technology and Communications (ICT) is presented as the main element in order to achieve more efficient and sustainable city resource management, while making sure that the needs of the citizens to improve their quality of life are satisfied. A key element will be the creation of new systems that allow the acquisition of context information, automatically and transparently, in order to provide it to decision support systems. In this paper, we present a novel distributed system for obtaining, representing and providing the flow and movement of people in densely populated geographical areas. In order to accomplish these tasks, we propose the design of a smart sensor network based on RFID communication technologies, reliability patterns and integration techniques. Contrary to other proposals, this system represents a comprehensive solution that permits the acquisition of user information in a transparent and reliable way in a non-controlled and heterogeneous environment. This knowledge will be useful in moving towards the design of smart cities in which decision support on transport strategies, business evaluation or initiatives in the tourism sector will be supported by real relevant information. As a final result, a case study will be presented which will allow the validation of the proposal