Integration of Ontological Scene Representation and Logic-Based Reasoning for Context-Aware Driver Assistance Systems

Co-operative driver assistance systems share information about their surrounding with each other, thus enhancing their knowledge and their performance. For successful information exchange and interpretation, a common domain understanding is needed. This paper first presents an ontology-based context-model for driving scene description, including next to spatio-temporal components also additional context information like traffic signs, state of the driver and the own-vehicle. For traffic rules, we integrate the ontological scene description with a logic programming environment, to enable complex and powerful reasoning on the given information. The proposed ontology is discussed with respect to a set of validation criteria. For integration with logic programming a prototypical development of an overtaking assistant is shown to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met

Ontology-Based Architecture to Improve Driving Performance Using Sensor Information for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems are advanced applications with aim to provide innovative services relating to road transport management and enable the users to be better informed and make safer and coordinated use of transport networks. A crucial element for the success of these systems is that vehicles can exchange information not only among themselves but with other elements in the road infrastructure through different applications. One of the most important information sources in this kind of systems is sensors. Sensors can be located into vehicles or as part of an infrastructure element, such as bridges or traffic signs. The sensor can provide information related to the weather conditions and the traffic situation, which is useful to improve the driving process. In this paper a multiagent system using ontologies to improve the driving environment is proposed. The system performs different tasks in automatic way to increase the driver safety and comfort using sensor information

One Ontology to Rule Them All: Corner Case Scenarios for Autonomous Driving

The core obstacle towards a large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles currently lies in the long tail of rare events. These are extremely challenging since they do not occur often in the utilized training data for deep neural networks. To tackle this problem, we propose the generation of additional synthetic training data, covering a wide variety of corner case scenarios. As ontologies can represent human expert knowledge while enabling computational processing, we use them to describe scenarios. Our proposed master ontology is capable to model scenarios from all common corner case categories found in the literature. From this one master ontology, arbitrary scenario-describing ontologies can be derived. In an automated fashion, these can be converted into the OpenSCENARIO format and subsequently executed in simulation. This way, also challenging test and evaluation scenarios can be generated.Comment: Daniel Bogdoll and Stefani Guneshka contributed equally. Accepted for publication at ECCV 2022 SAIAD worksho

Workflow-based Context-aware Control of Surgical Robots

Surgical assistance system such as medical robots enhanced the capabilities of medical procedures in the last decades. This work presents a new perspective on the use of workflows with surgical robots in order to improve the technical capabilities and the ease of use of such systems. This is accomplished by a 3D perception system for the supervision of the surgical operating room and a workflow-based controller, that allows to monitor the surgical process using workflow-tracking techniques

Semantic Management of Urban Traffic Congestion

Urban traffic congestion is a problem which affects the world and is related to the massive urbanization and excessive number of cars on our streets. This causes a variety of problems, from economical/financial and health-related, to environmental warnings caused by high CO2 and NO2 emissions. This paper proposes a novel software engineering solution, which generates a software application aimed at individual drivers on urban roads, in order to help and ease overall congestion. The novelty is twofold. We target individual drivers in order to motivate them to re-think the purpose and goals of each journey they take. Consequently, the proposed software application enables reasoning upon various options an individual driver may have and helps in choosing the best possible solution for an individual. Our software application utilizes reasoning with SWRL enabled OWL ontologies, which can be hosted by any software application we run in our cars, ready to assist in driving, and implemented in Android / iOS environments

Ontology-Based Context Awareness for Driving Assistance Systems

International audienceWithin a vehicle driving space, different entities such as vehicles and vulnerable road users are in constant interaction. That governs their behaviour. Whilst smart sensors provide information about the state of the perceived objects, considering the spatio-temporal relationships between them with respect to the subject vehicle remains a challenge. This paper proposes to fill this gap by using contextual information to infer how perceived entities are expected to behave, and thus what are the consequences of these behaviours on the subject vehicle. For this purpose, an ontology is formulated about the vehicle, perceived entities and context (map information) to provide a conceptual description of all road entities with their interaction. It allows for inferences of knowledge about the situation of the subject vehicle with respect to the environment in which it is navigating. The framework is applied to the navigation of a vehicle as it approaches road intersections, to demonstrate its applicability. Results from the real-time imple- mentation on a vehicle operating under controlled conditions are included. They show that the proposed ontology allows for a coherent understanding of the interactions between the perceived entities and contextual data. Further, it can be used to improve the situation awareness of an ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance System), by determining which entities are the most relevant for the subject vehicle navigation

Holistic Temporal Situation Interpretation for Traffic Participant Prediction

For a profound understanding of traffic situations including a prediction of traf- fic participants’ future motion, behaviors and routes it is crucial to incorporate all available environmental observations. The presence of sensor noise and depen- dency uncertainties, the variety of available sensor data, the complexity of large traffic scenes and the large number of different estimation tasks with diverging requirements require a general method that gives a robust foundation for the de- velopment of estimation applications. In this work, a general description language, called Object-Oriented Factor Graph Modeling Language (OOFGML), is proposed, that unifies formulation of esti- mation tasks from the application-oriented problem description via the choice of variable and probability distribution representation through to the inference method definition in implementation. The different language properties are dis- cussed theoretically using abstract examples. The derivation of explicit application examples is shown for the automated driv- ing domain. A domain-specific ontology is defined which forms the basis for four exemplary applications covering the broad spectrum of estimation tasks in this domain: Basic temporal filtering, ego vehicle localization using advanced interpretations of perceived objects, road layout perception utilizing inter-object dependencies and finally highly integrated route, behavior and motion estima- tion to predict traffic participant’s future actions. All applications are evaluated as proof of concept and provide an example of how their class of estimation tasks can be represented using the proposed language. The language serves as a com- mon basis and opens a new field for further research towards holistic solutions for automated driving

Context-aware Security for Vehicles and Fleets: A Survey

Vehicles are becoming increasingly intelligent and connected. Interfaces for communication with the vehicle, such as WiFi and 5G, enable seamless integration into the user’s life, but also cyber attacks on the vehicle. Therefore, research is working on in-vehicle countermeasures such as authentication, access controls, or intrusion detection. Recently, legal regulations have also become effective that require automobile manufacturers to set up a monitoring system for fleet-wide security analysis. The growing amount of software, networking, and the automation of driving create new challenges for security. Context-awareness, situational understanding, adaptive security, and threat intelligence are necessary to cope with these ever-increasing risks. In-vehicle security should be adaptive to secure the car in an infinite number of (driving) situations. For fleet-wide analysis and alert triage, knowledge and understanding of the circumstances are required. Context-awareness, nonetheless, has been sparsely considered in the field of vehicle security. This work aims to be a precursor to context-aware, adaptive and intelligent security for vehicles and fleets. To this end, we provide a comprehensive literature review that analyzes the vehicular as well as related domains. Our survey is mainly characterized by the detailed analysis of the context information that is relevant for vehicle security in the future