44,633 research outputs found
Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph
Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and
challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more
sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides
constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if
implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous
weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval
operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of
developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that
address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that
is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many
instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these
often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with
the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The
Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of
Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that
required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of
the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade
An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications
We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems
Mixed Initiative Systems for Human-Swarm Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges
Human-swarm interaction (HSI) involves a number of human factors impacting
human behaviour throughout the interaction. As the technologies used within HSI
advance, it is more tempting to increase the level of swarm autonomy within the
interaction to reduce the workload on humans. Yet, the prospective negative
effects of high levels of autonomy on human situational awareness can hinder
this process. Flexible autonomy aims at trading-off these effects by changing
the level of autonomy within the interaction when required; with
mixed-initiatives combining human preferences and automation's recommendations
to select an appropriate level of autonomy at a certain point of time. However,
the effective implementation of mixed-initiative systems raises fundamental
questions on how to combine human preferences and automation recommendations,
how to realise the selected level of autonomy, and what the future impacts on
the cognitive states of a human are. We explore open challenges that hamper the
process of developing effective flexible autonomy. We then highlight the
potential benefits of using system modelling techniques in HSI by illustrating
how they provide HSI designers with an opportunity to evaluate different
strategies for assessing the state of the mission and for adapting the level of
autonomy within the interaction to maximise mission success metrics.Comment: Author version, accepted at the 2018 IEEE Annual Systems Modelling
Conference, Canberra, Australi
Satellite Navigation for the Age of Autonomy
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) brought navigation to the masses.
Coupled with smartphones, the blue dot in the palm of our hands has forever
changed the way we interact with the world. Looking forward, cyber-physical
systems such as self-driving cars and aerial mobility are pushing the limits of
what localization technologies including GNSS can provide. This autonomous
revolution requires a solution that supports safety-critical operation,
centimeter positioning, and cyber-security for millions of users. To meet these
demands, we propose a navigation service from Low Earth Orbiting (LEO)
satellites which deliver precision in-part through faster motion, higher power
signals for added robustness to interference, constellation autonomous
integrity monitoring for integrity, and encryption / authentication for
resistance to spoofing attacks. This paradigm is enabled by the 'New Space'
movement, where highly capable satellites and components are now built on
assembly lines and launch costs have decreased by more than tenfold. Such a
ubiquitous positioning service enables a consistent and secure standard where
trustworthy information can be validated and shared, extending the electronic
horizon from sensor line of sight to an entire city. This enables the
situational awareness needed for true safe operation to support autonomy at
scale.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 2020 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation
Symposium (PLANS
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. AI has raised fundamental questions about what we should do with such systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. -
After the background to the field (1), this article introduces the main debates (2), first on ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy (2.1), manipulation (2.2), opacity (2.3), bias (2.4), autonomy & responsibility (2.6) and the singularity (2.7). Then we look at AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (2.8.) and artificial moral agency (2.9). Finally we look at future developments and the concept of AI (3). For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy conse-quences may be drawn
Integration of UAS in the civil airworthiness regulatory system: present and future
The last years are witnessing a number of initiatives worldwide devoted to assess the safety levels of the unmanned aircraft. These initiatives are very heterogeneous; some of them are centred in airworthiness aspects while others focus on operations. From the point of view of a potential UAS manufacturer the actual situation is plenty of uncertainties in relation to the regulations to be applied for certifying the design, manufacturing and maintenance, and from the point of view of the potential operator the situation is analogous with respect to operational procedures. In the present work the emphasis is on the manufacturer’s situation. The objective of this work is to clarify the present civil airworthiness regulatory scene by summarizing all the regulatory efforts up to date and preparing a comparative analysis of them. In this comparison, the manned regulations are included too. The most representative state-of-the-art UAS are analyzed from the point of view of the existing and the future regulatory framework. The main aspects to be considered are related to the airworthiness certification (performances, structural design, etc) for which a quantitative comparison is established in order to clarify how the new regulatory framework, mainly based on the conventional aircraft certification codes, will affect future UAS, compared to the existing regulation
Status quo and perspectives of the military use of unmanned systems. Summary
Unmanned systems (UMS) have become comprehensively and firmly established in many armed forces. They open up cost, effectiveness and security advantages in important dimensions of the military capability spectrum or open up new options on the battlefield. These include, for example, longer missions compared to manned systems, reduced risk to soldiers or the possibility of comprehensive reconnaissance in high-risk operational environments. The development of EMS is linked to advances in numerous fields of technology and opens up economic potential that goes beyond the military sphere. However, at the latest since thousands of airborne armed drones were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, EMS are also associated with challenges in terms of security, arms control policy and international law.
The TAB report describes the state of development and military use of unmanned air, land and sea systems in the national and international context and provides an overview of current and future key technologies for the development of EMS. In addition, it addresses the economic dimension of unmanned systems in the defence and civilian submarkets of the national and international economic system, in order to analyse the civilian innovation and deployment potential of EMS on this basis. The report also places unmanned systems in the legal framework provided by arms and arms export control treaties as well as international legal norms and takes stock of the current treaties with regard to their relevance for EMS in order to conclude by identifying the need for political and social information and discussion
Identifying attack surfaces in the evolving space industry using reference architectures
The space environment is currently undergoing a substantial change and many new entrants to the market are deploying devices, satellites and systems in space; this evolution has been termed as NewSpace. The change is complicated by technological developments such as deploying machine learning based autonomous space systems and the Internet of Space Things (IoST). In the IoST, space systems will rely on satellite-to-x communication and interactions with wider aspects of the ground segment to a greater degree than existing systems. Such developments will inevitably lead to a change in the cyber security threat landscape of space systems. Inevitably, there will be a greater number of attack vectors for adversaries to exploit, and previously infeasible threats can be realised, and thus require mitigation. In this paper, we present a reference architecture (RA) that can be used to abstractly model in situ applications of this new space landscape. The RA specifies high-level system components and their interactions. By instantiating the RA for two scenarios we demonstrate how to analyse the attack surface using attack trees
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