Introducing Intelligence and Autonomy into Industrial Robots to Address Operations into Dangerous Area

The paper addresses the issue to use new generation robotic systems inside industrial facilities in order to complete operations in dangerous area. The new robotic systems are currently adopting the autonomous approach already in use in military sector; however, in this context the intensity of operations and the necessity to interact with high productivity systems introduce different challenges. Despite the problems, it is evident that this approach could provide very interesting improvements in terms of safety for humans especially in relations to dangerous area. For instance, in confined spaces, Oil & Gas or Hot Metal Industry these new autonomous systems could reduce the number of injures and casualties. In addition, these systems could increase the operation efficiency in this complex frameworks as well as the possibility to carry out inspections systematically; in this sense, this could result in improving the overall reliability, productivity and safety of the whole Industrial Plant. Therefore, it is important to consider that these systems could be used to address also security aspects such as access control, however they could result vulnerable to new threats such as the cyber ones and need to be properly designed in terms of single entities, algorithms, infrastructure and architecture. From this point of view, it is evident that Modeling and Simulation represent the main approach to design properly these new systems. In this paper, the authors present the use of autonomous systems introducing advanced capabilities supported by Artificial Intelligence to deal with complex operations in dangerous industrial frameworks. The proposed examples in oil and gas and hot metal industry confirm the potential of these systems and demonstrate as simulation supports their introduction in terms of engineering, testing, installation, ramp up and training

LAWs: Latent Demand for Simulation of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems

This paper provides an overview on the Lethal Autonomous Systems (LAWs) and related critical issues caused by dynamically evolving context. Traditional approaches to evaluate new system development, software review, prototyping and testing are often not really efficient or even not applicable in this LAWs even due to the evolution in terms of social and operational scenarios. Vice versa, it is evident that simulation plays the key role to support evaluation of scenarios considering that is practically the only methodology able to develop and to conduct virtual tests on concepts, general principia, strategic decisions, technology impacts and related implications

Modelling and Optimization of the Air Operational Manoeuvre

Increasing complexity of the operational environment and advanced technology implementation in combat will probably lead to a serious limitation of human performance in all operational domains and activities in the future. With except of the clear indications, that tactical robotics will outperform human soldiers in many routine tasks on the battlefield, the area of operational decision making (resistible for decades to some automation) seems to be slowly approaching to the same stage. Presented article discusses the fundamental theory of optimization of the air operational maneuver and present the approach to the solution. The solution is highly theoretical and uses a modelling and simulation as an experimental platform to the visualization and evaluation of solution. The problem of air operational maneuver is specific in this case by many variables imposed on initial parametrization of the task (starting and destination point could not be known at the beginning, only \u201cair operational\u201d area should be selected) and very wide search of possible courses of action and the best \u201cmulti criteria\u201d choice identification

Persistence Through Collaboration at Sea for Off-Shore and Coastal Operations

Collaboration (Bruzzone et al. 2013a, b, c, d, e, f) is often mentioned as an opportunity to develop new capabilities for autonomous systems; indeed this paper proposes a practical application where use this approach to enhance the autonomy of the systems during operations in coastal areas or around offshore platforms. The proposed case deals with developing a collaborative approach (Bruzzone et al. 2013a, b, c, d, e, f) among an USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle) with several AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) to guarantee persistent surveillance over a marine area (Shkurti et al. 2012). Obviously, the proposed solution could be adopted also for defense and homeland security (Bruzzone et al. 2011a, b, 2010) as well as for archeological site protection in consistence with related cost analysis. The authors propose a technological solution as well as a simulation framework to validate and demonstrate the capabilities of this new approach as well as to quantify expected improvements