“Vehicular Steganography”?: Opportunities and Challenges

What if an autonomous vehicle (AV) could secretly warn of potentialthreats? “Steganography”, the hiding of messages, is a vital way for vulnerable populationsto communicate securely and get help. Here, we shine light on the conceptof vehicular steganography (VS) using a speculative approach: We identify somekey scenarios, highlighting unique challenges that arise from indirect perception,message generation, and effects of perspective–as well as potential carrier signalsand message generation considerations. One observation is that, despite challengesto transmission rates and robustness, physical signals such as locomotion or soundcould offer a complementary, currently-unused alternative to traditional methods.The immediate implication is that VS could help to mitigate some costly safetyproblems–suggesting the benefit of further discussion and ideation

Congestion Aware Objects Filtering for Collective Perception

This paper addresses collective perception for connected and automated driving. It proposes the adaptation of filtering rules based on the currently available channel resources, referred to as Enhanced DCC-Aware Filtering (EDAF)

A Survey on Remote Operation of Road Vehicles

In recent years, the use of remote operation has been proposed as a bridge towards driverless mobility by providing human assistance remotely when an automated driving system finds a situation that is ambiguous and requires input from a remote operator. The remote operation of road vehicles has also been proposed as a way to enable drivers to operate vehicles from safer and more comfortable locations. While commercial solutions for remote operation exist, remaining challenges are being tackled by the research community, who is continuously testing and validating the feasibility of deploying remote operation of road vehicles on public roads. These tests range from the technological scope to social aspects such as acceptability and usability that affect human performance. This survey presents a compilation of works that approach the remote operation of road vehicles. We start by describing the basic architecture of remote operation systems and classify their modes of operation depending on the level of human intervention. We use this classification to organize and present recent and relevant work on the field from industry and academia. Finally, we identify the challenges in the deployment of remote operation systems in the technological, regulatory, and commercial scopes

On the Performance of Packet Aggregation in IEEE 802.11ac MU-MIMO WLANs

Multi-user spatial multiplexing combined with packet aggregation can significantly increase the performance of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). In this letter, we present and evaluate a simple technique to perform packet aggregation in IEEE 802.11ac MU-MIMO (Multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output) WLANs. Results show that in non-saturation conditions both the number of active stations (STAs) and the queue size have a significant impact on the system performance. If the number of stations is excessively high, the heterogeneity of destinations in the packets contained in the queue makes it difficult to take full advantage of packet aggregation. This effect can be alleviated by increasing the queue size, which increases the chances to schedule a large number of packets at each transmission, hence improving the system throughput at the cost of a higher delay

Towards a Complete Safety Framework for Longitudinal Driving

Formal models for the safety validation of autonomous vehicles have become increasingly important. To this end, we present a safety framework for longitudinal automated driving. This framework allows calculating minimum safe inter-vehicular distances for arbitrary ego vehicle control policies. We use this framework to enhance the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) model and models based on it, which fail to cover situations where the ego vehicle has a higher decelerating capacity than its preceding vehicle. For arbitrary ego vehicle control policies, we show how our framework can be applied by substituting real (possibly computationally intractable) controllers with upper bounding functions. This comprises a general approach for longitudinal safety, where safety guarantees for the upper-bounded system are equivalent to those for the original system but come at the expense of larger inter-vehicular distances

An Application Layer Protocol to Support Cooperative Navigation of Multiple UAVs Systems

Applications involving multiple UAVs have gained increasing relevance in recent years, due to the benefits that cooperative systems tend to provide to their applications. In addition to performing several simultaneous tasks, the time spent to perform a certain task is reduced. In this article, an architecture for sharing navigation information is demonstrated to support applications composed of systems with multiple UAVs

A Broad View on Robot Self-Defense: Rapid Scoping Review and Cultural Comparison

With power comes responsibility: as robots become more advanced and prevalent, the role they will play in human society becomes increasingly important. Given that violence is an important problem, the question emerges if robots could defend people, even if doing so might cause harm to someone. The current study explores the broad context of how people perceive the acceptability of such robot self-defense (RSD) in terms of (1) theory, via a rapid scoping review, and (2) public opinion in two countries. As a result, we summarize and discuss: increasing usage of robots capable of wielding force by law enforcement and military, negativity toward robots, ethics and legal questions (including differences to the well-known trolley problem), control in the presence of potential failures, and practical capabilities that such robots might require. Furthermore, a survey was conducted, indicating that participants accepted the idea of RSD, with some cultural differences. We believe that, while substantial obstacles will need to be overcome to realize RSD, society stands to gain from exploring its possibilities over the longer term, toward supporting human well-being in difficult times

Recent advances in radio resource management for heterogeneous LTE/LTE-A networks

As heterogeneous networks (HetNets) emerge as one of the most promising developments toward realizing the target specifications of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks, radio resource management (RRM) research for such networks has, in recent times, been intensively pursued. Clearly, recent research mainly concentrates on the aspect of interference mitigation. Other RRM aspects, such as radio resource utilization, fairness, complexity, and QoS, have not been given much attention. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the key challenges arising from HetNets and highlight their importance. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive survey of the RRM schemes that have been studied in recent years for LTE/LTE-A HetNets, with a particular focus on those for femtocells and relay nodes. Furthermore, we classify these RRM schemes according to their underlying approaches. In addition, these RRM schemes are qualitatively analyzed and compared to each other. We also identify a number of potential research directions for future RRM development. Finally, we discuss the lack of current RRM research and the importance of multi-objective RRM studies