Biblio

In a socio-technically connected environment, self-adaptive systems need to cooperate with others to collect information to provide context-dependent functionalities to users. A key component of ensuring safe and secure cooperation is finding trustworthy information and its providers. Trust is an emerging quality attribute that represents the level of belief in the cooperative environments and serves as a promising solution in this regard. In this research, we will focus on analyzing trust characteristics and defining trust-aware models through the trust-aware goal model and the provenance model. The trust-aware goal model is designed to represent the trust-related requirements and their relationships. The provenance model is analyzed as trust evidence to be used for the trust evaluation. The proposed approach contributes to build a comprehensive understanding of trust and design a trust-aware self-adaptive system. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we will conduct a case study with the crowd navigation system for an unmanned vehicle system.

In a previous article [1] we proposed a layered framework to support the assessment of the security risks associated with the use of autonomous vehicles in military operations and determine how to manage these risks appropriately. We established consistent terminology and defined the problem space, while exploring the first layer of the framework, namely risks from the mission assurance perspective. In this paper, we develop the second layer of the framework. This layer focuses on the risk assessment of the vehicles themselves and on producing a highlevel security design adequate for the mission defined in the first layer. To support this process, we also define a reference model for autonomous vehicles to use as a common basis for the assessment of risks and the design of the security controls.

By analogy to nature, sight is the main integral component of robotic complexes, including unmanned vehicles. In this connection, one of the urgent tasks in the modern development of unmanned vehicles is the solution to the problem of providing security for new advanced systems, algorithms, methods, and principles of space navigation of robots. In the paper, we present an approach to the protection of machine vision systems based on technologies of deep learning. At the heart of the approach lies the “Feature Squeezing” method that works on the phase of model operation. It allows us to detect “adversarial” examples. Considering the urgency and importance of the target process, the features of unmanned vehicle hardware platforms and also the necessity of execution of tasks on detecting of the objects in real-time mode, it was offered to carry out an additional simple computational procedure of localization and classification of required objects in case of crossing a defined in advance threshold of “adversarial” object testing.

Cyber-physical systems contribute to building new infrastructure in the modern world. These systems help realize missions reducing costs and risks. The seas being a harsh and dangerous environment are a perfect application of them. Unmanned Surface vehicles (USV) allow realizing normal and new tasks reducing risk and cost i.e. surveillance, water cleaning, environmental monitoring or search and rescue operations. Also, as they are unmanned vehicles they can extend missions to unpleasing and risky weather conditions. The novelty of these systems makes that new command and control platforms need to be developed. In this paper, we describe an implemented architecture with 5 separated levels. This structure increases security by defining roles and by limiting information exchanges.

Unmanned systems are increasing in number, while their manning requirements remain the same. To decrease manpower demands, machine learning techniques and autonomy are gaining traction and visibility. One barrier is human perception and understanding of autonomy. Machine learning techniques can result in “black box” algorithms that may yield high fitness, but poor comprehension by operators. However, Interactive Machine Learning (IML), a method to incorporate human input over the course of algorithm development by using neuro-evolutionary machine-learning techniques, may offer a solution. IML is evaluated here for its impact on developing autonomous team behaviors in an area search task. Initial findings show that IML-generated search plans were chosen over plans generated using a non-interactive ML technique, even though the participants trusted them slightly less. Further, participants discriminated each of the two types of plans from each other with a high degree of accuracy, suggesting the IML approach imparts behavioral characteristics into algorithms, making them more recognizable. Together the results lay the foundation for exploring how to team humans successfully with ML behavior.