Towards Secure and Reliable Heterogeneous Real-time Telemetry Communication in Autonomous UAV Swarms

In the era of cutting-edge autonomous systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an essential part of the solutions for numerous complex challenges. This paper evaluates UAV peer-to-peer telemetry communication, highlighting its security vulnerabilities and explores a transition to a het-erogeneous multi-hop mesh all-to-all communication architecture to increase inter-swarm connectivity and reliability. Additionally, we suggest a symmetric key agreement and data encryption mechanism implementation for inter - swarm communication, to ensure data integrity and confidentiality without compromising performance.

Intelligence and Motion Models of Continuum Robots: an Overview

Many technical solutions are bio-inspired. Octopus-inspired robotic arms belong to continuum robots which are used in minimally invasive surgery or for technical system restoration in areas difficult-toaccess. Continuum robot missions are bounded with their motions, whereby the motion of the robots is controlled by humans via wireless communication. In case of a lost connection, robot autonomy is required. Distributed control and distributed decision-making mechanisms based on artificial intelligence approaches can be a promising solution to achieve autonomy of technical systems and to increase their resilience. However these methods are not well investigated yet. Octopuses are the living example of natural distributed intelligence but their learning and decision-making mechanisms are also not fully investigated and understood yet. Our major interest is investigating mechanisms of Distributed Artificial Intelligence as a basis for improving resilience of complex systems. We decided to use a physical continuum robot prototype that is able to perform some basic movements for our research. The idea is to research how a technical system can be empowered to combine movements into sequences of motions by itself. For the experimental investigations a suitable physical prototype has to be selected, its motion control has to be implemented and automated. In this paper, we give an overview combining different fields of research, such as Distributed Artificial Intelligence and continuum robots based on 98 publications. We provide a detailed description of the basic motion control models of continuum robots based on the literature reviewed, discuss different aspects of autonomy and give an overview of physical prototypes of continuum robots.