The autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - self-governing in the aerospace discipline has been a remarkable research area with the development of the advanced bespoke microcontrollers embedded ...with advanced AI techniques for the last several decades. The road forward about the operational environment is certain about the swarms of fully automated UAVs (FAUAVs), that is, urban areas. FAUAVs with self-learning and self-decision-making abilities by executing non-trivial sequences of events with decimetre-level accuracy based on a set of rules, control loops and constraints using dynamic flight plans and trajectories are taking their indispensable parts within smart cities (SCs). Therefore, their integration with the SC components using real-time data analytics is urgent. This is mainly required to establish a better swarm intelligence along with a safer and optimised harmonious smart ecosystem that enables cooperative FAUAV-SC automation systems with collaborative automated intelligence engaging in the concepts of Internet of Everything (IoE) and Automation of Everything (AoE). Planning the future of cities with swarms of FAUAVs is explored in this paper to optimise the use of FAUAVs with a diverse range of applications and a contemporary methodology is proposed using a holistic framework - FAUAVinSCF equipped with various effective and efficient techniques along with a novel FAUAV routing technique customisable to the constraints of FAUAVs and urban areas. With the methodology, the components of SC and FAUAVs involving recent and impending technological advancements are moulded together to make this inevitable transformation a harmonious part of the inhabitants contributing to the cities' liveability and sustainability. The framework consists of a decentralized agent-based control architecture that monitors and controls the swarms of resource-constraint FAUAVs for their real-time requirements in optimising their urban uses. The outcomes of the methodology suggest that the constraints of FAUAVs can be mitigated significantly in urban areas and consequently, their efficacy can be increased in realising their diverse range of missions.
The movie — The Matrix (1999) — boosted our imagination about how further we can be immersed within the cyber world, i.e., how further the cyber world can be indistinguishable from the real world. ...Nobody, including the creators, had expected that the aspirational fictional virtual worlds such as “ActiveWorlds (1995)” and “Second Life (2003)” would impact the way of experiencing our real urban environments with many urban experiences embedded into a rich featured 3D environment. Are we going to stay as ourselves while existing in a mirror world? Are the fabricated, created imaginary worlds becoming a part of real worlds or vice versa? The recent once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has confirmed the importance of location and time-independent Digital Twins (DTs) (i.e., virtual scale models) of cities and their automated services which can provide everybody with equity and accessibility. This study analyses how the metaverse (3D elevation of linear Internet), that aims to build high-fidelity virtual worlds with which to interact with, can be engaged within the Smart City (SC) ecosystem with high immersive Quality of Experiences (QoE) leading to increased Quality of Life (QoL). An urban metaverse ecosystem framework — MetaOmniCity — is designed to demonstrate a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for policymakers, city planners and all other stakeholders about how to transform data-driven SCs with DTs into virtually inhabitable cities with a network of shared urban experiences from a metaverse point of view. MetaOmniCity, allowing the metaversification of cities with granular virtual societies, i.e., MetaSocieties, and eliminating the boundaries between the real world and their virtual counterparts can be shaped to the particular requirements and features of cities. Urban metaverse shared worlds, an extension of residents and urban society, where the virtual and the physically real blend and are more organically integrated, would impact urban ways of living significantly with many practical implementations. This would open doors for potential businesses with tremendous global economic value by democratising skills/assets within an urban environment, paving the way for immersive globalisation with the bigger and richer metaverse of Country (MoC) and metaverse of World (MoW) being an immersive DT of the broader universe with tangibly connected cities. MetaOmniCity is expected to accelerate the building, deployment, and adoption of immersive urban metaverse networks for citizens to interface with as an extension of real social and individual experiences.
The deployment of fully self-sufficient, self-driving vehicles (SDVs) to city roads in a diverse range of benefit-driven concepts is on the horizon where the higher levels of automation with ...automated driving systems (ADSs) are being installed on vehicles. The acceptance of SDVs as safety-critical systems to successfully substitute for human drivers requires a high level of trustworthiness in numerous socio-technical aspects. By the time SDVs are available to the general public with challenges and opportunities, the trustworthiness of SDVs in rapidly changing, partially observable, multiagent, stochastic, sequential, dynamic, continuous and unknown environments shall be ensured from the perspective of the stakeholders. This paper analyses the dynamics of trust in SDVs from the perspectives of all stakeholders to result in how the "trustworthiness" of SDVs can be ensured with mitigated risks and dangers (i.e., non-maleficence) and maximised benefits (i.e., beneficence) as a holistic view of all the dimensions and dynamics of SDVs. Besides, a framework, namely, TrustFSDV, that designates a transitional roadmap with delegated responsibilities and liabilities along with the desired performance indicators, is proposed for the stakeholders to pursue in ensuring a sufficient level of trust within the concepts of human-vehicle integration and society-vehicle harmonisation - inducing the advancement of SDVs and acceptance of them by the society - while the future is being revolutionised by SDVs. To conclude the key findings in this research, i) although instant trust can be gained through hard work, it can be lost readily without forward-thinking during the life-cycle of SDVs, ii) a high level of trustworthiness cannot only be achieved by manufacturers, it requires the strict collaboration of all the stakeholders with distributed responsibilities and liabilities while moulding the requirements of the stakeholders in a system under the supervision of related disciplines, iii) the manufacturers along with the press shall not ignore the real technical limitations of the SDV technology when communicating about benefits to the potential customers, and iv) drastic steps are needed to be taken concerning ethical and legal perspectives, which is perceived as the primary concern beyond technology to build and maintain a high level of trustworthiness.
The automotive industry aims to deploy commercial level-5 fully autonomous self-driving vehicles (FA-SDVs) in a diverse range of benefit-driven concepts on city roads in the years to come. In all ...future visions of operating networks of FA-SDVs, humans are expected to intervene with some kind of remote supervisory role. Recent advances in cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE) using tactile Internet (TI) teleport us to teleoperate remote objects within the cyber-world. Human-on-the-loop (HOTL) haptic teleoperation with an extension of human control and sensing capability by coupling with artificial sensors and actuators with an increased sense of real-time driving in the remote vehicle can help overcome the challenging tasks when the new driver - artificial intelligence (AI) agent - encounters an unorthodox situation that can't be addressed by the autonomous capabilities. This paper analyses HOTL real-time haptic delay-sensitive teleoperation with FA-SDVs, in the aspects of human-vehicle teamwork by establishing two similar remote parallel worlds - real-world vehicle time-varying environment and cyber-world emulation of this environment, i.e., digital twins (DTs) - in which a human telesupervisor (HTS), as a biological agent, can be immersed with no cybersickness enabling omnipresence through a timely bidirectional flow of energy and information. The experiments conducted as a proof of concept of HOTL haptic teleoperation regarding learning with human-vehicle collaboration show promising results and the potential of benefiting from the proposed framework.
A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can ...be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK.
Deploying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms in delivery systems are still in its infancy with regard to the technology, safety, and aviation rules and regulations. Optimal use of UAVs in dynamic ...environments is important in many aspects, e.g., increasing efficacy and reducing the air traffic, resulting in a safer environment, and it requires new techniques and robust approaches based on the capabilities of UAVs and constraints. This paper analyzes several delivery schemes within a platform, such as delivery with and without using air highways and delivery using a hybrid scheme along with several delivery methods (i.e., optimal, premium, and first-in first-out) to explore the use of UAV swarms as part of the logistics operations. In this platform, a dimension reduction technique, "dynamic multiple assignments in multi-dimensional space," and several other new techniques along with Hungarian and cross-entropy Monte Carlo techniques are forged together to assign tasks and plan 3D routes dynamically. This particular approach is performed in such a way that UAV swarms in several warehouses are deployed optimally given the delivery scheme, method, and constraints. Several scenarios are tested on the simulator using small and big data sets. The results show that the distribution and the characteristics of data sets and constraints affect the decision on choosing the optimal delivery scheme and the method. The findings are expected to guide the aviation authorities in their decisions before dictating rules and regulations regarding effective, efficient, and safe use of UAVs. Furthermore, the companies that produce UAVs are going to take the demonstrated results into account for their functional design of UAVs along with other companies that aim to deliver their products using UAVs. Additionally, private industries, logistics operators, and municipalities are expected to benefit from the potential adoption of the simulator in strategic decisions before embarking on the practical implementation of UAV delivery systems.
Most of the vehicle manufacturers aim to deploy level-5 fully autonomous ground vehicles (FAGVs) on city roads in 2021 by leveraging extensive existing knowledge about sensors, actuators, telematics ...and Artificial Intelligence (AI) gained from the level-3 and level-4 autonomy. FAGVs by executing non-trivial sequences of events with decimetre-level accuracy live in Smart City (SC) and their integration with all the SC components and domains using real-time data analytics is urgent to establish better swarm intelligent systems and a safer and optimised harmonious smart environment enabling cooperative FAGVs-SC automation systems. The challenges of urbanisation, if unmet urgently, would entail severe economic and environmental impacts. The integration of FAGVs with SC helps improve the sustainability of a city and the functional and efficient deployment of hand over wheels on robotized city roads with behaviour coordination. SC can enable the exploitation of the full potential of FAGVs with embedded centralised systems within SC with highly distributed systems in a concept of Automation of Everything (AoE). This article proposes a synergistic integrated FAGV-SC holistic framework - FAGVinSCF in which all the components of SC and FAGVs involving recent and impending technological advancements are moulded to make the transformation from today's driving society to future's next-generation driverless society smoother and truly make self-driving technology a harmonious part of our cities with sustainable urban development. Based on FAGVinSCF, a simulation platform is built both to model the varying penetration levels of FAGV into mixed traffic and to perform the optimal self-driving behaviours of FAGV swarms. The results show that FAGVinSCF improves the urban traffic flow significantly without huge changes to the traffic infrastructure. With this framework, the concept of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) is transformed into the concept of Automated ITS (A-ITS). Cities currently designed for cars can turn into cities developed for citizens using FAGVinSCF enabling more sustainable cities.
Various methods have been used to estimate the pupil location within an image or a real-time video frame in many fields. However, these methods lack the performance specifically in low-resolution ...images and varying background conditions. We propose a coarse-to-fine pupil localisation method using a composite of machine learning and image processing algorithms. First, a pre-trained model is employed for the facial landmark identification to extract the desired eye frames within the input image. Then, we use multi-stage convolution to find the optimal horizontal and vertical coordinates of the pupil within the identified eye frames. For this purpose, we define an adaptive kernel to deal with the varying resolution and size of input images. Furthermore, a dynamic threshold is calculated recursively for reliable identification of the best-matched candidate. We evaluated our method using various statistical and standard metrics along with a standardised distance metric that we introduce for the first time in this study. The proposed method outperforms previous works in terms of accuracy and reliability when benchmarked on multiple standard datasets. The work has diverse artificial intelligence and industrial applications including human computer interfaces, emotion recognition, psychological profiling, healthcare, and automated deception detection.
The recent advances in cyber-physical domains, cloud, cloudlet, and edge platforms along with the evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, big data analytics, and cutting-edge wireless ...communication technologies within the Industry 4.0 (4IR) are urging mechatronics designers, practitioners, and educators to further review the ways in which mechatronics systems are perceived, designed, manufactured, and advanced. Within this scope, we introduce the service-oriented cyber-physical advanced mechatronics systems (AMSs) along with current and future challenges. The objective in AMSs is to create remarkably intelligent autonomous products by 1) forging effective sensing, self-learning, Wisdom as a Service (WaaS), Information as a Service (InaaS), precise decision making, and actuation using effective location-independent monitoring, control and management techniques with products and 2) maintaining a competitive edge through better product performances via immediate and continuous learning, while the products are being used by customers and are being produced in factories within the cycle of Automation of Everything (AoE). With the advanced wireless communication techniques and improved battery technologies, the AMSs are capable of getting independent and working with other massive AMSs to construct robust, customizable, energy-efficient, autonomous, intelligent, and immersive platforms. In this regard, rather than providing technological details, this paper implements philosophical insights into 1) how mechatronics systems are being transformed into AMSs; 2) how robust AMSs can be developed by both exploiting the wisdom created within cyber-physical smart domains in the edge and cloud platforms and incorporating all the stakeholders with diverse objectives into all phases of the product life-cycle; and 3) what essential common features AMSs should acquire to increase the efficacy of products and prolong their product life. Against this background, an AMS development framework is proposed in order to contextualize all the necessary phases of AMS development and direct all stakeholders to rivet high-quality products and services within AoE.
The recent advances in the cyber–physical domains, cloud and edge platforms along with the advanced communication technologies play a crucial role in connecting the globe more than ever, which is ...creating large volumes of data at astonishing rates and a tsunami of computation within hyper-connectivity. Data analytic tools are evolving rapidly to harvest these explosive increasing data volumes. Deriving meaningful insights from voluminous geo-distributed data of all kinds as a strategic asset is fuelling the innovation, facilitating e-commerce and revolutionizing the industry and businesses in the transition from digital to the intelligent way of doing business. In this perspective, in this study, a philosophical industrial and technological direction involving Deep Insight-as-a-Service (DINSaaS) on Forged Cloud Platforms (FCP) along with Advanced Insight Analytics (AIA), primarily motivated by the global benefit is systematically analysed within sophisticated theoretical knowledge, and consequently, a conceptual geo-distributed framework is proposed to (1) guide the national/international leading organizations, governments, cloud service providers and leading companies in order to establish a scalable framework within the hyperscale geo-distributed infrastructure in which exponentially increasing voluminous Big Data (BD) can be harvested effectively and efficiently, (2) inspire the transformation of BD into wiser abstract formats in Specialized Insight Domains (SID), (3) provide fusion and networking of insights rather than BD in order to obtain globally generated distributed intelligence and help make better decisions and near-real-time predictions, in particular for time-critical latency-sensitive applications, and (4) direct all the stakeholders to rivet the high-quality products and services within Automation of Everything (AoE) by exploiting continuously created and updated insights in dedicated taxonomic SID within large-scale geo-distributed datacenters.
•A geo-distributed architectural framework is proposed to manage the Big Data in Cloud and Edge/Fog.•Voluminous big data can be harvested effectively and efficiently in this framework.•Transformation of big data into wiser abstract formats is analysed for effective decision making.
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