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Deep Neural Network-Based Aerial Transport in the Presence of Cooperative and Uncooperative UAS

Zahed, Muhammad Junayed Hasan, Rastgoftar, Hossein

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a resilient deep neural network (DNN) framework for decentralized transport and coverage using uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) operating in $\mathbb{R}^n$. The proposed DNN-based mass-transport architecture constructs a layered inter-UAS communication graph from an initial formation, assigns time-varying communication weights through a forward scheduling mechanism that guides the team from the initial to the final configuration, and ensures stability and convergence of the resulting multi-agent transport dynamics. The framework is explicitly designed to remain robust in the presence of uncooperative agents that deviate from or refuse to follow the prescribed protocol. Our method preserves a fixed feed-forward topology but dynamically prunes edges to uncooperative agents, maintains convex, feedforward mentoring among cooperative agents, and computes global desired set points through a sparse linear relation consistent with leader references. The target set is abstracted by $N$ points that become final desired positions, enabling coverage-optimal transport while keeping computation low and guarantees intact. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, under full cooperation, all agents converge rapidly to the target zone with a 10\% boundary margin and under partial cooperation with uncooperative agents, the system maintains high convergence among cooperative agents with performance degradation localized near the disruptions, evidencing graceful resilience and scalability. These results confirm that forward-weight scheduling, hierarchical mentor--mentee coordination, and on-the-fly DNN restructuring yield robust, provably stable UAS transport in realistic fault scenarios.


Area Modeling using Stay Information for Large-Scale Users and Analysis for Influence of COVID-19

Shoji, Kazuyuki, Aoki, Shunsuke, Yonezawa, Takuro, Kawaguchi, Nobuo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding how people use area in a city can be a valuable information in a wide range of fields, from marketing to urban planning. Area usage is subject to change over time due to various events including seasonal shifts and pandemics. Before the spread of smartphones, this data had been collected through questionnaire survey. However, this is not a sustainable approach in terms of time to results and cost. There are many existing studies on area modeling, which characterize an area with some kind of information, using Point of Interest (POI) or inter-area movement data. However, since POI is data that is statically tied to space, and inter-area movement data ignores the behavior of people within an area, existing methods are not sufficient in terms of capturing area usage changes. In this paper, we propose a novel area modeling method named Area2Vec, inspired by Word2Vec, which models areas based on people's location data. This method is based on the discovery that it is possible to characterize an area based on its usage by using people's stay information in the area. And it is a novel method that can reflect the dynamically changing people's behavior in an area in the modeling results. We validated Area2vec by performing a functional classification of areas in a district of Japan. The results show that Area2Vec can be usable in general area analysis. We also investigated area usage changes due to COVID-19 in two districts in Japan. We could find that COVID-19 made people refrain from unnecessary going out, such as visiting entertainment areas.


A Novel Approach To User Agent String Parsing For Vulnerability Analysis Using Mutli-Headed Attention

Nandakumar, Dhruv, Murli, Sathvik, Khosla, Ankur, Choi, Kevin, Rahman, Abdul, Walsh, Drew, Riede, Scott, Dull, Eric, Bowen, Edward

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing reliance on the internet has led to the proliferation of a diverse set of web-browsers and operating systems (OSs) capable of browsing the web. User agent strings (UASs) are a component of web browsing that are transmitted with every Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request. They contain information about the client device and software, which is used by web servers for various purposes such as content negotiation and security. However, due to the proliferation of various browsers and devices, parsing UASs is a non-trivial task due to a lack of standardization of UAS formats. Current rules-based approaches are often brittle and can fail when encountering such non-standard formats. In this work, a novel methodology for parsing UASs using Multi-Headed Attention Based transformers is proposed. The proposed methodology exhibits strong performance in parsing a variety of UASs with differing formats. Furthermore, a framework to utilize parsed UASs to estimate the vulnerability scores for large sections of publicly visible IT networks or regions is also discussed. The methodology present here can also be easily extended or deployed for real-time parsing of logs in enterprise settings.


Using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for Assessing and Monitoring Fall Hazard Prevention Systems in High-rise Building Projects

Li, Yimeng, Esmaeili, Behzad, Gheisari, Masoud, Kosecka, Jana, Rashidi, Abbas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study develops a framework for unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to monitor fall hazard prevention systems near unprotected edges and openings in high-rise building projects. A three-step machine-learning-based framework was developed and tested to detect guardrail posts from the images captured by UAS. First, a guardrail detector was trained to localize the candidate locations of posts supporting the guardrail. Since images were used in this process collected from an actual job site, several false detections were identified. Therefore, additional constraints were introduced in the following steps to filter out false detections. Second, the research team applied a horizontal line detector to the image to properly detect floors and remove the detections that were not close to the floors. Finally, since the guardrail posts are installed with approximately normal distribution between each post, the space between them was estimated and used to find the most likely distance between the two posts. The research team used various combinations of the developed approaches to monitor guardrail systems in the captured images from a high-rise building project. Comparing the precision and recall metrics indicated that the cascade classifier achieves better performance with floor detection and guardrail spacing estimation. The research outcomes illustrate that the proposed guardrail recognition system can improve the assessment of guardrails and facilitate the safety engineer's task of identifying fall hazards in high-rise building projects.


A new model to enable multi-object tracking in unmanned aerial systems

#artificialintelligence

To efficiently navigate their surrounding environments and complete missions, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) should be able to detect multiple objects in their surroundings and track their movements over time. So far, however, enabling multi-object tracking in unmanned aerial vehicles has proved to be fairly challenging. Researchers at Lockheed Martin AI Center have recently developed a new deep learning technique that could allow UASs to track multiple objects in their surroundings. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could aid the development of better performing and more responsive autonomous flying systems. "We present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations," the researchers wrote in their paper.


Video Friday: Muscle for Tough Robots, Cobots on Wheels, and WALK-MAN Goes for a Walk

IEEE Spectrum Robotics

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robot videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Opportunity is 13 years old! The hydraulic high-power muscle has been developed by Suzumori Endo Robotics Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Bridgestone Corporation as part of the Impulsing PAradigm Change through disruptive Technologies program (ImPACT) Tough Robotics Challenge which is an initiative of the Cabinet Office Council for Science, Technology and Innovation. The muscle is 15 mm in diameter and generates 700 kgf contraction force.