Safety and Security Challenges and Technologies of Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems in Low-Altitude Economic Environments

Abstract

Although the concepts and developments on Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) have been progressively and extensively investigated worldwide since the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, the catastrophic crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX8 airplanes in 2019 have again highlighted the necessity and urgency for FDD and FTC research & development and their industrial applications. On the other hand, the low-altitude economy is developing rapidly in China and other countries around the world. What are the key challenges and technologies of autonomous unmanned flight in the low-altitude economy? In addition to the system design and implementation that meets the autonomy requirements for normal operations in the low-altitude environments, system reliability and operational safety are key technologies for safe and effective operation and development of these new Autonomous Systems (ASs). The new advancements of these ASs are benefited significantly from new technical advances in materials, electronics, electrification, communication, computation, vehicle and traffic control, actuators, sensors, networks and new/smart designs linked to the rapid development under the framework of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and widely spread Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Neural Network (DNN) learning technologies. Due to a higher level of size and complexity in these systems, in particular the added technical challenges due to the involvement of more electronic devices with both hardware and software and with large-scale and distributed networked systems, artificial cyber-attacks through communication networks, along with physical faults, could occur during systems operation, which will all lead to physical damages of the system and thus critical issues on stability, performance, safety and security of the desired/planned operations of the autonomous/unmanned systems. In this seminar, a brief overview of the challenges and latest developments towards smarter, safer, more reliable, and more resilient autonomous/unmanned systems will be presented, focusing on safe and secure controls of these systems with the integration of Remote Sensing (RS) techniques for applications such as forest fire detection and firefighting. The second part of the presentation will introduce some of the new developments and current research being carried out in Prof. Zhang’s group. In particular, Prof. Zhang will present advancements in autonomous control, fault detection and diagnosis (FDD), fault-tolerant control (FTC), and Fault/Attack-Tolerant Cooperative Control (FTCC) techniques. These advancements aim to ensure the autonomous, safe, and secure operation of autonomous systems for forest fire and smart city monitoring and detection tasks, even in the presence of physical faults/damages and cyber-attacks.

Speaker

Prof. Youmin Zhang is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Aerospace Engineering at Concordia University, Canada. His research interests include monitoring, diagnosis, and physical fault/cyber-attack tolerant/resilient control, as well as the guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned systems (air, space, land, marine, and autonomous vehicles, etc.) and smart grids. These research areas have applications in forest fire management and smart cities within the framework of cyber-physical systems, combining remote sensing and image processing techniques. He has published 10 books and over 600 journal and conference papers, which have been cited up to 31,116 times on Google Scholar. His h-index is 87, and his i10-index is 426. His publications have been ranked #1 worldwide in "Aircraft Systems" and "Fault Tolerance" (lifetime) and #2 worldwide in "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" (lifetime), making him the only contributor from Canada in that category, according to the recent ranking by ScholarGPS™. He has also been continuously recognized in the "World's Top 2% Scientists" by Stanford University since its launch in 2021.


Prof. Zhang is a Fellow of IEEE and the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (CSME) and served as the President of the International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems from 2019 to 2022. He has held roles as (Deputy) Editor-in-Chief and (Advisory) Editorial Board Member for more than 20 journals. Additionally, he has served as (Honorary) General Chair and Program Chair for several conferences related to autonomous/unmanned systems, renewable energies, and smart cities. More detailed information can be found at http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~ymzhang/.