Proactive UAVs for Cognitive Contextual Awareness

Unmanned vehicle systems are often teleoperated, semiautonomous, and strictly dependent on human operators. In complex and dynamic environments, unmanned vehicles should be autonomous in a stricter sense, which means they should exhibit a human-like behavior to be capable of accurately perceiving the environment; understanding the situation, locating and interacting with environmental elements; and reporting solutions to humans. In order to address these desiderata, a modeling of a proactive, context-aware unmanned system is presented. Precisely, the system framework is designed for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that flies over an area, and collects data in the form of video frames, sensor values, etc. It recognizes situations, senses scene object and environment data, acquires the awareness about the evolving scenes, and, finally, takes a decision based on the perception of the overall scenario. The system design is based on two primary building blocks: 1) the semantic web technologies that provide the high-level object description in the tracked scenario, and 2) the fuzzy cognitive map model that provides the cognitive accumulation of spatial knowledge in order to discern specific situations that need a decision. Although the paper presents a UAV-based surveillance system model, its applicability is shown based on a realistic case study (viz., broken car on the highway); moreover, several possible scenario configurations have been simulated to assess the criticality level perceived by the system (UAV) in a given situation and to validate the effective response/decision in the case of critical situations.