Intelligent Adaptive Autonomous Systems: Essential Technologies and Applications

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Autonomous and Unmanned Vehicles (AUVs) are systems that operate in the sea, across the ground, in the air and beyond Earth's atmosphere. AUVs can go places and do things traditional vehicles cannot, or where it is unsafe for humans. The AUVs have a lot of potential applications in civilian, military and security areas, for example defense patrol duties, agricultural activities, forest fire monitoring and control, grid monitoring, boarder control, surveillance, search and rescue. AUVs have great potential benefits to Canada for numerous reasons; many of which are connected with our large uninhabited land, the largest area of forests in the world, and the longest international border in the world. While the field of autonomous unmanned vehicles has made tremendous progress over the last decade, many questions remain unanswered. Autonomous systems that operate in complex, dynamic, and interactive environments require artificial intelligence that generalizes to unpredictable situations and reasons in a timely manner. Compared to single AUV, systems with multiple AUVs (same or of different types) are more effective in various complicated team tasks due to their inherent advantages, including increased adaptability, robustness, and flexibility in a dynamic environment, mission efficiency, lower cost, and probability of success. However, effective cooperation of multiple autonomous vehicles poses many challenges in dynamics, control, navigation, planning, decision-making, etc. In some applications, autonomous systems need to reach human-level reliability in decision-making, planning, and perception, and current detection and segmentation accuracies do not yet suffice in difficult conditions. If we can overcome these challenges, autonomous systems will have a tremendously beneficial impact on our lives. This proposed Discovery Project will focus on the development of several essential technologies for the Intelligent Adaptive Autonomous Systems and their applications such as (i) collaborative transportation; and (ii) autonomous driving. The successful development of these technologies will further contribute to maintaining Canada's status as a leading research country in the area of autonomous systems, and will, in addition, translate into monetary benefits for the Canadian companies who participate in these areas. This project is also important for developing expertise and talent within Canada needed for the next phases of research and development of autonomous systems.