TASCC: Secure Cloud-based Distributed Control (SCDC) Systems for Connected Autonomous Cars

汽车行业和消费者都渴望新车的智能功能和更高效的车辆。现代汽车不再仅仅被视为从A地到B地的交通工具，而是提供个性化服务的智能系统，有能力适应用户的偏好和需求。它们有望成为智能代理，从环境中学习，利用各种信息来源，成为日益自动化的系统，将驾驶员从繁琐的任务（如停车）中解脱出来，并提高未来汽车的安全性、效率和吸引力。从更广泛的角度来看，根据思科最近的一份报告，今天的陆地运输系统在道路交通事故中造成约130万人死亡，700万人受伤。汽车数量的增加导致交通堵塞，给司机和乘客造成了大约900亿小时的损失。此外，交通运输约占人类活动温室气体排放总量的26%。根据2014年交通部最近的一份报告，虽然公共交通工具可以提供帮助，但汽车仍然是理想的交通工具。除了运输系统对环境、经济和社会的影响之外，这些市场力量还需要及时和变革性的研究来重新思考汽车控制系统，并为未来的汽车设计带来革命性的变化。在过去十年中，实现这一目标有两个趋势：一方面，受无人驾驶太空飞行器的启发，自主系统的研究催生了谷歌机器人车等无人驾驶概念车；另一方面，现代无线通信使汽车能够相互通信，并与路边基础设施通信，从而产生了联网汽车的概念。然而，对于商用车辆来说，无人驾驶汽车仍然过于昂贵（b谷歌的汽车仅用于传感设备的成本约为10万英镑），而联网汽车如果不能适当地集成到智能和自动驾驶功能中，就几乎无法提供任何功能。这项雄心勃勃的研究由多家世界级学术机构和领先的工业合作伙伴共同定义，与高端汽车市场领导者捷豹路虎合作，设计和验证一个框架，将联网汽车概念的力量与自动驾驶系统的概念结合起来，建立一个新的平台，以经济有效地部署自动驾驶功能，最终实现联网和全自动驾驶汽车。这要归功于现代无线技术和云计算的强大功能，云计算允许共享昂贵的计算资源（因此降低了每辆车的成本），并提供了只能在云上获得的信息的访问。为了实现该项目的目标，该项目将解决超低延迟无线技术、云计算、分布式控制系统和人机交互问题等领域的一些关键挑战。此外，潜在的安全威胁将被识别和分析，以评估公众的潜在风险和汽车制造商的声誉损害，如果这些技术被商业化。在项目结束时，技术解决方案将被整合到一个单一的框架中，并将通过实例应用进行验证，以描述框架的技术和服务水平性能，并为增强自动化服务的未来方向提供基础。虽然最终目标是实现价格合理的无人驾驶汽车，但在短期内，该项目的目标是在测试环境中实现一系列可演示的自动驾驶功能。

Automotive industry and the consumers are eager for smart features on new cars and more efficient vehicles. Modern cars are not considered as mere means for travelling from point A to B anymore, but rather smart systems that offer personalised services and have the capability to adapt to the user's preferences and needs. They are expected to become intelligent agents that learn from their environments and exploit various sources of information to become increasingly autonomous systems that relieve the driver from tedious tasks, such as parking, and improve safety, efficiency, and desirability of the future cars. From a wider angle, today's land transportation systems claim about 1.3 million lives and 7 million injuries in road accidents, according to a recent report by CISCO. The increasing number of cars results in traffic jams costing about 90 billion of lost hours for the drivers and the passengers. In addition, transportation accounts for about 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission from human activities. While public transport can help, cars remain to be the desired means of transport according to a recent report by the Department of Transport in 2014. These market forces in addition to the environmental, economic and social impacts of transport systems demand a timely and transformative research to rethink the automotive control systems and revolutionise vehicle design for future cars. There have been two trends towards this objective in the past decade: in the one hand the research in autonomous systems, inspired by unmanned space vehicles, gave birth to driver-less concept cars such as Google robotic car; on the other hand, modern wireless communications enabled cars to talk to each other and the roadside infrastructures, resulting in the concept of connected cars. However, driver-less cars remain to be too expensive for commercial vehicles (Google's cars cost about £100,000 only for sensing equipment) and connected vehicles can offer little if not properly integrated into smart and autonomous features. This ambitious research is defined by a number of world-class academic institutions and leading industrial partners to work with Jaguar Land Rover, a market leader in high end cars, to design and validate a framework that combines the power of connected vehicles concept with the notion of autonomous systems and build a novel platform for cost-effective deployment of autonomous features and ultimately realisation of connected and fully autonomous cars. This can be made possible thanks to modern wireless technologies and the power of cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources (hence, reducing costs per vehicle) and provides access to information that are only available on the cloud. To realise the ambition of the project, a number of key challenges in the areas of ultra-low-latency wireless technologies, cloud computing, distributed control systems, and human interaction issues will be addressed in this project. In addition, potential security threats will be identified and analysed to assess the potential risks for the public and reputational damage for car manufacturers should such technologies be commercialised. At the end of the project, the technical solutions will be integrated into a single framework and will be validated by example applications, characterising technical and service-level performance of the framework, and providing a basis for the future direction of enhanced automated services. While the objective here is to ultimately enable affordable driver-less cars, in the short term, this project aims to enable a number of demonstrable autonomous features in a test environment.