Mission Statement

The use of autonomous mobile systems as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or cooperative smart cars is desirable, for example, for environmental surveillance like the monitoring of ash clouds emitted by volcano eruptions as seen in 2010. Likewise, smart cars co-ordinating behaviours to improve vehicle density without driver involvement, will be a means of increasing traffic throughput to maintain mobility without the need to build new traffic infrastructures. Sharing the same air- or ground space with other systems, these systems need to communicate and cooperate in their environment. However, in the current state of the art, these systems are not allowed to operate in the public air space or on public roads, because the risk of causing severe damage cannot be excluded with sufficient certainty.

The key objective of KARYON is to provide system solutions for predictable and safe coordination of smart vehicles that autonomously cooperate and interact in an open and inherently uncertain environment. This is a challenging objective since the same increasingly complex control components and wireless communication, which would allow improving performance, end up introducing new safety risks, which have to be mitigated or neutralized. Addressing this challenge requires innovative solutions in two major problem areas. The first one is to achieve a high availability of the complex control system investigating new ways of achieving fault-tolerant distributed control that allow maintaining a high performance level in the presence of uncertainties and failures. The second is the provision of a safety kernel to constraining system operation in order to avoid hazardous situations.