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The purpose of this paper is to propose a software engineering procedure for real-time software development and verification of an autonomous underwater robotic system. High performance and robust software are one of the requirements of autonomous systems design. A simple error in the software can easily lead to a catastrophic failure in a complex system. Then, a systematic procedure is presented for this purpose.

This paper utilizes software engineering tools and hardware-inthe-loop (HIL) simulations for real-time system design of an autonomous underwater robot.

In this paper, the architecture of the system is extracted. Then, using software engineering techniques a suitable structure for control software is presented. Considering the desirable targets of the robot, suitable algorithms and functions are developed. After the development stage, proving the real-time performance of the software is disclosed.

A suitable approach for analyzing the real-time performance is presented. This approach is implemented using HIL simulations. The developed structure is applicable to other autonomous systems.

The importance of mobile services in our everyday life is growing while at the same time new interoperability issues arise due to hardware and software heterogeneity. Therefore, new architectural paradigms and models are needed to enhance software engineering methodologies with regard to platform independence and interoperability. This paper describes an UML pattern based approach for developing reconfigurable autonomous mobile services. Through the analysis of an mcommerce project, the relevance of our proposed architecture will be explained. Our focus lays on a generic reconfiguration mechanism based on profile matching from software modules. This profiling part will be further described and discussed. Finally, the applicability of our approach is investigated within a project about reconfigurable indoor navigation computers and a project about robot assisted sensor networks.

In this paper, we will address privacy and trust issues that arise in more advanced software systems. Though a lot of information is currently available in electronic form, not all of it should widely be accessible to everybody. The involved parties need full control on how their data are used and who has access. If the system consists of autonomous software agents, this problem requires extra attention and new working principles. We illustrate this in the case of a communication platform for multimodal transport. The major aim of the communication platform is to enhance exchanging information and to ultimately improve organisation/collaboration within the transport sector. A better informed view of the transport sector will facilitate better considered decisions for users of the communication platform. The software system merits credibility by accurately modelling all the relevant real world interactions of potential users of the system. We opted for a connectivity solution in which software agents act as representatives of the parties involved. All agents can be equipped with human‐like skills and qualities such as intelligence, autonomy, and the ability to cooperate, coordinate and negotiate. We demonstrate how cooperation between parties can be achieved while respecting their sensitivity concerning information.

Given that value exchange in virtually every sector of the economy is increasingly dominated by software, the goals of this chapter are to bring software to the attention of the academic marketing community, to discuss the unusual product attributes of software, and to therefore suggest some research topics related to software as a product attribute. Software allows service to be physically stored and allows physical objects to perform services. Managing products that have evolved into software products creates difficult challenges for managers as software does not resemble either tangible goods or intangible services in terms of production, operations, cost structure, or prescribed strategy. Every time a business replaces an employee with an e-service interaction, and every time a business adds a line of code to a previously inert object, the nature of that business changes. And as software gets more capable, its nature as a product changes as well by adding unique product characteristics summarized as complexity, intelligence, autonomy, and agency.

Automatic, autonomous browsing has an increasingly important task in information discovery and assisted browsing on the Internet. Where users could once keep up to date with information of interest on the Internet, the recursive growth of the network has made this process increasingly time consuming and less rewarding. Presents two possible solutions to this problem: Data Agents and CollaborAgents which were developed with IBM’s Aglet Workbench – a particular implementation of mobile agents. Also surveys the agent technology and discusses the agent building package used to develop both mentioned applications. Concludes that the future of local interaction, reduced network loading, server flexibility and application autonomy which are supported by mobile agent technology, all help to provide a level agility above distributed problem solving.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a layered adjustable autonomy (LAA) as a dynamically adjustable autonomy model for a multi-agent system. It is mainly used to efficiently manage humans’ and agents’ shared control of autonomous systems and maintain humans’ global control over the agents.

The authors apply the LAA model in an agent-based autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. The UAV system implementation consists of two parts: software and hardware. The software part represents the controller and the cognitive, and the hardware represents the computing machinery and the actuator of the UAV system. The UAV system performs three experimental scenarios of dance, surveillance and search missions. The selected scenarios demonstrate different behaviors in order to create a suitable test plan and ensure significant results.

The results of the UAV system tests prove that segregating the autonomy of a system as multi-dimensional and adjustable layers enables humans and/or agents to perform actions at convenient autonomy levels. Hence, reducing the adjustable autonomy drawbacks of constraining the autonomy of the agents, increasing humans’ workload and exposing the system to disturbances.

The application of the LAA model in a UAV manifests the significance of implementing dynamic adjustable autonomy. Assessing the autonomy within three phases of agents run cycle (task-selection, actions-selection and actions-execution) is an original idea that aims to direct agents’ autonomy toward performance competency. The agents’ abilities are well exploited when an incompetent agent switches with a more competent one.

The authors present a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for autonomous flight and navigation in GPS-denied environments using an off-the-shelf smartphone as its core on-board processing unit. Thereby, the approach is independent from additional ground hardware and the UAV core unit can be easily replaced with more powerful hardware that simplifies setup updates as well as maintenance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The UAV is able to map, locate and navigate in an unknown indoor environment fusing vision-based tracking with inertial and attitude measurements. The authors choose an algorithmic approach for mapping and localization that does not require GPS coverage of the target area; therefore autonomous indoor navigation is made possible.

The authors demonstrate the UAVs capabilities of mapping, localization and navigation in an unknown 2D marker environment. The promising results enable future research on 3D self-localization and dense mapping using mobile hardware as the only on-board processing unit.

The proposed autonomous flight processing pipeline robustly tracks and maps planar markers that need to be distributed throughout the tracking volume.

Due to the cost-effective platform and the flexibility of the software architecture, the approach can play an important role in areas with poor infrastructure (e.g. developing countries) to autonomously perform tasks for search and rescue, inspection and measurements.

The authors provide a low-cost off-the-shelf flight platform that only requires a commercially available mobile device as core processing unit for autonomous flight in GPS-denied areas.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a generic platform for a robotic mobile system, seeking to obtain a support tool for under-graduation and graduation activities. Another objective was to gather knowledge in the mobile robotic area in order to provide practical solutions for industrial problems.

The proposed new integrated platform would serve as didactic material for many disciplines, shown to be an ideal platform to teach DC motor drives, stepper motor and motion-control systems. To reach this objective, the ability of the robot to plan its motion autonomously is of vital importance. The control of a mobile robot in dynamic and unstructured environments typically requires efficient processing of data/information to ensure precise navigation and many other applications. Path planning is also one common method of auto-navigation. After the computation of the shortest path, mobile robot can navigate safely and without occlusion.

The developed platform is an integrated system for intelligent software middleware to coordinate many activities in the field of electric drives, robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.

As a result of the study, this paper contributed to research in the industrial development, principally in the fields of industrial robotics and also in different application purposes such as entertainment, personal use, welfare, education, rehabilitation, etc.

This study aims to develop a software agent-knowledge procurement management tool to address uncertainties from external and internal environments, such as record failure, slow logistics auditing and distribution delay toward improving procurement management in retailing enterprises.

Quantitative methodology was used to collect data using a self-administered survey from randomly selected procurement staffs, marketers and customers to measure their perception regarding the feasibility and acceptance of the implemented agent-knowledge-based procurement management tool.

Results from empirical analysis reveal that the implemented tool facilitates collaboration and interaction among buyers, sellers and procurement managers toward enhancing procurement managers’ flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions. In addition, results confirm the feasibility of the implemented tool in supporting procurement management toward handling inventory failure exception, which occurs in traditional procurement approaches. Moreover, descriptive results from user acceptance test verify that the tool was accepted by the respondents.

The limitation of this study is that the implemented tool is evaluated using data collected from respondents in Malaysia retailing enterprise only; thus, the results cannot be generalized to other enterprises and country. In addition, research implications from this study design a methodological and comprehensive software agent-knowledge-based model that support buyers, sellers and procurement managers with information to facilitate buying and selling operations.

Practically, the designed software agent-knowledge-based model describes how software agents collaborate with each other to facilitate procurement tasks and also use the knowledge base in the implemented tool to provide information sharing platform that manages the dynamics of procurement operations.

This research integrates software agents which are autonomous programs that carryout pre-defined task on behalf of end users. Socially, this study would be useful for procurement managers in developing mechanisms for instilling insights in retailing operations.

This research is among the first to attempt to develop a software agent-knowledge-based model to support procurement management in the retailing enterprise domain. It contributes to promote e-procurement practices by implementing a software agent-knowledge-oriented tool to address uncertainties experienced in retailing enterprise. It is envisaged that this study will provide basis for future research into e-procurement practices for retailing businesses in Malaysia and beyond.