Abstract-The design, prototype implementation, and demonstration of an ethical governor capable of restricting lethal action of an autonomous system in a manner consistent with the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement is presented.

Abstract-This paper presents the first known humansubject study of comfortable approach distance and height for human interaction with a small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV), finding no conclusive difference in comfort with a sUAV approaching a human at above head height or below head height. Understanding the amount, if any, of discomfort introduced by a sUAV flying in close proximity to a human is critical for law enforcement, crowd control, entertainment, or flying personal assistants. Previous work has focused on how humans interact with each other or with unmanned ground vehicles, and the experimental methods typically rely on the human participant to consciously express distress. The approach taken was to duplicate the experimental set up in human proxemics studies, while adding psychophysiological sensing, under the hypothesis that human-robot interaction will mirror human-human interaction. The 16 participant, within-subjects experiment did not confirm this hypothesis. Instead a sUAV above height of a "tall" person in human experiments (2.13 m) did not produce statistically different heart rate variability nor cause the participant to stop the robot further away than for a sUAV at a "short" height (1.52 m). The lack of effect may be due to two possible confounds: i) duplicating prior human proxemics experiments did not capture how a sUAV would likely move or interact and ii) telling the participants that the robot could not hurt them. Despite possible confounding, the results raise the question of whether humanhuman psychological and physical distancing behavior transfers to human-aerial robot interactions.

This article presents a preliminary work domain theory and identifies autonomous vehicle, navigational, and mission capabilities and challenges for small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs) responding to a radiological disaster. Radiological events are representative of applications that involve flying at low altitudes and close proximities to structures. To more formally understand the guidance and control demands, the environment in which the SUAS has to function, and the expected missions, tasks, and strategies to respond to an incident, a discovery experiment was performed in 2013. The experiment placed a radiological source emitting at 10 times background radiation in the simulated collapse of a multistory hospital. Two SUASs, an AirRobot 100B and a Leptron Avenger, were inserted with subject matter experts into the response, providing high operational fidelity. The SUASs were expected by the responders to fly at altitudes between 0.3 and 30 m, and hover at 1.5 m from urban structures. The proximity to a building introduced a decrease in GPS satellite coverage, challenging existing vehicle autonomy. Five new navigational capabilities were identified: scan, obstacle avoidance, contour following, environment‐aware return to home, and return to highest reading. Furthermore, the data‐to‐decision process could be improved with autonomous data digestion and visualization capabilities. This article is expected to contribute to a better understanding of autonomy in a SUAS, serve as a requirement document for advanced autonomy, and illustrate how discovery experimentation serves as a design tool for autonomous vehicles.

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