Missions involving humans interacting with automated systems become increasingly common. Due to the non-deterministic behavior of the human and possibly high risk of failing due to human factors, such an integrated system should react smartly by adapting its behavior when necessary. A promise avenue to design an efficient interaction-driven system is the mixed-initiative paradigm. In this context, this paper proposes a method to learn the model of a mixed-initiative human-robot mission. The first step to set up a reliable model is to acquire enough data. For this aim a crowdsourcing campaign was conducted and learning algorithms were trained on the collected data in order to model the human-robot mission and to optimize a supervision policy with a Markov Decision Process (MDP). This model takes into account the actions of the human operator during the interaction as well as the state of the robot and the mission. Once such a model has been learned, the supervision strategy can be optimized according to a criterion representing the goal of the mission. In this paper, the supervision strategy concerns the robot's operating mode. Simulations based on the MDP model show that planning under uncertainty solvers can be used to adapt robot's mode according to the state of the human-robot system. The optimization of the robot's operation mode seems to be able to improve the team's performance. The dataset that comes from crowdsourcing is therefore a material that can be useful for research in human-machine interaction, that is why it has been made available on our web site.

This study describes a blockchain-based multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV) surveillance framework that enables UAV coordination and financial exchange between system users. The objective of the system is to allow a set of Points-Of-Interest (POI) to be surveyed by a set of autonomous UAVs that cooperate to minimize the time between successive visits while exhibiting unpredictable behavior to prevent external agents from learning their movements. The system can be seen as a marketplace where the UAVs are the service providers and the POIs are the service seekers. This concept is based on a blockchain embedded on the UAVs and on some nodes on the ground, which has two main functionalities. The first one is to plan the route of each UAV through an efficient and computationally cheap game-theoretic decision algorithm implemented into a smart contract. The second one is to allow financial transactions between the system and its users, where the POIs subscribe to surveillance services by buying tokens. Conversely, the system pays the UAVs in tokens for the provided services. The first benchmarking experiments show that the IOTA blockchain is a potential blockchain candidate to be integrated in the UAV embedded system and that the chosen decentralized decision-making coordination strategy is efficient enough to fill the mission requirements while being computationally light.

To cite this version:José Alfredo Macés-Hernández, François Defay, Corentin Chauffaut. Autonomous landing of an UAV on a moving platform using Model Predictive Control. Autonomous landing of an UAV on a moving platform using Model Predictive ControlJosé A. Macés-Hernández, François Defaÿ and Corentin ChauffautAbstract-This paper proposes a linear Model Predictive Control (MPC) for high-accuracy tracking of a mobile robotic platform, in an indoor environment. The mission is divided into three main phases: target detection, target tracking and autonomous lading. These phases were coded into a so-called guidance function, which allows the system to safely switch between different reference signals according to the state of the mission. In order to ease the control loop implementation in the experimental framework available at the facilities of ISAE Supaero, some existing optimisation tools were employed. In addition, some simulations and real tests were carried out to demonstrate the performance of the controller against other control techniques developed for the same experimental system.

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