Infrastructure

This report presents a benefit and cost study of a Cooperative High‐Accuracy LOcation (C‐HALO) service. A High Accuracy Location service should be ubiquitous and reliable as the GPS constellation. A survey of the literature on location services reveals a body of work on the benefits of a high accuracy location service. Focusing on road travel, benefits are estimated to be between $160-$320 billion dollars over slightly more than 20 years. The benefits arise from smoother traffic flow on the roads leading to reduced travel delays, and fewer accidents leading to reduced injuries and saved...

This paper describes a model of computation for structure-aware computing called the BigActor model. The model is a hybrid. It combines the Actor model [1] and the Bigraph model [10]. The contributions of this paper are an operational semantics, an example illustrating how the model supports the concise programming of a mobile agent working in a ubiquitous computing world, a query language enabling a bigActor to observe the world around it, and a definition giving semantics to the feedback loop in control theory in the context of this model. This is followed by three theorems showing how...

In this paper we introduce the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (C3UV) testbed for collaborative information acquisition. The C3UV testbed has been used for demonstrating a wide range of information-oriented applications executed by collaborative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the C3UV testbed from an architectural stand-point. The testbed includes a estimation and control architecture and a software architecture. The estimation and control architecture is a set of components that can be composed to perform specific missions. The software...

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network?, and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, we develop...