The First Robotics and Digital Twins Workshop

Keynote Speaker 1: Professor Mehrdad Dianati 

Head of the Intelligent Vehicles Research Directorate at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and Co-Director of the University of Warwick’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Mobility Technologies 

Talk Title: On Resilience of Connected and Cooperative Autonomous Systems 

Abstract: Connected and Cooperative Autonomous Systems promise enormous opportunities in various applications to address some of the grand challenges of the 21st century. The term refers to groups of autonomous systems working together and with humans coherently and cohesively to extend humans’ physical and intellectual capabilities. Such systems can unleash the power of big data and AI and the processing and storage of the cloud (Edge/Core) and connectivity capabilities of 5G/6G communication systems to transform various aspects of human civilisation. However, these systems must demonstrate higher levels of autonomy to allow us to realise their full potential. At the same time, they shall be designed, verified/validated to be trustworthy to be deployed safely and effectively in mass in real-world applications. Trust is a multi-facet and cross-disciplinary challenge. It is a function of the competence and integrity of the systems and the transparency of system developers and operators.  An essential element of competence is resilience, defined as the capability of a system to avoid, withstand, adapt to, and recover from system failures. This talk elaborates on the needs and challenges of achieving resilience in AI-driven connected and cooperative autonomous systems. To this end, some promising approaches to achieving resilience in such systems will be discussed. Also, some highlights of the speaker’s recent and ongoing work on this topic will be presented. 

Speaker Bio   

Professor Mehrdad Dianati is currently the Head of the Intelligent Vehicles Research Directorate at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and Co-Director of the University of Warwick’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Mobility Technologies. Before joining Warwick, he held a professorial post at the 5G/6G Innovation Centre of the University of Surrey. At Surrey, he led a research theme in V2X systems for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles and was the Work Area Leader for the UK’s first flagship 5G programme. In addition to over 20 years of academic experience, he has worked in the industry as a software/hardware developer and Head of R&D for 10 years. His current research focuses on Connected and Cooperative Autonomous Systems involving 1) the development of AI-Native Network-Compute Fabrics in the context of 5G/6G Future Networks for those systems and 2) the exploitation of Cooperative Intelligence in those systems to ensure their efficiency and resilience. The latter aspect of his research involves using Cooperative Perception (Multi-Agent Belief Formation, Propagation) and Distributed Multi-Agent Decision Making and Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles. He has led over 20 research projects as the Principal Investigator (PI), including the recently delivered TASCC-CARMA project, sponsored by EPSRC and JLR with contributions from several leading UK companies, with a total budget of about £5.2 million, investigating the use of Mobile Edge Cloud Computing Systems for the control of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Also, he has been the local PI in several flagship EU and Innovate UK CAV projects, such as Drive-C2X, L3Piot, Hi-Drive, AutopleX and MACAM, since 2008. Professor Dianati is a Fellow of the Alan Turning Institute. He is the Field Chief Editor of Frontier in Future Transportation. In the past, he was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and IET Communications and several other journals. He also served as the Guest Editor of several IEEE journals, such as JSAC and Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Keynote Speaker 2: Professor Charalampos Tsimenidis

Head of Sustainable Digital Communications and Energy Systems (DIGCOM) Group,

Department of Engineering, Nottingham Trent University

Talk Title: Underwater Acoustic Communications

Abstract: In recent years, there has been an immense interest in developing underwater acoustic communication systems, most of which are related to commercial and industrial applications, and military and defence telemetry applications. Other applications include oceanographic research and environmental monitoring, such as ocean-bottom survey and collection of scientific data acquired by sub-sea sensors without the need for retrieving the equipment. However, for all these applications the principal function is to achieve reliable communication both in point-to-point links, and in network scenarios. In practice, the only feasible method to achieve subsea communications is by means of acoustic signals. Such acoustic links are exposed to adverse physical phenomena governing acoustic wave propagation in the sea. These include ambient noise, frequency-dependent attenuation, temperature and pressure variations, reverberation, and extended multi-path. Any successful acoustic modem design must consider all these effects to select an appropriate configuration for system-related parameters. The transmit power level and operating frequency must be considered in conjunction with the ambient noise and transmission range, the utilized modulation scheme, data rate, and the level of diversity must properly match the expected channel conditions related to time and frequency dispersion, and choice of multiple-access strategy. The focus of this talk will be to provide a review of the state-of-the-art art in point-to-point underwater acoustic communication modems, and an insight into their design and analysis. Emphasis will be placed on transceiver structures that employ well-established communication techniques, such as spatial and time filtering, single- and multi-carrier approaches, and spread-spectrum and error control coding methods that strike a balance between power and bandwidth efficient transmission, multiple-access capability and reliability.

Speaker Bio   

Professor Tsimenidis joined NTU in October 2022 after working for 25 years as an academic at Newcastle University, where he has obtained his PhD in 2002 and was promoted to Prof. of Digital Communications in 2022. His research interests are in the area of digital communications with focus in wireless RF and underwater acoustic communications. He has published over 250 articles and graduated successfully 50 PhD students, and secured more than 15 research projects from industry and government to a value of over £5M. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of IET. 

Keynote Speaker 3: Dr. Son Tong

ADAS Team Manager

Siemens Digital Industries Software

Talk title: Digital Twin in Autonomous Driving Development 

The presentation discusses some Siemens engineering technologies for autonomous driving development that combines algorithms, virtual and physical testing in a digital twin fashion. The ADAS and autonomous vehicle industries recently rely on virtual testing as one of the safe and efficient technologies for validation, especially to deal with safety critical scenarios. Starting from measurement and real traffic sensor data, we demonstrate the process to create digital twin high-fidelity models of sensor, vehicle dynamics, and traffic scenarios. These models are then deployed for scenario generation and algorithms development (i.e. perception, planning, and control), targeting to safety and other driving metrics such as driving comfort, efficiency. Combine with hardware and physical car testing, the digital twin framework helps to accelerate the development stages, detect issues early on, and capture corner cases. Some applications will be presented: scenario detection and generation, imitation learning, and sim2real reinforcement learning control. 

Speaker Bio  

Son Tong is an ADAS R&D Manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software with focus on control systems, automated driving and AI engineering topics. He has been facilitating technology developments dealing with vehicle control, safety, comfort, and validation processes. The solutions often involve state of art algorithms, simulation and physical testing. Son Tong is active in different Siemens and European Union (EU), Belgian research programs as technical coordinator and PhD co-supervisor. He was awarded Siemens PL Invention of the Year Award, and selected in the AutoSens2019 most influential research award finalist.

Keynote speaker 4: Dr. Matthew Bonney

Lecturer in Space Engineering, Swansea University 

Talk title: Considerations of Multidisciplinary Trust in Digital Twins 

With the ideal of a truly virtual representation of a system, the understanding of all components in the system should be under consideration. Two major components that are commonly under-studied are the incorporation of multidisciplinary aspects of digital twins (cybersecurity, Multiphysics simulations, business predictions, etc.) and the consideration of human factors. For understanding the human factor of digital twins, the concept of “trust” is a fascinating topic of research. This talk will discuss a wide variety of digital twin applications and the various aspects/concerns that these industries have around using digital twins, including the different components of “trust”.

Speaker Bio  

Dr. Bonney is a Lecturer in Space Engineering at Swansea University and a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. His research interests are Multiphysics simulations, multidisciplinary digital twins, and high-consequence systems. While working on aerospace and nuclear systems, Dr. Bonney worked to develop various engineering tools such as digital twins and ABAQUS plug-ins. He has worked as multi-university project lead for the EPSRC funded Digital Twins for Improved Dynamic Design, technical lead for the Alan Turing Institute funded Digital Twins for High-Value Engineering Applications, and the Demonstrator lead for the Turing Research and Innovation Cluster in Digital Twins’ Hawk demonstrator.