Kentucky researcher wins NSF grant for AV safety framework

A University of Kentucky researcher has received a US$534,264 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a coordination framework for autonomous vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), addressing reliability and security challenges in real-time networked systems. The five-year Faculty Early Career Development award supports Yang Xiao, assistant professor in the university’s Department of Computer Science, whose project is titled RESONET, short for Resilient and Secure Operation of Networked Real-Time Systems.

Current autonomous vehicle systems rely on onboard sensors and reactive safety features but do not coordinate with other vehicles in advance. RESONET is designed to treat decision-making within and between systems as a continuous process, incorporating fault-tolerant mechanisms to prevent single-point failures from triggering cascading failures across a fleet. Intended applications include truck platooning, drone swarm control and search-and-rescue UAV coordination.

In a statement, Xiao said: “If we imagine future transportation scenes where the roads are flooded with autonomous vehicles and the skies are congested by UAVs, we do not want them to suffer from large-scale cascading disasters just because a single sensor on one vehicle fails. I hope RESONET’s fault-tolerant inter-system coordination mechanism represents a pioneering solution to this futuristic scenario.”

The grant will fund prototyping, proof-of-concept testing and hardware-in-the-loop validation. The project also aims to train students in distributed systems, network security and applied cryptography.

Source: University of Kentucky