This paper investigates the cyber-security problem for autonomous vehicles under sensor attacks. In particular, a model-based framework is proposed which can detect sensor attacks and identify their sources in order to achieve the secure localization of self-driving vehicles. To ensure robustness of the vehicle against cyber-attacks, sensor redundancy is introduced, that is to deploy multiple sensors, each of which provides real-time pose observations of the vehicle. A bank of attack detectors is developed to capture anomalies in each sensor measurement, which is a combination of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a cumulative sum (CUSUM) discriminator. EKFs are employed to estimate the vehicle position and orientation recursively, while each CUSUM discriminator is designed to analyze the residual generated by its combined EKF to detect the possible deviation of the sensor measurement from the expected pose derived according to the mathematical model of the vehicle. To monitor the inconsistency amongst multiple sensor measurements, an auxiliary detector is introduced which fuses observations from multiple sensors. Based on the results of all the detectors, a rule-based isolation scheme is developed to identify the source anomalous sensor. The effectiveness of our proposed framework has been demonstrated on real vehicle data.

In this article, a modified convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm, namely 1D-GAPCNN-SVM, is proposed to address the early anomaly diagnosis problem. Considering the fact that traditional 2D-CNN based approaches contain too many model parameters and are not suitable for fast diagnosis applications using multisensor 1-D time-series measurements, 1D-CNN is introduced to deal with this problem. To reduce the number of parameters, a 1-D global average pooling layer is designed to substitute the fully connected layer with two or three layers. In order to further improve the diagnosis accuracy, a nonlinear multiclass support vector machine (SVM) is adopted to replace the traditional Softmax classifier as the final discriminator. Raw multisensor 1-D time-series data are directly fed into the diagnosis model, then the diagnosis result can be automatically generated. Two experiments, which are rolling bearing and GPS anomaly detection, have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the conventional SVM, K-nearest neighbor, deep neural network (DNN), and traditional 2D-CNN.

In open-pit mining, holes are drilled into the surface of the excavation site and are then detonated with explosives to facilitate digging. These blast holes need to be inspected internally for quality assurance, as well as for operational and geological reasons. Manual hole inspection is slow and expensive, limited in its ability to capture the geometric and geological characteristics of holes. This is the motivation behind the development of our autonomous mine site inspection robot—“DIPPeR”. In this paper, the automation aspect of the project is explained. We present a robust navigation and perception framework that provides streamlined blasthole detection, tracking, and precise down-hole sensor insertion during repetitive inspection tasks. To mitigate the effects of noisy GPS and odometry data typical of surface mining environments, we employ a proximity-based adaptive navigation system that enables the vehicle to dynamically adjust its operations according to target detectability and localisation accuracy. For perception, we process LiDAR data to extract the cone-shaped volume of drill waste above ground, and then project the 3D cone points into a virtual depth image to form accurate 2D segmentation of hole regions. To ensure continuous target tracking as the robot approaches the goal, our system automatically adjusts the projection parameters to ensure consistent appearance of the hole in the image. In the vicinity of the hole, we apply least squares circle fitting combined with non-maximum candidate suppression to achieve accurate hole localisation and collision-free down-hole sensor insertion. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework through dedicated perception and navigation feature tests, as well as streamlined mission trials conducted in high-fidelity simulations and real mine-site field experiments.

Accurate and efficient object detection is crucial for safe and efficient operation of earth-moving equipment in mining. Traditional 2D image-based methods face limitations in dynamic and complex mine environments. To overcome these challenges, 3D object detection using point cloud data has emerged as a comprehensive approach. However, training models for mining scenarios is challenging due to sensor height variations, viewpoint changes, and the need for diverse annotated datasets. This paper presents novel contributions to address these challenges. We introduce a synthetic dataset SimMining 3D [1] specifically designed for 3D object detection in mining environments. The dataset captures objects and sensors positioned at various heights within mine benches, accurately reflecting authentic mining scenarios. An automatic annotation pipeline through ROS interface reduces manual labor and accelerates dataset creation. We propose evaluation metrics accounting for sensor-to-object height variations and point cloud density, enabling accurate model assessment in mining scenarios. Real data tests validate our models effectiveness in object prediction. Our ablation study emphasizes the importance of altitude and height variation augmentations in improving accuracy and reliability. The publicly accessible synthetic dataset [1] serves as a benchmark for supervised learning and advances object detection techniques in mining with complimentary pointwise annotations for each scene. In conclusion, our work bridges the gap between synthetic and real data, addressing the domain shift challenge in 3D object detection for mining. We envision robust object detection systems enhancing safety and efficiency in mining and related domains.