Smart farming is one of the most promising applications showing the benefits of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Thus, precision agriculture in rural areas may largely benefit from low-cost and easy-to-deploy vehicles able to exchange data with ground sensors for monitoring and controlling automated cultivations. In this letter, we describe, both analytically and empirically, a real testbed implementing IEEE 802.15.4-based communications between an UAV and fixed ground sensors. In our scenario, we found that aerial mobility limits the actual IEEE 802.15.4 transmission range among the UAV and the ground nodes to approximately 1/3 of the nominal one. We also provide considerations to design the deployment of sensors in precision agriculture scenarios.

In the shipping digitalisation process, the peak will be reached with the advent of a wholly autonomous and at the same time safe and reliable ship. Full autonomy could be obtained by two linked Artificial-Intelligence systems representing the ship navigator and the ship engineer that possess sensing and analysis skills, situational awareness, planning, and control capabilities. Many efforts have been made in developing onboard systems; however, the shore facilities are not ready yet to deal with these new technologies. The paper aims to present the innovative technologies and methodologies needed to develop a futuristic Vessel Traffic System. The proposed systems will aim at faultless data acquisition and processing, provide input to decision-making systems, and suggest evasive manoeuvre; to deal with hazards and systems failure without human intervention onboard. The system is composed of three different and interacting layers. The first is an artificially intelligent tool to detect and control autonomous ships, thanks to situation recognition and obstacle avoidance strategies. The second is an orchestration and management platform designed to coordinate the sensing/actuation infrastructure and the AI algorithms’ results made available by multiple ships, mustering edge, and distributed computing techniques to fulfil the specific harsh requirements of the sea environment. The final part is a holistic guidance-navigation-control framework to manage autonomous ships’ navigation in a crowded area. Eventually, a cyber-physical scenario, using both a ship digital-twin and a real model-scale ship, is suggested to test and validate the innovative system without the availability of a full-scale scenario.

The historical buildings of a nation are the tangible signs of its history and culture. Their preservation deserves considerable attention, being of primary importance from a historical, cultural, and economic point of view. Having a scalable and reliable monitoring system plays an important role in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM): therefore, this paper proposes an Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for a remote monitoring system that is able to integrate, through the Virtual Reality (VR) paradigm, the environmental and mechanical data acquired by a wireless sensor network set on three ancient buildings with the images and context information acquired by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Moreover, the information provided by the UAV allows to promptly inspect the critical structural damage, such as the patterns of cracks in the structural components of the building being monitored. Our approach opens new scenarios to support SHM activities, because an operator can interact with real-time data retrieved from a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) by means of the VR environment.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) generate a massive amount of multi-modal data that once collected and processed through Machine Learning algorithms, enable AI-based services at the Edge. In fact, only a subset of the collected data present informative attributes to be exploited at the Edge. Therefore, extracting such a subset is of utmost importance to limit computation and communication workloads. Doing that in a distributed manner imposes the AVs to cooperate in finding an agreement on which attributes should be sent to the Edge. In this work, we address such a problem by proposing a federated feature selection (FFS) algorithm where the AVs collaborate to filter out, iteratively, the less relevant attributes in a distributed manner, without any exchange of raw data, thought two different components: a Mutual-Information-based feature selection algorithm run by the AVs and a novel aggregation function based on the Bayes theorem executed on the Edge. The FFS algorithm has been tested on two reference datasets: MAV with images and inertial measurements of a monitored vehicle, WESAD with a collection of samples from biophysical sensors to monitor a relative passenger. The numerical results show that the AVs converge to a minimum achievable subset of features with both the datasets, i.e., 24 out of 2166 (99%) in MAV and 4 out of 8 (50%) in WESAD, respectively, preserving the informative content of data.