With the wide bandwidths in millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band that results in unprecedented accuracy, mmWave sensing has become vital for many applications, especially in autonomous vehicles (AVs). In addition, mmWave sensing has superior reliability compared to other sensing counterparts such as camera and LiDAR, which is essential for safety-critical driving. Therefore, it is critical to understand the security vulnerabilities and improve the security and reliability of mmWave sensing in AVs. To this end, we perform the end-to-end security analysis of a mmWave-based sensing system in AVs, by designing and implementing practical physical layer attack and defense strategies in a state-of-the-art mmWave testbed and an AV testbed in real-world settings. Various strategies are developed to take control of the victim AV by spoofing its mmWave sensing module, including adding fake obstacles at arbitrary locations and faking the locations of existing obstacles. Five real-world attack scenarios are constructed to spoof the victim AV and force it to make dangerous driving decisions leading to a fatal crash. Field experiments are conducted to study the impact of the various attack scenarios using a Lincoln MKZ-based AV testbed, which validate that the attacker can indeed assume control of the victim AV to compromise its security and safety. To defend the attacks, we design and implement a challenge-response authentication scheme and a RF fingerprinting scheme to reliably detect aforementioned spoofing attacks.

A swarm of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can provide richer spatial-temporal information than the traditional single-robot system, which can be used for underwater mapping, exploration, target tracking, among others. However, the limitation of AUVs’ battery cannot support persistent services, which restricts AUVs’ operating range and mission duration. In this paper, a mobile underwater charging solution is developed that can continuously recharge a swarm of AUVs by using a wireless mobile charger. Magnetic induction-based communication and wireless energy transfer are employed. This paper first shows that by using tri-axis coils, reliable wireless communication and wireless energy transfer without coil orientation losses can be obtained. After that, wireless communication, motion control, and wireless energy transfer are jointly designed for a swarm of mission-driven AUVs. In particular, optimal continuous motion controllers are developed for AUVs to avoid intra-swarm collisions and networking protocols are designed to optimally allocate resources for wireless communication and wireless energy transfer. The proposed approach can guide AUVs to their destinations, while maintaining wireless network integrity and maximizing wireless energy transfer efficiency, upon which the constraints on AUVs’ batteries can be eliminated and cheaper and smaller AUVs can be employed for various underwater applications.

The UnderWater Acoustic (UWA) communication is the foundation for oceanic information applications. However, existing UWA systems suffer from low data rate problem. Although the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) scheme is proved to be able to increase channel capacity in many terrestrial scenarios, the high cost and complexity of acoustic MIMO significantly limit its usage. Recently, the acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (acoustic RIS) concept has been proposed to address the aforementioned problem. In this paper, with the real-world constraints taken into consideration, three key components of the acoustic RIS are designed to realize the underwater RIS concept, including the new acoustic RIS hardware, the ultra-wideband (UWB) beamforming, and practical operation protocol. Specifically, a completely new hardware design of acoustic RIS is first provided, since existing electromagnetic RIS designed for terrestrial environments do not work for underwater acoustic waves. Then, the UWB beamforming solution is developed, since underwater acoustic RIS need to control the acoustic signals, whose bandwidth is comparable to its carrier frequency. Finally, the practical operation protocol is developed to realize the acoustic RIS functionalities in complex underwater environment. The acoustic RIS design is validated through both COMSOL multiphysics simulations and end-to-end Bellhop-based simulations.