With the rapid expansion of mobile internet usage, the prevalence of the Android operating system on smartphones is steadily growing. However, improper utilization of the Intent mechanism within Android applications can result in security vulnerabilities. Presently, the majority of Android security testing methods, which rely heavily on fuzzing, are predominantly focused on UI interactions, lacking sufficient testing capabilities for Intents. The motivation of this paper is to find a more effective testing method to improve the security detection capabilities of Intents. This paper introduces an Intent fuzzing method based on genetic mutation principles. Initially, we establish an Intent seed library using a text classification model, followed by employing Jaccard distance and minimum edit distance to refine high-quality seeds. Subsequently, we augment the seeds through extensive mutation using genetic algorithms, generating numerous test cases that exhibit structural similarity but contain varied content. During testing, we compare the state before and after Intent testing using image similarity to detect anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate that this method effectively enhances test coverage and identifies potential issues in edge cases. This approach offers an efficient means of conducting Intent security testing and enhances Android app robustness and security.

The advancement of automated driving technology has led to new challenges in the interaction between automated vehicles and human road users. However, there is currently no complete theory that explains how human road users interact with vehicles, and studying them in real-world settings is often unsafe and time-consuming. This study proposes a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) framework for studying how pedestrians interact with human-driven vehicles. The framework uses VR technology to collect data in a safe and cost-effective way, and deep learning methods are used to predict pedestrian trajectories. Specifically, graph neural networks have been used to model pedestrian future trajectories and the probability of crossing the road. The results of this study show that the proposed framework can be for collecting high-quality data on pedestrian-vehicle interactions in a safe and efficient manner. The data can then be used to develop new theories of human-vehicle interaction and aid the Autonomous Vehicles research.

In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior, leading to potential dangers for human coworkers. This paper presents a novel control framework by adopting safety-critical control and uncertainty estimation for human-robot collaboration. Additionally, to select the shortest path during collaboration, a novel quadratic penalty method is presented. The innovation of the proposed approach is that the proposed controller will prevent the robot from violating any safety constraints even in cases where humans move accidentally in a collaboration task. This is implemented by the combination of a time-varying integral barrier Lyapunov function (TVIBLF) and an adaptive exponential control barrier function (AECBF) to achieve a flexible mode switch between path tracking and collision avoidance with guaranteed closed-loop system stability. The performance of our approach is demonstrated in simulation studies on a 7-DOF robot manipulator. Additionally, a comparison between the tasks involving static and dynamic targets is provided.Note to Practitioners—This research addresses the need to improve the safety of robots interacting with humans when performing collaborative tasks. Existing safety-critical control (SCC) approaches do not adequately monitor and continuously limit the state of the robot in Cartesian space, which results in a risk of injury to human operators if there is unexpected behavior during collaboration. Additionally, existing SCC approaches only consider system uncertainty for a single task (i.e. path tracking only or collision avoidance only). These problems limit the applicability of SCC techniques to manufacturing cobots. We address these problems by developing a controller that accounts for uncertainty in robot dynamics, guarantees that the robot end-effector remains within a constrained task space, and continuously modifies its motion in real-time to avoid dynamic obstacles that violate this space. We employ a machine learning approach to estimate the unknown uncertainties in real-time, allowing them to be incorporated within the controller design. The designed controller selects the shortest path for collision avoidance at each sample instant in order to minimize the total motion of the robot.

This study proposes a new distributed control method based on an adaptive fuzzy control for multiple collaborative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to track a desired formation shape within a fixed time. First, a formation control protocol based on a fixed-time backstepping sliding mode control is designed, in which the consensus cooperative tracking errors for each AUV will be formulated. Then, to compensate for the saturated control torques, an adaptive auxiliary variable is introduced. Finally, a fixed-time adaptive fuzzy logic control (FLC) is derived to approximate the unknown dynamics, in which the adaptive laws of the FLC is derived such that the adaptive signals and errors can be convergent within a fixed time. The fixed-time convergence is desired in practice because it provides an exciting property that the global convergence of the whole system is independent with the initial states of the AUVs. The computer simulation results for a consensus formation control of four AUVs show that the proposed formation control can provide higher tracking performance with lower and smoother control efforts.

In this paper we present the implementation of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) safety filter that provides obstacle avoidance for a robotic manipulator arm system in a simulated environment (Simulink). CBF is a control technique that has developed over the past decade and has been extensively explored in the literature on its mathematical foundations and potential applications for a variety of safety-critical control systems. In this work we will look at the design of CBF for the robotic manipulator obstacle avoidance, discuss the selection of the CBF parameters and present a search algorithm to find parameters that provide the most efficient trajectory for different obstacles. We then create a data-set across a range of obstacle scenarios that is used to train a Neural-Network (NN) model that can be used within the control scheme to allow the system to efficiently adapt to different obstacle scenarios.

This article aims to resolve the three major issues of fault tolerant control (FTC) for robot manipulators: 1) the faster response, lower tracking errors, lower chattering, and higher robustness of the FTC, 2) the requirement of partial or full knowledge of robot dynamics for the design of model-based FTC, and 3) the global fixed-time convergence of the system. First, a fixed-time controller based on a backstepping control is designed and its disadvantages are analyzed. Then, an adaptive fuzzy backstepping control is developed to enhance the tracking performance of the system. The proposed approach does not require the full prior knowledge of robot dynamic model, thus facilitating implementation of the controller in practical applications. In addition, the tracking errors of the system will be practically convergent within a fixed-time, which provides additional system information in advance. The fixed time convergence of the system is mathematically proved and the performance of the system is demonstrated for FTC of a PUMA560 robot.

With the widespread use of mobile devices, security and privacy concerns have been attracting increasing attention. However, it is challenging for Android users to apply the appropriate settings to protect their devices. Therefore, a cloud-based solution is proposed in this paper, which works based on crowdsourcing to generate recommended security and privacy settings for Android users. Following the suggestions of security experts, ordinary users can readily understand how to properly set up their devices for security enforcement. Our solution collects security-related data from experts, and a weight-based algorithm is introduced to determine data priority and credibility. Finally, the recommended security and privacy settings are created based on these data. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution can effectively improve the robustness and reliability of Android devices.

Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performance in many computer vision tasks. Most state-of-the-art (SOTA) semantic segmentation and object detection approaches reuse neural network architectures designed for image classification as the backbone, commonly pre-trained on ImageNet. However, performance gains can be achieved by designing network architectures specifically for detection and segmentation, as shown by recent neural architecture search (NAS) research for detection and segmentation. One major challenge though is that ImageNet pre-training of the search space representation (a.k.a. super network) or the searched networks incurs huge computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Fast Network Adaptation (FNA++) method, which can adapt both the architecture and parameters of a seed network (e.g., an ImageNet pre-trained network) to become a network with different depths, widths, or kernel sizes via a parameter remapping technique, making it possible to use NAS for segmentation and detection tasks a lot more efficiently. In our experiments, we apply FNA++ on MobileNetV2 to obtain new networks for semantic segmentation, object detection, and human pose estimation that clearly outperform existing networks designed both manually and by NAS. We also implement FNA++ on ResNets and NAS networks, which demonstrates a great generalization ability. The total computation cost of FNA++ is significantly less than SOTA segmentation and detection NAS approaches: 1737× less than DPC, 6.8× less than Auto-DeepLab, and 8.0× less than DetNAS. A series of ablation studies are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness, and detailed analysis is provided for more insights into the working mechanism. Codes are available at https://github.com/JaminFong/FNA.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has dramatically advanced the development of neural network design. We revisit the search space design in most previous NAS methods and find the number and widths of blocks are set manually. However, block counts and block widths determine the network scale (depth and width) and make a great influence on both the accuracy and the model cost (FLOPs/latency). In this paper, we propose to search block counts and block widths by designing a densely connected search space, i.e., DenseNAS. The new search space is represented as a dense super network, which is built upon our designed routing blocks. In the super network, routing blocks are densely connected and we search for the best path between them to derive the final architecture. We further propose a chained cost estimation algorithm to approximate the model cost during the search. Both the accuracy and model cost are optimized in DenseNAS. For experiments on the MobileNetV2-based search space, DenseNAS achieves 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 361MB FLOPs and 17.9ms latency on a single TITAN-XP. The larger model searched by DenseNAS achieves 76.1% accuracy with only 479M FLOPs. DenseNAS further promotes the ImageNet classification accuracies of ResNet-18, -34 and -50-B by 1.5%, 0.5% and 0.3% with 200M, 600M and 680M FLOPs reduction respectively. The related code is available at https://github.com/JaminFong/DenseNAS.