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Starting January 2015 the government of the United Kingdom will allow driverless cars on public roads. From a first glance this can and should be seen as a great step towards the adoption of autonomous vehicles. Yet as any new technology driverless vehicles carry with them many new risks and disadvantages that need to be understood and protected against in order for the introduction of said systems into the market place to be a long lasting and fruitful one. The present work will look at the possible safety and security risks posed by the use of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems on the open road, motivated by the fact that many projected autonomous vehicle concept systems rely on them for object detection and avoidance.

Upon their arrival, Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS) brought with them many benefits for those involved in a military campaign. They can use such systems to reconnoiter dangerous areas, provide 24-hr aerial security surveillance for force protection purposes or even attack enemy targets all the while avoiding friendly human losses in the process. Unfortunately, these platforms also carry the inherent risk of being built on innately vulnerable cybernetic systems. From software which can be tampered with to either steal data, damage or even outright steal the aircraft, to the data networks used for communications which can be jammed or even eavesdropped on to gain access to sensible information. All this has the potential to turn the benefits of UAS into liabilities and although the last decade has seen great advances in the development of protection and countermeasures against the described threats and beyond the risk still endures.

The incorporation of hydrogen fuel cells into heavy duty tactical mobility vehicles can bring about great opportunities in reducing the pollutant emissions of this kind of platforms (GVW > 30,000 kg). Furthermore the transportation of fuel to operational areas has become a key aspect for any deployment therefore optimal use of this resource is of paramount importance. Finally, it is also quite common for such platforms to serve additional purposes, besides freight delivery, such as powering external equipment (i.e. field hospitals or mobile artillery pieces). This work will describe the intelligent energy management system for a PEM Fuel Cell-Battery-Ultracapacitor Hybrid 8×8 heavy truck of the aforementioned weight class which also contemplates an internal electric/traction power generation unit. It will describe how the system optimizes the use of battery and hydrogen fuel energy while keeping system efficiency and performance at a maximum.

This paper reports studies of jet-induced upwash fountains for twin-nozzle, short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) aircraft. Experimental and 3-D computational fluid dynamics studies were carried out using twin circular jets at nozzle pressure ratios (NPR) between 1.05 and 3, impingement heights between 2.5 and 8.5 nozzle diameters and a nozzle separation of 7 diameters. This paper describes an extension to our previous work on jet-induced fountain unsteadiness, with the development of pressure-instrumented ground and suck-down plates and a vertically-moving ground landing simulator. The aims of the studies were to model and measure the average pressure and time-varying fluctuations present around the upwash fountain and to correlate this information with flow visualisation data and hence to understand better the flow mechanisms involved in upwash fountain flapping, with application to modern STOVL aircraft.