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There have been significant advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) recently. At the same time there exists an ever-growing demand for ubiquitous healthcare systems to improve human health and well-being. In most of IoTbased patient monitoring systems, especially at smart homes or hospitals, there exists a bridging point (i.e., gateway) between a sensor network and the Internet which often just performs basic functions such as translating between the protocols used in the Internet and sensor networks. These gateways have beneficial knowledge and constructive control over both the sensor network and the data to be transmitted through the Internet. In this paper, we exploit the strategic position of such gateways to offer several higher-level services such as local storage, real-time local data processing, embedded data mining, etc., proposing thus a Smart e-Health Gateway. By taking responsibility for handling some burdens of the sensor network and a remote healthcare center, a Smart e-Health Gateway can cope with many challenges in ubiquitous healthcare systems such as energy efficiency, scalability, and reliability issues. A successful implementation of Smart e-Health Gateways enables massive deployment of ubiquitous health monitoring systems especially in clinical environments. We also present a case study of a Smart e-Health Gateway called UT-GATE where some of the discussed higher-level features have been implemented. Our proof-of-concept design demonstrates an IoT-based health monitoring system with enhanced overall system energy efficiency, performance, interoperability, security, and reliability.

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Search and rescue (SAR) operations can take significant advantage from supporting autonomous or teleoperated robots and multi-robot systems. These can aid in mapping and situational assessment, monitoring and surveillance, establishing communication networks, or searching for victims. This paper provides a review of multi-robot systems supporting SAR operations, with system-level considerations and focusing on the algorithmic perspectives for multi-robot coordination and perception. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first survey paper to cover (i) heterogeneous SAR robots in different environments, (ii) active perception in multi-robot systems, while (iii) giving two complementary points of view from the multi-agent perception and control perspectives. We also discuss the most significant open research questions: shared autonomy, sim-to-real transferability of existing methods, awareness of victims' conditions, coordination and interoperability in heterogeneous multi-robot systems, and active perception. The different topics in the survey are put in the context of the different challenges and constraints that various types of robots (ground, aerial, surface, or underwater) encounter in different SAR environments (maritime, urban, wilderness, or other post-disaster scenarios). The objective of this survey is to serve as an entry point to the various aspects of multi-robot SAR systems to researchers in both the machine learning and control fields by giving a global overview of the main approaches being taken in the SAR robotics area.

Moving towards autonomy, unmanned vehicles rely heavily on state-of-the-art collision avoidance systems (CAS). A lot of work is being done to make the CAS as safe and reliable as possible, necessitating a comparative study of the recent work in this important area. The paper provides a comprehensive review of collision avoidance strategies used for unmanned vehicles, with the main emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). It is an in-depth survey of different collision avoidance techniques that are categorically explained along with a comparative analysis of the considered approaches w.r.t. different scenarios and technical aspects. This also includes a discussion on the use of different types of sensors for collision avoidance in the context of UAVs. INDEX TERMS autonomous aerial vehicles, autonomous vehicles, collision avoidance, active and passive sensors, optimisation-based, force-field based, sense and avoid, geometry based

The development of a navigation system is one of the major challenges in building a fully autonomous platform. Full autonomy requires a dependable navigation capability not only in a perfect situation with clear GPS signals but also in situations, where the GPS is unreliable. Therefore, selfcontained odometry systems have attracted much attention recently. This paper provides a general and comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field of self-contained, i.e., GPS denied odometry systems, and identifies the out-coming challenges that demand further research in future. Self-contained odometry methods are categorized into five main types, i.e., wheel, inertial, laser, radar, and visual, where such categorization is based on the type of the sensor data being used for the odometry. Most of the research in the field is focused on analyzing the sensor data exhaustively or partially to extract the vehicle pose. Different combinations and fusions of sensor data in a tightly/loosely coupled manner and with filtering or optimizing fusion method have been investigated. We analyze the advantages and weaknesses of each approach in terms of different evaluation metrics, such as performance, response time, energy efficiency, and accuracy, which can be a useful guideline for researchers and engineers in the field. In the end, some future research challenges in the field are discussed.

In this paper, a secure and efficient authentication and authorization architecture for IoT-based healthcare is developed. Security and privacy of patients' medical data are crucial for the acceptance and ubiquitous use of IoT in healthcare. Secure authentication and authorization of a remote healthcare professional is the main focus of this work. Due to resource constraints of medical sensors, it is infeasible to utilize conventional cryptography in IoT-based healthcare. In addition, gateways in existing IoTs focus only on trivial tasks without alleviating the authentication and authorization challenges. In the presented architecture, authentication and authorization of a remote end-user is done by distributed smart e-health gateways to unburden the medical sensors from performing these tasks. The proposed architecture relies on the certificate-based DTLS handshake protocol as it is the main IP security solution for IoT. The proposed authentication and authorization architecture is tested by developing a prototype IoT-based healthcare system. The prototype is built of a Pandaboard, a TI SmartRF06 board and WiSMotes. The CC2538 module integrated into the TI board acts as a smart gateway and the WisMotes act as medical sensor nodes. The proposed architecture is more secure than a state-of-the-art centralized delegation-based architecture because it uses a more secure key management scheme between sensor nodes and the smart gateway. Furthermore, the impact of DoS attacks is reduced due to the distributed nature of the architecture. Our performance evaluation results show that compared to the delegation-based architecture, the proposed architecture reduces communication overhead by 26% and communication latency from the smart gateway to the end-user by 16%.