# Wireless Communication Technologies for Safe Cooperative Cyber Physical Systems
## 2 Technical Background
### SafeCOP Use Cases  
The SafeCOP project aims to cover safety-crystal Co-CPS of a wide range of industrial domains. To reach this objective it is driven by five representative use cases that span from hospital applications with low-speed movements, vehicular applications with high speed movements, to maritime applications. In what follows, we briefly introduce the use cases addressed in the SafeCOP project. * **Hospital Application: Autonomous Hospital Beds** To reduce the risk of contamination and spread of disease, hospital beds are thoroughly cleaned before being used by a new patient. In most hospitals, the cleaning is performed manually on site in each patient room, even in hospitals where they have a centralized bed-washing facility (CBWF). This is because moving the bed to and from the CBWF takes about the same amount of time as cleaning the bed in the ward. Both manually cleaning a bed and transporting beds to the CBWF are tasks that require hard physical labor and non-ergonomic motions and positions. To avoid unnecessary strain on hospital workers, and to free up a large amount of their time, this use case proposes an automated solution using two small mobile robots, designated MiR00. After the discharge of a patient, the MiR100s will autonomously transport the bed from the ward to the CBWF for washing, and then bring a clean bed from the CBWF back to the ward. A MiR100 will be attached to each end of the bed, and coordinate and synchronize their movement through the use of safe communication. As the MiR100s are small, their vision is quite limited. To assist in navigation and obstacle detection, a network of cameras will be installed in the hospital hallways. These cameras will act as remote eyes, allowing the robots to maneuver in restricted spaces and keep out of peoples' way. Figure 1 provides the layout of the hospital beds testbeds, where two individual mobile robots are moving in the corridor covered by wireless access points. * **Maritime Application: Autonomous Boat Platoons** Since international shipping is responsible for approximately 90% of world trade transportations, the safety of vessels is critical to the global economy. Human errors account for approximately 75% of the almost 15,000 marine liability insurance claims analyzed over five years, which correspond to over $1.6 bn [41]. Autonomous/semi-autonomous ships could improve maritime safety but revolutionize the movement of ships [42]. International Maritime Organization (IMO, London, UK) has received a proposal supported by a number of countries to include autonomous ships on its agenda. The IMO Maritime Safety Committee will establish a new international legal framework for the safe operation of autonomous vessels. It is evident that safety considerations are crucial in this respect. The main barrier to the development of autonomous shipping is represented by the concerns related to the risk of collision between manned and unmanned vessels. Moreover, as the number of cyber threats are increasing, a great concern is raised on specific cyber-attacks targeting the control of autonomous vessels [43]. To reduce inherent risk, cybersecurity should be taken at a high priority when developing autonomous ships. Among various explorations of autonomous ships, bathymetry (Bathymetry is the study of underwater depth of lake or ocean floors. Bathymetric charts are typically produced to support geophysical exploration and environmental monitoring) is a very attractive application [44]. Bathymetry is usually performed by sailing a boat with a multi-beam sonar in a rather repetitive lawn-mover pattern. The data acquisition should ideally be going on 24/7, but when  
Figure 1: Layout of the use case “Autonomous Hospital Beds”. using manned survey boats this possibility may be limited due to crew Health and Safety Executive (HSE) regulations. This is an ideal task for an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that snails these repetitive patterns 24/7.