Globalisation and technological digitisation have triggered an Industry 4.0. revolution.  The core of this revolution is autonomisation of complex processes, which require expert knowledge. The technical foundations of Industry 4.0 are IoT, Big Data and AI technologies. Nowadays, autonomous systems are widely used to increase human and environmental safety and to prevent health degradation.  Such non-industrial, life related applications demand high reliability as well as precision and accuracy, which challenge engineering science. 

The thesis objective is to provide suitable solutions for non-invasive, automated, and autonomous systems used for life protection and health maintenance. The proposed solutions enable non-invasive measurements by means of vision and acoustic sensors. The presented methods and systems are designed based on an analytical assessment of existing technologies and algorithms. New hardware solutions, signal and data processing methods, as well as classification and decision-making algorithms are proposed. Where required, additional customisations and modifications are applied. The systems and methods presented have been modelled and rigorously validated, and subsequently implemented and verified in a real environment.  

The scope of the thesis includes the assessment of functional requirements, precision, accuracy and reliability of life-related technological systems. It covers an analytical evaluation of proposed methods and algorithms of filtration, feature extraction, also detection, localization, identification, and classification of objects. The application fields are health monitoring, nature observation and facilitating collaborative frameworks in modern factories. 

The thesis specifically focuses on methods and algorithms of autonomous decision making concerning the risk of heart disease, the threat of fatal collision of rare birds with man-made structures and the prevention of accidents in modern robotised factories. It also deals with the implementation of the Industry 4.0 fundamentals, which are smart sensing, IoT and AI methods optimised to improve the system performance in a broad sense. The applied distributed computing method and machine-to-machine communication are aimed at limiting the data stream at an early stage of the decision-making process, and thus ensure the system’s cost-effectiveness. From the thesis, one can understand how the Industry 4.0 paradigm can contribute to autonomisation of compound processes and to increase system performance, without compromising its affordability.

The thesis is divided into two parts. The first, Prolegomena provides an overview of the sensors and algorithms applicable to industrial safety along with human health and nature preservation. This part also visualizes the relationships and interactions among the articles comprising the second part named Papers. In general, each of the enclosed six papers deals with the problem of autonomisation of complex processes in real-time and in a regular environment.