A Federated Transfer Learning-Empowered Blockchain-Enabled Secure Knowledge Sharing Scheme for Unmanned Any Vehicles in Smart Cities

Smart cities embrace unmanned autonomous vehicles (UxVs) for urban mobility and addressing challenges. UxVs include UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs, empowered by AI, particularly deep learning (DL), for autonomous missions. However, traditional DL has limitations in adapting to dynamic environments and raises data privacy concerns. Limited data availability and starting from scratch to adapt to a new environment during missions pose challenges. Additionally, cyber threats, particularly in terms of communication and data security, can jeopardize the missions performed by UxVs. This paper proposes a federated transfer learning scheme for UxVs, sharing prior knowledge and training with limited data while ensuring security through blockchain. Domain adaptation with maximum mean discrepancy enhances the DL model's performance in target domains. The proposed scheme's feasibility is demonstrated in an empirical environment, and it outperforms existing works.