Class at Agrocampus Ouest

Today I had the opportunity to teach a class at Agrocampus Ouest (Angers, France). I have talked about my experience working with robots in agriculture in the Robotics and Cybernetics Research Group of the Technical University of Madrid. 

First, I have explained the RHEA european project, in which some colleagues were working when I arrived to the research group. Then, I have described our three works using robots to measure environmental variables in greenhouses: an aerial robot, a ground robot and a multi-robot system. Finally, I have presented the SUREVEG european project, in which we will work during the next year.

I would like to thank Professor Gerhard Buck-Sorlin for giving me this opportunity, as well as the students for attending to my presentation and asking me a lot of interesting questions. I hope to repeat this experience soon!

Researcher's life is hard!

Sometimes you can build and program robots, sometimes you have to be a victim in a disaster area...

Monitoring traffic in future cities with aerial swarms: developing and optimizing a behavior-based surveillance algorithm

SwarmCity Project has its first journal publication!

The paper is entitled "Monitoring traffic in future cities with aerial swarms: developing and optimizing a behavior-based surveillance algorithm" and has been published by Cognitive Systems Research.

Traffic monitoring is a key issue to develop smarter and more sustainable cities in the future, allowing to make a better use of the public space and reducing pollution. This work presents an aerial swarm that continuously monitors traffic in SwarmCity, a simulated city developed in Unity game engine where drones and cars are modeled in a realistic way. The control algorithm of the aerial swarm is based on six behaviors with twenty-three parameters that must be tuned. The optimization of parameters is carried out with a genetic algorithm in a simplified and faster simulator. The best resulting configurations are tested in SwarmCity showing good efficiencies in terms of observed cars over total cars during time windows. The algorithm reaches a good performance making use of an acceptable computational time for the optimization.

P. Garcia-Aunon, J.J. Roldán and A. Barrientos. “Monitoring traffic in future cities with aerial swarms: developing and optimizing a behavior-based surveillance algorithm”. Cognitive Systems Research, 2018. Impact Factor (2016): 1.425. Article

Download the article!

Our minute of fame!

Our research in immersive interfaces applied to multi-robot systems has been reported by the press.

Spanish:

• Una interfaz para controlar simultáneamente varios robots - UPM, madri+d, AlphaGalileo, Catalunya Vanguardista
• Una nueva interfaz permite controlar simultáneamente varios robots - SINC, LaSexta, NCYT-Amazings
• Equipo de la UPM crea interfaz para controlar simultáneamente varios robots - La Vanguardia
• Investigadores del CSIC y la UPM crean un interfaz para controlar simultáneamente varios robots - La Razón
• Un cerebro para "gobernarlos a todos" - ComputerWorld
• Los operadores de robots silban canciones de Jorge Drexler - nobbot

English: 

• A new interface to simultaneously control various robots - UPM, AlphaGalileo, nanowerk
• Controlling Multiple Robots Simultaneously Through VR - AZoRobotics

IROS 2018: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

This week I have been at the IROS 2018 (IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) that has been held in Madrid. There have been five days of workshops, presentations, exhibitions and competitions with the robots as protagonists. The figures of this conference have set a new record in this kind of events: more than 4,000 attendees from 62 countries around the world, presenting 1,200 papers and participating in 124 sessions.

I have the opportunity to present our work "Should we Compete or Should we Cooperate? Applying Game Theory to Task Allocation in Drone Swarms" in the "Swarm and Multi-Robots" session of the conference. The format was very dynamic: a 3 minutes presentation, which you can see below, and a  30 minutes poster discussion.

J.J. Roldán, J. del Cerro and A. Barrientos. "Should we Compete or Should we Cooperate? Applying Game Theory to Task Allocation in Drone Swarms". 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). Madrid, October 1-5th 2018.

Special Issue on Multi-Robot Systems in Applied Sciences

We are editing a Special Issue on "Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications" in the journal Applied Sciences. This journal published by MDPI is open access, publishes works of applied natural sciences and has an impact factor of 1.689 (ranked as Q3 in Physics, Chemistry and Materials Science).

We are waiting to receive your relevant papers on the following topics:

• Multi-robot systems: heterogeneous and homogeneous fleets
• Multi-robot mission planning, modeling and optimization
• From multi-robot systems to robot swarms
• Human factor issues: workload, situational awareness, stress...
• Human-robot interaction: collaboration and teaming
• Operator Interfaces: adaptation and immersion
• Applications: search and rescue, environmental monitoring…

Please visit the Special Issue website to get more information and submit your contribution.

And finally I have defended my PhD thesis...

As you can read, I have defended my PhD thesis.

My PhD thesis was entitled "Adaptive and Immersive Interfaces to Improve Situational Awareness in Multi-Robot Missions" and aimed at developing a new generation of operator interfaces to allow single operators to control multiple robot. The thesis have made multiple contributions to the areas of mission modeling, operator modeling, adaptive interfaces and immersive interfaces. You can find more information at this link.

I did my PhD thesis under the direction of Antonio Barrientos Cruz and Jaime del Cerro Giner at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and in the context of SAVIER (Situational Awareness VIrtual EnviRonment) project of Airbus Defence & Space. 

The defense took place the 24 July 2018 at the School of Industrial Engineers of the Technical University of Madrid. The committee decided unanimously to qualify my PhD thesis with summa cum laude. 

Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Games 2018

I have assisted to the first international summer school on Artificial Intelligence and Games, which has taken place in Chania (Crete, Greece) between May 28 and June 1. During this week, I have learnt a lot of things about artificial intelligence applied to games for creating artificial agents, generating scenarios and studying human players. Additionally, we took part in the game jam of the summer school by developing "A Game of Drones", a drone race game where the human players has to do their best to get the goals before the artificial intelligence, which learned to play by using reinforcement learning. 

Mi tesis en 4 minutos

I have participated in the contest "Tu tesis en 4 minutos" (your PhD thesis in 4 minutes) organized by the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in the context of "Symposium Cuéntanos tu tesis" (Tell us your PhD thesis symposium). This time I did not win one of the prizes, but I could know the works of my colleagues from other disciplines at the university and explain them my own work. And I think my presentation was not as bad as you would expect... :P

Cátedra UPM-CESEDEN Award to the best scientific paper

Our paper "Multi-robot interfaces and operator situational awareness: study of the impact of immersion and prediction" has been awarded with the Cátedra Ingeniero Remón y Zarco del Valle prize to the best scientific paper in defense and security. This prize is awarded annually by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), which is my alma mater, and Centro Superior de Estudios de Defensa Nacional (CESEDEN), which is a center of the Spanish Army that deals with defense research and culture. 

The commitee has decided to award our paper because it presents a novel technology that will have an impact on the future of defense and security. This paper was the result of months of teamwork, starting from the multi-robot missions performed in Luxembourg in 2016 and finishing at the experiments with operators developed in Spain in 2017. Therefore, I would like to say "thanks" to my colleagues who participated in this work and "congratulations" to Elena because she contributed as much as me to this success.

Here you can see the paper:

J.J. Roldán, E. Peña-Tapia, A. Martín-Barrio, M.A. Olivares-Méndez, J. del Cerro and A. Barrientos. “Multi-Robot Interfaces and Operator Situational Awareness: Study of the Impact of Immersion and Prediction”. Sensors, 17(8), 1720. 2017. Impact Factor (2016): 2.677. Article

Simposio de Innovación Docente en Automática

I have attended to the Simposio de Innovación Docente en Automática (Symposium of Teaching Innovation in Automation) organized by the Comité Español de Automática (Spanish Automation Committee) in León (Spain) the January 10-12, 2018. In this event, I have seen the latest trends about inverted classrooms and remote laboratories, I have presented our work about a training system for industrial operators in assembly tasks, and I have visited the cathedral of León and a wind generator factory!

E. Crespo, J.J. Roldán, A. Martín-Barrio, J. del Cerro and A. Barrientos. “Virtual reality and process mining applied to operator training in complex assembly tasks”. IV Seminario de Innovación Docente en Automática (CEA-IFAC). León, January 10-12, 2018. Article     

One of the proposals of Industry 4.0 is the integration of machines and operators through network connections and information management. One of the challenges that can be addressed following this approach is the management of knowledge in the industry or, in other words, the transmission of knowledge from the expert operators to the new ones. This work has been developed a system that combines Virtual Reality and Process Mining to allow this knowledge transmission in the particular case of assembly tasks. Virtual Reality allows to create work environments that reproduce the real ones and interact with them without detracting resources of other processes or facing the risks of working with real systems. Process Mining allows to acquire the knowledge of experts, store it in models and then transmit it to novices. The developed system has been tested by means of several examples of assemblies with Lego.

This research line is under development and there will be news in the next months!