Showing our robots in IRM2019

I have taken part in the stand of the Robotics and Cybernetics Research Group (RobCib) in the Industriales Research Meeting (IRM2019), an event organized by the Industrial Engineering School of the Technical University of Madrid to disseminate the research. In this stand, we have shown the different robots of the group: a mobile manipulator, three search and rescue robots and a hyper-redundant robot. Additionally, we took some volunteers to test our virtual reality interface for monitoring the state of a smart city.

Workshop: how to tell my research in radio and TV

I attended the workshop "how to tell my research in radio and TV", organized by the Scientific Culture Unit of the Technical University of Madrid. In this course, I learned how to deal with journalists, tell my research to the general public and take part in radio and TV programs.  Moreover, we did a series of short TV interviews and a complete radio program. A great experience!

PerCom 2019: IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications

After an amazing trip through Japan, I have participated in the PerCom 2019: IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. This conference focused on Pervasive Computing and Communications is organized yearly by IEEE and this time has been celebrated in Kyoto. In particular, I have presented our work "SwarmCity Project: Can an Aerial Swarm Monitor Traffic in a Smart City?" in the UNAGI'19 Workshop on UNmanned aerial vehicle Applications in the smart city: from Guidance technology to enhanced system Interaction. Our paper presents a behavior-based algorithm to allow an aerial swarm to perform surveillance tasks in a city, as well as a data fusion algorithm to build traffic maps from the cars detected by the drones. 

J.J. Roldán, P. Garcia-Aunon, E. Peña-Tapia and A. Barrientos. "SwarmCity Project: Can an Aerial Swarm Monitor Traffic in a Smart City?". UNAGI'19: Workshop on UNmanned aerial vehicle Applications in the smart city: from Guidance technology to enhanced system Interaction. PerCom 2019: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. Kyoto, 11-15th March 2019.

PhD graduation ceremony

This morning it took place the Santo Tomás de Aquino celebration at the Technical University of Madrid, where the new doctors were invested and the university awards were delivered. In this academic act, I promised to act correctly as a doctor and I received my PhD diploma and ring from the university authorities. As you can see, this celebration follows an old tradition and gives rise to curious images...

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!