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.