Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

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This doctoral thesis navigates the complex landscape of motion coordination and formation control within teams of rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Prompted by the intricate demands of real-world applications such as search and rescue or surveillan ...

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

One can estimate the velocity and acceleration of robot manipulators by utilizing nonlinear observers. This involves combining inertial measurement units (IMUs) with the motor encoders of the robot through a model-based sensor fusion technique. This approa ...

Most works on multi-agent reinforcement learning focus on scenarios where the state of the environment is fully observable. In this work, we consider a cooperative policy evaluation task in which agents are not assumed to observe the environment state dire ...

Automatic control design for robotic systems is becoming more and more popular. However, this usually involves a significant computational cost, due to the expensive and noisy evaluation of candidate solutions through highfidelity simulation or even real h ...

Flapping wings produce lift and thrust in bio-inspired aerial robots, leading to quiet, safe and efficient flight. However, to extend their application scope, these robots must perch and land, a feat widely demonstrated by birds. Despite recent progress, f ...

Running economy, known as the steady-state oxygen consumption at a given submaximal intensity, has been proposed as one of the key factors differentiating East African runners from other running communities around the world. Kenyan runners have dominated m ...

Aerial robot swarms have the potential to perform time-critical and dangerous tasks such as disaster response without compromising human safety. However, their reliance on external infrastructure such as global positioning for localization and wireless net ...

Natural disasters, population growth, social conflicts, and political or structural crises give rise to forced migrations, which can lead to humanitarian emergencies. According to the “UNHCR annual global trends report”, 65.6 million people were displaced ...

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

With current overuse of the road transportation system and planned increase in traffic, inno- vative solutions that overcome environmental and financial cost of the current system should be assessed. A promising idea is the use of the third dimension for p ...

The degree of intelligence built-in in today's vehicles in constantly on the rise. The vehicles are being equipped with sensors, with the goal to estimate the state of the vehicle and the environment surrounding it. Intelligent algorithms that process the ...

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

Aerial imagery captured via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in disaster response. Unlike satellite imagery, aerial imagery can be captured and processed within hours rather than days. In addition, the spatial resol ...

Humanoid robots are gaining much interest nowadays. This is partly motivated by the ability of such robots to replace humans in dangerous environments being specifically designed for humans, such as man-made or natural disaster scenarios. However, existing ...

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have penetrated multiple domains over the past years. In GNSS-denied or indoor environments, aerial robots require a robust and stable localization system, often with external feedback, in order to fly safely. Motion ca ...

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

The safety of buildings which have been affected by a natural disaster such as an earthquake is currently evaluated manually by certified inspectors who identify visible damage on the structural elements. This process has been proven to be time-consuming, ...

Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

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Distributed Predictive Formation Control of Autonomous Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

A Stable Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter for Estimating Robot Manipulators Link Velocity and Acceleration

Policy Evaluation in Decentralized POMDPs With Belief Sharing

Leveraging Multi-Level Modelling to Automatically Design Behavioral Arbitrators in Robotic Controllers

How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branch

Integration of Wearable Sensors Into the Evaluation of Running Economy and Foot Mechanics in Elite Runners

Vision-based Flocking in Aerial Robot Swarms

Preface: Special Section on Energy and Food Security in a Humanitarian Context

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Aerial Human-Comfortable Collision-free Navigation in Dense Environments

Cooperative Perception Algorithms for Networked Intelligent Vehicles

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Combining Human Computing and Machine Learning to Make Sense of Big (Aerial) Data for Disaster Response

Bio-inspired balance controller for a humanoid robot

UWB-based system for UAV Localization in GNSS-Denied Environments: Characterization and Dataset

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Automated Damage Index Estimation of Reinforced Concrete Columns for Post-Earthquake Evaluations