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!