Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones

Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019

A review of laser scanning for geological and geotechnical applications in underground mining

Laser scanning can provide timely assessments of mine sites despite adverse challenges in the operational environment. Although there are several published articles on laser scanning, there is a need to review them in the context of underground mining applications. To this end, a holistic review of laser scanning is presented including progress in 3D scanning systems, data capture/processing techniques and primary applications in underground mines. Laser scanning technology has advanced significantly in terms of mobility and mapping, but there are constraints in coherent and consistent data collection at certain mines due to feature deficiency, dynamics, and environmental influences such as dust and water. Studies suggest that laser scanning has matured over the years for change detection, clearance measurements and structure mapping applications. However, there is scope for improvements in lithology identification, surface parameter measurements, logistic tracking and autonomous navigation. Laser scanning has the potential to provide real-time solutions but the lack of infrastructure in underground mines for data transfer, geodetic networking and processing capacity remain limiting factors. Nevertheless, laser scanners are becoming an integral part of mine automation thanks to their affordability, accuracy and mobility, which should support their widespread usage in years to come

Assessing occupants’ energy-load variation in commercial and educational buildings: Occupancy detecting approach based on existing wireless network infrastructure

ABSTRACT Providing energy-consumption feedback has the potential to change people's behavior, a reality that has led to significant energy-usage reductions in residential buildings. However, it is challenging to provide feedback in commercial and educational buildings because it is difficult to track occupants' behaviors and their corresponding energy usage-especially for temporary occupants. In order to make providing such feedback possible in commercial and educational buildings, this paper presents a coupled system that monitors the energy load for occupants who have WiFi-enabled devices. The system benchmarks energy loads using an energy monitoring system that simultaneously detects occupancy and roughly estimates the residents' location through Wi-Fi access points. A preliminary experiment was conducted in an educational building to illustrate the data processing procedure and to test the validity of the system. The experiment results suggest the event of wireless connection is a valid indication of energy load variation. The proposed system is the prototype of a coupled system that, in the future, will be able to estimate individual's energy load through an indoor positioning system and, in turn, provide corresponding energyconsumption feedback. INTRODUCTION Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed every year, making them the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. (U.S. Department of Energy 2011). Residents in commercial and educational buildings significantly contribute to and exercise a great control over a significant amount of the energy end-uses, such as lighting, space heating, space cooling, electronics and appliances (U.S. Department of Energy 2011). Conventional approaches toward enhancing building energy efficiency focus on building envelope retrofitting and system update. However, such approaches require large capital investments and sometimes are infeasible. Recently, researchers propose that changing people's behavior by providing high resolution feedback has a great potential to contribute to the reduction of energy consumption. Feedback, in the context of energy-related research, means all levels of information related to energy consumption that may be provided to energy end-users. By providing real-time energy feedback to occupants, researchers observed up to a 46% reduction in consumption in residential building

State of the Art Review on Mobile Robots and Manipulators for Humanitarian Demining

Robotics solutions properly sized with suitable modularized structure and well adapted to local conditions of dangerous unstructured areas can greatly improve the safety of personnel as well as the work efficiency, productivity and flexibility. In this sense, mobile systems equipped with manipulators for detecting and locating antipersonnel landmines are considered of most importance towards autonomous/semi-autonomous mine location in a proficient, reliable, safer and effective way. This paper reviews the most relevant literature and previous research activity regarding mobile robots and manipulators for humanitarian demining.Robotics solutions properly sized with suitable modularized structure and well adapted to local conditions of dangerous unstructured areas can greatly improve the safety of personnel as well as the work efficiency, productivity and flexibility. In this sense, mobile systems equipped with manipulators for detecting and locating antipersonnel landmines are considered of most importance towards autonomous/semi-autonomous mine location in a proficient, reliable, safer and effective way. This paper reviews the most relevant literature and previous research activity regarding mobile robots and manipulators for humanitarian demining

Short Survey of Wireless Indoor Positioning Techniques and Systems

Smart city offers different services to different people depending on a wish list. It fulfills people's aspiration level, wherever there is willingness to change and to reform. Due to the complexity people movement within and between cities, localization techniques became popular with the global positioning system for outdoor applications, followed by Personal Networks (PNs) localization for indoor applications. PN are designed to provide a flexible and fast wireless communication between user’s devices and other devices, in various indoor environment places. PN mainly uses indoor positioning systems (IPSs) for improving numerous factors such as Self-organizing sensor networks, location sensitive billing, ubiquitous computing, context- dependent information services, tracking, and guiding. This paper gives a short survey of some kinds of IPSs, and focuses on triangulation to predict the target location, where for example it calculates the distance by measuring time difference of signals arrival (TDOA) over Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), as one of several techniques identify the distance between the transmitters and receiver

Robotic autonomous systems for earthmoving equipment operating in volatile conditions and teaming capacity: a survey

Abstract There has been an increasing interest in the application of robotic autonomous systems (RASs) for construction and mining, particularly the use of RAS technologies to respond to the emergent issues for earthmoving equipment operating in volatile environments and for the need of multiplatform cooperation. Researchers and practitioners are in need of techniques and developments to deal with these challenges. To address this topic for earthmoving automation, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of significant contributions and recent advances, as reported in the literature, databases of professional societies, and technical documentation from the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). In dealing with volatile environments, advances in sensing, communication and software, data analytics, as well as self-driving technologies can be made to work reliably and have drastically increased safety. It is envisaged that an automated earthmoving site within this decade will manifest the collaboration of bulldozers, graders, and excavators to undertake ground-based tasks without operators behind the cabin controls; in some cases, the machines will be without cabins. It is worth for relevant small- and medium-sized enterprises developing their products to meet the market demands in this area. The study also discusses on future directions for research and development to provide green solutions to earthmoving.</jats:p

Big data analytics for large-scale wireless networks: Challenges and opportunities

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. The wide proliferation of various wireless communication systems and wireless devices has led to the arrival of big data era in large-scale wireless networks. Big data of large-scale wireless networks has the key features of wide variety, high volume, real-time velocity, and huge value leading to the unique research challenges that are different from existing computing systems. In this article, we present a survey of the state-of-art big data analytics (BDA) approaches for large-scale wireless networks. In particular, we categorize the life cycle of BDA into four consecutive stages: Data Acquisition, Data Preprocessing, Data Storage, and Data Analytics. We then present a detailed survey of the technical solutions to the challenges in BDA for large-scale wireless networks according to each stage in the life cycle of BDA. Moreover, we discuss the open research issues and outline the future directions in this promising area

Towards autonomous robotic systems: seamless localization and trajectory planning in dynamic environments

Evolucionar hacia una sociedad más automatizada y robotizada en la que podamos convivir con sistemas robóticos que desempeñen tareas poco atractivas o peligrosas para el ser humano, supone plantearnos, entre otras cuestiones, qué soluciones existen actualmente y cuáles son las mejoras a incorporar a las mismas. La mayoría de aplicaciones ya desarrolladas son soluciones robustas y adecuadas para el fin que se diseñan. Sin embargo, muchas de las técnicas implantadas podrían funcionar de manera más eficiente o bien adaptarse a otras necesidades. Asimismo, en la mayoría de aplicaciones robóticas adquiere importancia el contexto en el que desempeñan su función. Hay entornos estructurados y fáciles de modelar, mientras que otros apenas presentan características utilizables para obtener información de los mismos.Esta tesis se centra en dos de las funciones básicas que debe tener cualquier sistema robótico autónomo para desplazarse de forma robusta en cualquier tipo de entorno: la localización y el cálculo de trayectorias seguras. Además, los escenarios en los que se desea poner en práctica la investigación son complejos: un parque industrial con zonas cuyas características de entorno (usualmente geométricas) son utilizadas para que un robot se localice, varían; y entornos altamente ocupados por otros agentes móviles, como el vestíbulo de un teatro, en los que se debe considerar las características dinámicas de los demás para calcular un movimiento que sea seguro tanto para el robot como para los demás agentes.La información que se puede percibir de los escenarios con ambientes no homogéneos, por ejemplo de interior y exterior, suele ser de características diferentes. Cuando la información que se dispone del entorno proviene de sensores diferentes hay que definir un método que integre las medidas para tener una estimación de la localización del robot en todo momento. El tema de la localización se ha investigado intensamente y existen soluciones robustas en interior y exterior, pero no tanto en zonas mixtas. En las zonas de transición interior-exterior y viceversa es necesario utilizar sensores que funcionan correctamente en ambas zonas, realizando una integración sensorial durante la transición para evitar discontinuidades en la localización o incluso que el robot se pierda. De esta manera la navegación autónoma, dependiente de la correcta localización, funcionará sin discontinuidades ni movimientos bruscos.En entornos dinámicos es esencial definir una forma de representar la información que refleje su naturaleza cambiante. Por ello, se han definido en la literatura diferentes modelos que representan el dinamismo del entorno, y que permiten desarrollar una planificación de trayectorias directamente sobre las variables que controlan el movimiento del robot, en nuestro caso, las velocidades angular y lineal para un robot diferencial. Los planificadores de trayectorias y navegadores diseñados para entornos estáticos no funcionan correctamente en escenarios dinámicos, ya que son puramente reactivos. Es necesario tener en cuenta la predicción del movimiento de los obstáculos móviles para planificar trayectorias seguras sin colisión. Los temas abordados y las contribuciones aportadas en esta tesis son:• Diseño de un sistema de localización continua en entornos de interior y exterior, poniendo especial interés en la fusión de las medidas obtenidas de diferentes sensores durante las transiciones interior-exterior, aspecto poco abordado en la literatura. De esta manera se obtiene una estimación acotada de la localización durante toda la navegación del robot. Además, la localización se integra con una técnica reactiva de navegación, construyendo un sistema completo de navegación. El sistema integrado se ha evaluado en un escenario real de un parque industrial, para una aplicación logística en la que las transiciones interior-exterior y viceversa suponían un problema fundamental a resolver.• Definición de un modelo para representar el entorno dinámico del robot, llamado Dynamic Obstacle Velocity-Time Space (DOVTS). En este modelo aparecen representadas las velocidades permitidas y prohibidas para que el robot evite las colisiones con los obstáculos de alrededor. Este modelo puede ser utilizado por algoritmos de navegación ya existentes, y sirve de base para las nuevas técnicas de navegación desarrolladas en la tesis y explicadas en los siguientes puntos. • Desarrollo de una técnica de planificación y navegación basada en el modelo DOVTS. En este modelo se identifica un conjunto de situaciones relativas entre el robot y los obstáculos. A cada situación se asocia una estrategia de navegación, que considera la seguridad del robot para evitar colisiones, a la vez que intenta minimizar el tiempo al objetivo.• Implementación de una técnica de planificación y navegación basada en el modelo DOVTS, que utiliza explícitamente la información del tiempo para la planificación del movimiento. Se desarrolla un algoritmo A*-like que planifica los movimientos de los siguientes instantes, incrementando la maniobrabilidad del robot para la evitación de obstáculos respecto al método del anterior punto, a costa de un mayor tiempo de cómputo. Se analizan las diferencias en el comportamiento global del robot con respecto a la técnica anterior.Los diferentes aspectos que se han investigado en esta tesis tratan de avanzar en el objetivo de conseguir robots autónomos que puedan adaptarse a nuestra vida cotidiana en escenarios que son típicamente dinámicos de una forma natural y segura.<br /