Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate to the workshop on Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles at the euRobotics Forum
(http://www.eurobotics-project.eu/cms/index.php?idcat=40)

Title:
UAVs in Europe: state-of-the-art and new trends in UAV autonomy,
performance, and human assistance.

Objectives of the workshop:
To gather the state-of-the-art European researchers working on UAVs to
share their current activities and build a common vision for the
future perspective of this field.

Organisers:
* KULeuven (Steven Bellens)
* Università di Bologna (Prof. Lorenzo Marconi)

Summary:
This workshop will give the audience an overview of current UAV
research in Europe: state-of-the-art and new trends in UAV autonomy,
performance, and human assistance, by a number of short talks followed
by discussions.

Presentations:
We invite you to present any work relevant in the UAV domain in this
workshop. Presentations are preferrably 10 - 15 mins long followed by
5 - 10 mins discussions. Please send us
(steven.bellens@mech.kuleuven.be - lorenzo.marconi@unibo.it) an
abstract (10 - 15 lines) about the work you wish to present.
Deadline: 25/03/2011
Notice of acceptance: 28/03/2011

Speakers scheduled already are:
---------------------------------------
* Dr. Paolo Robuffo Giordano

Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen,
Germany

Summary: In our research group, we study new ways to interface humans
and remote (multi-)robot systems in an effective way by adopting a
"shared control" perspective. Indeed, it is clear that humans, on one
side, have higher cognitive skills and superior situational awareness
while robots, on the other side, possess higher versatility, reliability
and motion accuracy. It is then interesting to study what is the best
combination between level of autonomy expected in the robots, and best
sensory feedback and control leverages needed by the human users to
create an effective interaction. A good example that illustrates this
philosophy is probably given by the telepresence/telerobotics scenarios:
exploit remote robot(s) as an extension, or even an augmentation, of the
humans' senses and actions.
In this talk, we will review some of the research activities that our
group is performing in this context. We will focus on the use of
vestibular (self-motion) and/or force-feedback feedback in interfacing a
human operator with remote UAVs. A particular attention will be given to
the case of force-feedback teleoperation of multiple UAVs. Indeed, this
situation imposes several challenges: since the human operator cannot
directly control multiple remote agents, high level of autonomy must be
demanded to the UAVs. Also, from a technical point of view, establishing
a teleoperation channel between a single master and multiple remote
slaves is nontrivial and requires special care. A discussion on
longer-term research research directions will be presented at the end of
the talk.

---------------------------------------
* Dr. Lorenzo Marconi

Title: Modeling and control of a VTOL UAV interacting with the
environment: from flying vehicles to flying robots

Abstract: In this talk the modelling, control design and prototyping
of a Ducted-Fan Miniature Aerial Vehicle interacting with the
environment is presented. This research activity is carried out in the
context of the European Project AIRobots (www.airobots.eu) that will
be briefly presented during the talk.
The vision is to develop unmanned aerial vehicles capable to
accomplish tasks which may require contacts between the aerial vehicle
and the environment such as remote manipulation, docking and flight in
cluttered environments.
Since the system's dynamics may be dramatically different when
contacts happen and when they do not, in the first part of the talk an
overall description of the system is obtained by collection of the
different behaviours into a hybrid automaton. For this particular
class of hybrid dynamical system, a general framework for robust
control of the system over predefined trajectories is developed and
subsequently specialized for the case of the Ducted-Fan interacting
with the environment.

---------------------------------------
* Steven Bellens

Title: Intelligent task specification for UAVs: Research Overview

Summary:
In this talk I will give a brief overview of my research, regarding
intelligent task specification for quadrotors. The Robotics research
group at KULeuven succesfully uses iTaSC, an Instantaneous Task
Specification and estimation formalism using Constraints, for a
variety of tasks using mobile manipulators. We're aiming at extending
and applying this task formalism for usage with UAVs in general, and
quadrotors in particular, also aiming at performing manipulation
tasks. As those systems dynamics are highly influenced by the
environment (ground effects, wind gusts, contact forces, ...) new
control strategies are needed in the framework, especially when
interaction with the environment is required.

---------------------------------------

You can find all this information as well at
http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~u0063509/euRoboticsForum/


Best regards,

Steven Bellens
Lorenzo Marconi