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The thirty-eighth meeting of the Prague computer science seminar

Martin Saska

Teams of autonomous cooperating micro aerial vehicles: From theory to applications

Deployment of large teams of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in real-world (outdoor and indoor) environments without precise external localisation or motion capture systems is very challenging. I will present the latest results of our endeavor towards fully autonomous compact flocks of MAVs with onboard artificial intelligence.

November 29, 2018

4:00pm

Auditorium S5, MFF UK
Malostranské nám. 25, Praha 1
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Lecture annotation

Deployment of large teams of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in real-world (outdoor and indoor) environments without precise external localisation or motion capture systems is very challenging. I will present the latest results of our endeavor towards fully autonomous compact flocks of MAVs with onboard artificial intelligence, which was achieved by the Multi-robot Systems group at the Czech Technical University in Prague together with Vijay Kumar Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stabilization, control, and motion planning techniques for steering swarms and formations of unmanned MAVs will be discussed in the talk. We shall focus on biologically inspired techniques that integrate swarming abilities of individual particles with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) methodology respecting the fast dynamics of unmanned quadrotors. Besides the basic principles of formation flying and swarm stabilization, examples of real-world applications of the introduced methods will be shown in complex indoor and outdoor experiments. First, we show how we use MAVs for indoor documentation of large historical objects (cathedrals) by formations of cooperating MAVs, where one MAV carries a camera and its neighbors carry light sources with the possibility to set a relative angle between the camera axis and the lights as required. Second, we demonstrate cooperative manipulation of large objects by a pair of MAVs developed for the international MBZIRC competition. Last, we present the fully autonomous flying robot Eagle.one hunting for unauthorized drones.

Lecturer

Martin Saska

Martin Saska received his MSc. degree at the Czech Technical University in Prague, 2005, and his Ph.D. degree at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, within the PhD program of the Elite Network of Bavaria, 2009. Since 2009 he has been a research fellow at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he founded and heads the Multi-robot Systems group, consisting of 15+ young researchers, and co-founded the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems with more than 40 researchers cooperating in robotics . He was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2008, and at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, where he worked with Vijay Kumar's group within the GRASP lab. He is an author or co-author of more than 90 papers in proceedings of peer-reviewed conferences and more than 15 articles in major journals, including IJRR, AURO, RAS, ASC or EJC, with more than 1500 citations indexed by Google Scholar (H-index 22). He led a joint team of the CTU in Prague, University of Pennsylvania and University of Lincoln that obtained a gold medal at the MBZIRC 2017 competition (5M USD funding) in Abu Dhabi with 143 applicants from the best technical universities worldwide. He received best paper awards at ICUAS 2013 and, ETFA 2017, and was an award-finalist at ICRA 2008.

ABOUT THE PRAGUE COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

The seminar typically takes place on Thursdays at 4:15pm in lecture rooms of the Czech Technical University in Prague or the Charles University.

Its program consists of a one-hour lecture followed by a discussion. The lecture is based on an (internationally) exceptional or remarkable achievement of the lecturer, presented in a way which is comprehensible and interesting to a broad computer science community. The lectures are in English.

The seminar is organized by the organizational committee consisting of Roman Barták (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jaroslav Hlinka (Czech Academy of Sciences, Computer Science Institute), Michal Chytil, Pavel Kordík (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Information Technologies), Michal Koucký (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jan Kybic (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Michal Pěchouček (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Jiří Sgall (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Vojtěch Svátek (University of Economics, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics), Michal Šorel (Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Theory and Automation), Tomáš Werner (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), and Filip Železný (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering)

The idea to organize this seminar emerged in discussions of the representatives of several research institutes on how to avoid the undesired fragmentation of the Czech computer science community.

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Prague computer science seminar is suspended until further notice to prevent spread of the new coronavirus.