Antoni Grau Saldes

Sustainable technology results for sewage networks in smart cities

The objective of this paper is to explain the importance of research in wastewater transportation (sewage systems) using new technologies such as robotics systems and information and communication technologies. ECHORD++ (European Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development) is a very useful tool to foster this research and to meet needs and solutions. In this paper, authors explain the tool as well as the methodology to promote robotics research in urban environments, and the on-going experience will demonstrate that huge advances are made in this field.The objective of this paper is to explain the importance of research in wastewater transportation (sewage systems) using new technologies such as robotics systems and information and communication technologies. ECHORD++ (European Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development) is a very useful tool to foster this research and to meet needs and solutions. In this paper, authors explain the tool as well as the methodology to promote robotics research in urban environments, and the on-going experience will demonstrate that huge advances are made in this field.

Delayed Monocular SLAM Approach Applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, many researchers have addressed the issue of making Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) more and more autonomous. In this context, the state estimation of the vehicle position is a fundamental necessity for any application involving autonomy. However, the problem of position estimation could not be solved in some scenarios, even when a GPS signal is available, for instance, an application requiring performing precision manoeuvres in a complex environment. Therefore, some additional sensory information should be integrated into the system in order to improve accuracy and robustness. In this work, a novel vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method with application to unmanned aerial vehicles is proposed. One of the contributions of this work is to design and develop a novel technique for estimating features depth which is based on a stochastic technique of triangulation. In the proposed method the camera is mounted over a servo-controlled gimbal that counteracts the changes in attitude of the quadcopter. Due to the above assumption, the overall problem is simplified and it is focused on the position estimation of the aerial vehicle. Also, the tracking process of visual features is made easier due to the stabilized video. Another contribution of this work is to demonstrate that the integration of very noisy GPS measurements into the system for an initial short period of time is enough to initialize the metric scale. The performance of this proposed method is validated by means of experiments with real data carried out in unstructured outdoor environments. A comparative study shows that, when compared with related methods, the proposed approach performs better in terms of accuracy and computational time.

An LPV Fractional Model for Canal Control

In this paper an LPV non-integer order control model of an irrigation canal is derived from system identification experiments. This model is experimentally obtained by using the described LPV fractional identification procedure. This procedure consists on the identification of a non-linear order model in each operation point of the canal. The global LPV model is obtained by the polynomial interpolation of the parameters of the local models. The validation results show that fractional models are more accurate than integer models. Therefore the fractional models have an important role to play in management and efficient use of water resources.

Remote laboratory in control engineering degree

This paper presents an innovative web-based control laboratory focused on the necessity of control education community. The usefulness of the remote laboratory proposed in this paper is justified by the opportunity of organizing the remote experiments, saving time and money to the students.

Delayed inverse depth monocular SLAM

The 6-DOF monocular camera case possibly represents the harder variant in the context of simultaneous localization and mapping problem. In the last years, several advances have been appeared in this area; however the application of these techniques to real world applications it’s difficult so far. Recently, the unified inverse depth parametrization has shown to be a good option this challenging problem, in a scheme of EKF for the estimation of the stochastic map and camera pose. In this paper a new delayed initialization scheme is proposed for adding new features to the stochastic map. The results show that delayed initialization can improve some aspects without losing the performance and unified aspect of the original method, when initial reference points are used in order to fix a metric scale in the map.