Gustavo Oliveira

A platform for the design, simulation and development of quadcopter multi-agent systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining the attention of researchers around the world. Recently researchers apply the multi-agent paradigm to such domain taking advantage of its research in cognition, deliberation, and mainly coordination mechanisms. The aim of our research is to contribute to the multiple quadcopter simulation area introducing a platform for the design, simulation, and development of quadcopter MultiAgent Systems (MAS). Specifically for this paper, we minutely discuss the proposed architecture and present the implemented prototype focusing our experiments on the scalability and the resource usage of it. The results demonstrate that the centralised perspective limits the scalability mainly when the physical engine is being used; also, we identify that the method responsible for the 3D update is the platforms bottleneck. After this work different type of studies in social interaction of quadcopters will follow up as well as the improvement of the proposed architecture, for instance, using a multi-threading approach.

A symbiotic simulation platform for agent-based quadcopters

Small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining the attention of researchers around the world, due to their versatility and performance in both indoor and outdoor applications. The whole project aims to specify and implement a symbiotic simulation platform to assist the design, development and testing of UAVs that use a quad-rotor configuration. Additionally, in this paper we firstly discuss the integration of two software components to build the simulation environment: Jason, an agent-oriented platform for the development and simulation of multi-agent systems and the jME3 game engine, used for 3-dimensional simulations of the models. Further, we describe the implementation of the physical multi-rotor system and present some preliminary results, as well as the description of the symbiotic simulation platform.

ONE YEAR OF CONTINUOUS DYNAMIC MONITORING OF A WIND TURBINE. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY AND FATIGUE ASSESSMENT

Abstract. The paper presents recent results from a research project based on a continuous dynamic monitoring of a wind turbine. The monitoring system was developed with the capacity to detect structural abnormalities based on the continuous tracking of the modal properties of wind turbines (natural frequencies, modal damping ratios and mode shapes). In addition, the system is also capable to estimate the dynamic stress levels of the tower structure, in order to assess the damage condition and evaluate its remaining fatigue life. In the first part of the present paper, preliminary results from one year of continuous tracking of the modal properties of the wind turbine vibration modes are introduced. The main characteristics of the tracked modes are shown and the evolution of these modes with rotor rotation speed is characterized. In a second part, the methodology followed to evaluate the stress condition of the wind turbine tower is introduced. This procedure is illustrated and validated with the help of a numerical analysis of a wind turbine, developed in the HAWC2 aeroelastic code.