News

Taking control of electricity consumption and storage

Austria has set itself the target in computational terms to cover 100% of total electricity consumption from renewable energy sources by 2030. Photovoltaics, wind and hydro power will serve as driving force. A conversation with smart grids expert Wilfried Elmenreich about the intelligent management and optimisation of renewable energy. Photovoltaic […]

Self-calibration of visual sensor networks

Many multi-camera applications rely on the knowledge of the spatial relationship among the individual nodes. However, establishing such a network-wide calibration is typically a time-consuming task and requires user interaction. In her recent work, Jennifer Simonjan developed a decentralized and resource-aware algorithm for estimating the poses of all camera nodes […]

Sarwar defended PhD

Today Omair Sarwar successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled “Facial Privacy Protection in Airborne Recreational Videography”. Omair participated in our Erasmus Mundus Doctoral School on Interactive and Cognitive Environements and was co-supervised by Andrea Cavallaro from Queen Mary University of London. The defense committee was composed by Prof. Hermann Hellwagner […]

Unmanned aerial vehicle communications: Opportunities and challenges

Wireless communications is essential for many applications with commercial drones. Omid Semiari interviewed Christian Bettstetter about this exciting topic at the interface of communications and robotics for the latest IEEE ComSoc TCCN newsletter. To start, could you please explain why “communications” matter for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and what are […]

CPSwarm at ICT 2018 in Vienna

The CPSwarm project presented its tools for designing swarms of cyber physical systems at ICT 2018: Imagine Digital – Connect Europe. The event, which took place in Vienna, Austria from 4 – 6 December 2018, focused on the digital transformation of society and industry. The CPSwarm project, formed by nine […]

“I worked hard for this”

Jennifer Simonjan’s work focuses on camera networks. In conversation with ad astra she tells us why she does not fear ubiquitous camera surveillance, what she recently learned in Atlanta about nano cameras, and what it took for her, a first-generation student from an environment that was hardly technologically-minded, to gain […]

“Drones are here to stay. Get used to it.”

This statement was the title of a TIME article, which was included in the magazine’s special report on “The Drone Age”. We asked Christian Bettstetter to tell us what today’s drones can do and what drone(swarms) are not yet capable of. One thing is certain: Our airspace is going to […]

UAV motion planning for multi-coverage

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with onboard cameras are increasingly deployed in various applications including surveying, search and rescue, inspection as well as video production. In all these applications, the UAVs move – in many cases autonomously – to capture imagery of sufficient quality of the environment or objects of interest.  […]

Aerospace best paper award

Stochastic Trajectory Generation Using Particle Swarm Optimization for Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been selected as the best research article published in 2017 in the MDPI Aerospace journal. The paper is co-authored by Babak Salamat and Andrea Tonello. It provides a realistic stochastic trajectory generation method for unmanned aerial vehicles. […]