Contact person:

Aníbal Ollero

AICIA - Scientific & Technical Coordinator

The Association of Research and Industrial Co-operation of Andalucia (AICIA) is a public interest non-profit Association. AICIA has 43 industrial companies as associates. Its objectives are to boost, guide and promote industrial research. AICIA has an agreement with the University of Seville to use the human and material resources of the School of Engineering to accomplish the goals provided in the Association rules. The activities of AICIA are set out in a long list of research and development projects, engineering works, tests, evaluations, reports, analysis and consultations. In the last years, AICIA increased very significantly its involvement in international projects. Thus, AICIA participated in 28 International Projects in 2000, including many projects of the IV and V Framework Programmes

The Robotics, Vision and Intelligent Control Group focuses its research interest on mobile robots, intelligent perception systems and  intelligent control systems. It has about 15 researchers, and several collaborators and doctorate students.

Contact person:

Luis Gonzalo Gutiérrez

GMV S.A.- Financial and Administrative Coordinator

GMV S.A. (GMV) is a fully Spanish, privately owned company founded in 1984. It is devoted to engineering and consultancy studies, operations preparation and support, simulation and advanced turnkey systems and software development for the aerospace, transportation, telematics and defence markets.

The current GMV structure is organised into three business units: a Directorate of Space and Defence and two smaller business units, one devoted to commercialising navigation and precise positioning products in commercial markets (USL) and another geared towards the provision of engineering services and systems for global communications (SGI)

Contact person:

Raja Chatilla

LAAS (Laboratoire d'Architecture et d'Analyse des Systèmes) is a CNRS (the French National Scientific Research Centre) institute founded in 1967. 450 workers are involved in researches dealing with Automatic Control, Computer Science, Microelectronics, Production Systems and Robotics.

The Artificial Intelligence group (22 faculty members and permanent scientists, 6 Post-doc and 27 PhD students) focuses its research interests on intelligent systems. Its goal is to design and experiment with systems and devices able to perceive and act in various dynamic environments, and to reason on different tasks and on the means to achieve them autonomously.

This goal is supported by formal developments as well as by experimental research.

Contact person:

Volker Remuss

comets@pdv.cs.tu-berlin.de

The Real-Time Systems and Robotics group (Prozessdatenverarbeitung und Robotik – PDV) of the Technische Universität Berlin, lead by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günter Hommel, is engaged in the fields of robotics (both manipulators for assembly and mobile robots) on the one hand and modelling, reliability and performance of real-time systems on the other.

Since 1993, the PDV group has been developing and constructing unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs). In 1997, the PDV group started the development of the flying robot MARVIN (Multipurpose Aerial Robot Vehicle with Intelligent Navigation), which is based on a helicopter with a fuel engine. MARVIN is equipped with GPS-based position measuring, various threat and obstacle sensors, and high-resolution imaging. The robot is capable of fully autonomous operation, including take-off and landing. MARVIN participated in the IARCs of 1999 and 2000 and showed the best performance in each competition. In 2000, it fulfilled the whole mission, detecting survivors, victims and dangerous materials in a non-structured simulated disaster area and successfully avoiding gas fires, water fountains, and smoke. In this competition among university teams, the PDV group beat 9 American teams, including teams from Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), the University of Waterloo (Canada), Simon Fraser University (Canada), Mesa State College (USA), and Southern Polytechnic Institute (USA)

Contact person:

Domingos X. Viegas

ADAI (Associação para o Desenvolvimento da Aerodinâmica Industrial – Association for the Development of Industrial Aerodynamics) is a non-profit research institution aimed to support and promote basic and applied research on Industrial Aerodynamics and other related subjects, in close co-operation with the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Coimbra and with other public and private institutions. It was founded in 1990 and since then it has developed a large number of science research projects, as well as applied research and consultant work contracts with support of several national and international institutions.

Contact person:

Johan Wiklund

jowi@isy.liu.se

The Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL) at Linköping University is doing research in computer vision, signal processing, robot vision and learning. CVL was formed in 1982 and has about 15 researchers, doctorate students and visiting scientists.

CVL is participating in a major project, WITAS: The Wallenberg laboratory for research on Information Technology and Autonomous Systems. The funding of the entire project is about 15 Meuro over 7 years. The research goal of this project is to do high quality research on topics that are relevant to the design of autonomous systems. The system goal is to develop an intelligent autonomous helicopter, and to demonstrate its performance before the end of

Contact person:

Miguel Ángel González

p_mace@ono.com

Helivision (HELIV) is a SME. Its main activities are real time aerial photography, filming and recording using radio-controlled aeroplanes, helicopters and zeppelins. Helivision offers services to a wide variety of sectors, commercial companies and industries including naval industry, television, cinema, publicity, wild life documentaries, archaeology, insurance companies and city councils. More information about HELIV and its activities can be found in http://www.helivision.org