Overview

The main objective of this Workshop is to analyse the current state of aerial robotics and its applications.

Aerial robotics mainly comes from the evolution of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technologies and is also related to Field Robotics Applications. UAVs are increasingly used for many civilian applications such as terrain and utilities inspection, disaster monitoring, environmental surveillance, search and rescue, law enforcement, aerial mapping, traffic surveillance, and cinematography. UAVs have improved their autonomy both in energy and information processing. Thus, many prototypes of autonomous aerial vehicles have been presented. Significant improvements have been achieved in UAV autonomous positioning and object tracking based on modern GPS, image processing, inertial sensing, range sensing, and information processing technologies.

The speakers of the workshop will consider the technologies involved in aerial robotics, and UAVs, will present prototypes and working systems, and will deal with applications.

Particularly, prototypes of autonomous helicopters and airships will be presented. Applications will include forest fire localization and monitoring, electrical lines inspection and surveillance applications.