![](/files/organization-images/f8ab0ed6-8728-4061-8677-25e027b4d685/23d6ef07-5725-4a9b-a4b2-912c84653497.jpg_200_200.jpg) Autonomous Systems LabOpen OpportunitiesRecent work on multi-robot systems with collaborative autonomy has made significant strides towards developing robotic
teams capable of performing complex tasks in real, complex settings as shown above. Right at the core of such capabilities is
the capability to collaboratively perform SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) within such multi-agent systems that
can operate efficiently and in challenging real-world environments, which is the main goal of this project.
The aim of this project is to develop key components of a multi-robot SLAM system that is robust in challenging environments
and adaptable to different scenarios, ranging from environmental monitoring to search-and-rescue operations. The envisioned
system will research integrating complementary onboard sensor modalities (e.g., cameras, LiDAR, and IMU), machine learning
methods, and distributed communication systems to provide precise localization and mapping exhibiting resilience to sensor
failure and sufficient efficiency to be deployed onboard small platforms, such as drones. The student will be guided to work
towards a system architecture that can enable effective testing and optimization in state-of-the-art simulation engines, with the
ultimate goal of reducing the gap between simulated experiments and real tests. The outlook is to create a system that can be
employed onboard a small swarm of drones in a real setting. - Computer Vision, Intelligent Robotics
- Master Thesis
| Automating drone navigation promises to revolutionise the way we conduct a wide variety of tasks, such as agricultural monitoring, industrial inspection, and disaster relief scenarios. Equipping a drone with the capability to autonomously explore and map previously unseen environments using onboard sensors and algorithms forms the basis of autonomy. While there has been tremendous progress in this area over the past few years [1-5], existing systems still lack reliability and adaptability to the challenges and complexity of real settings, which is crucial for the deployment of this technology in actual missions. In particular, performing robust navigation and mapping in highly dynamic environments (e.g., forests) remains an open challenge.
Following promising leads from the state-of-the-art and our in-house navigation stack, the goal of this project is to develop the capability to deal with increasingly dynamic and complex scenarios. The student will be guided towards leveraging the multi-sensor capabilities of a LiDAR-Visual-Inertial payload being developed in the lab to research approaches for perception and mission planning that can fuse information from the different sensors and capture high-fidelity representations of challenging dynamic environments. Initially, the student will work within a realistic simulation environment and then deploy and test their work onboard a real drone in a real setting.
- Computer Vision, Intelligent Robotics
- Master Thesis
| Digital environments, or digital twins, allow for design, prototyping, and testing in the virtual world before moving to the real world, thus accelerating development and reducing costs. A digital twin of a farm supports crop operations such as scheduling a harvest or predicting a yield, while agritech companies can develop farm automation robots using a digital twin. The goal of this project is to develop 3D Reconstruction and localization strategies that are capable to identify temporal invariant areas and properties in crop environments during the production season. The main target is to be able to match the same plants over time. - Computer Vision, Intelligent Robotics
- Master Thesis, Semester Project
| Bundle Adjustment (BA) is a critical optimization technique used to refine a visual reconstruction by jointly estimating the 3D scene structure and the viewing parameters. Traditional BA approaches primarily focus on geometric features and might struggle in highly unstructured scenarios, such as natural environments.
This project aims to extend the Bundle Adjustment methodology by incorporating higher-level features extracted from semantic segmentation. The integration of semantic information aims to provide contextually relevant and more discriminative data to the adjustment process, thereby improving its accuracy and robustness.
- Computer Vision, Image Processing
- Master Thesis, Semester Project
| The project aims to implement a semantic label transfer from satellite to aerial imagery in order to enable the training of image-based machine learning algorithms for autonomous aerial vehicle tasks, such as path planning, collision avoidance, and localization. - Computer Vision, Intelligent Robotics
- Semester Project
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