Report from the European Conference on Mobile Robotics 2017

[Manuel Lopez-Antequera] and I just returned from the 8th edition of ECMR held in Paris. It was a great experience with most contributed works centered on solution for UAVs. In this regard, my personal favorite key-session was that of [Scaramuzza]. It was not only very inspiring, but also introduced us to event based cameras, which have a extremely high refresh rate when compared with standard cameras.

All in all, it was a very great experience. The organization was excellent and we were very well received. Also, I liked that the conference was single track, meaning that we didn't miss a single contribution. As for [Manuel] and me, we presented the following works respectively:

• Andres Gongora, Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Gas Source Localization Strategies for Teleoperated Mobile Robots. An Experimental Analysis", European Conference of Mobile Robotics, Paris, 2017.
• Manuel Lopez-Antequera, Nicolai Petkov and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez, "City-scale continuous visual localization", European Conference of Mobile Robotics, Paris, 2017.

Enhanced commercial multicopter for research in autonomous navigation

I just wanted to share with you a fully autonomous drone I built some time back for my degree in electornic engineering. It was a time when there were no fully autonomous drones, as the needed hardware was still too heavy to be flown piggyback all around your backyard. Still, I managed to pack everything I needed on top of a commercial RTF-Y6 hexacopter, including an RGD-D camera and an ARM computer.

If you feel like, take a look at the corresponding paper published during the 23th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, 2015. Also, don't miss the video after the break.