Álvaro Deibe Díaz - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Álvaro Deibe Díaz

A mixed reality simulation framework is being developed as a tool to facilitate the elaboration, ... more A mixed reality simulation framework is being developed as a tool to facilitate the elaboration, testing and deployment of control and collaborative strategies for teams of UAVs. The virtual world within the framework must contain a model of the phenomenon under analysis. It has been shown that, for complex cases, the use of real UAVs in an initiation phase could serve to simplify this model while increasing its accuracy. In a second step, a subsequent intermediate phase is implemented now. In this phase the virtual model is first scaled and then used to provide measurement data to the real planes that are equipped with virtual sensors in an augmented reality scenario. This way the cost and time of checking the coordination strategies and communications when several real planes are flying simultaneously can be greatly reduced. Once everything is tuned and adjusted within this intermediate phase, the whole system could be implemented in the full size real environment. An application ...

2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), 2015

This paper presents the strategies used to develop a speed control system for a ship model. This ... more This paper presents the strategies used to develop a speed control system for a ship model. This speed control is a part of a larger control and data acquisition system on board of an autonomous ship model that is being specifically developed to perform towing tank testing. Taking into account the requirements for this speed control system, and that the speeds to be measured are about one meter per second, a Laser Rangefinder is used as mean for measuring the speed of the model. This is quite unusual because these devices are just intended to measure distances between motionless objects. Various approaches used for setting up the controller are also presented.

En el presente proyecto, se muestra el trabajo realizado por el autor en la competición Imagine C... more En el presente proyecto, se muestra el trabajo realizado por el autor en la competición Imagine Cup'09, en su modalidad de Robótica y Algoritmos. Durante este trabajo se realizarán tareas de adquisición de conocimiento, pues la herramienta de programación ...

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2019

A positioning system based on the combination of various measurements is being developed in order... more A positioning system based on the combination of various measurements is being developed in order to allow precise UAV navigation on GPS denied environments. In the case of study, the task is developed near walls in a closed fully metallic environment with nearly homogeneous floor and walls. This led up to some interesting challenges. The first one regarding RF signal transmission on a metallic environment. Secondly, the difficulty of using SLAM or other computer vision navigation solutions due to the homogeneity of the walls and floor. Finally, a working place located near walls, where positioning systems tend to offer worst accuracy. To overcome these challenges, the proposed positioning method combines an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) based system, for global location, with unidirectional laser range finders, for very precise near-wall measurements. Moreover, RF transmission on various frequencies and results of the proposed positioning precision experiments performed are shown and results analyzed.

Robotics in Education, 2019

Teaching robotics in secondary school is common nowadays, although with heterogeneous approaches ... more Teaching robotics in secondary school is common nowadays, although with heterogeneous approaches in different countries, mainly in the specific technology that is used. Even with such lack of standardization, there are many common elements in these early stages of educational robotics, focused on basic assembling, simple sensing, and locomotion, which are a consequence of the simplicity of the robots that are used. In this paper, we aim to go one step ahead, and propose an approach of how the next stage in educational robotics should be. To this end, we analyze the current situation of this subject in reference to the robotics market and society, and then we propose a structure for the curriculum development. This approach is based on the use of the Robobo robot, as a clear example of the type of device that allows to perform such update of the subject, and on the use of a STEAM methodology, where a global view of how to face a robotics problem is presented.

Wireless gas sensor networks (WGSN) offer the potential of high spatial and temporal resolution m... more Wireless gas sensor networks (WGSN) offer the potential of high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of target areas in both critical and non-critical scenarios. We describe the design and evaluation of an electronic expansion module, MICARES, suitable for gas sensing applications with wireless sensor networks. The module is intended for use with the MICA family of motes through the 51-pin connector. Proper housing assured, the device is applicable to both indoor and outdoor gas sensing for buildings, commercial and industrial spaces. Challenges lay in sensor selection, analytical and experimental power budgeting and field testing. We present the design goals at the network and node level and the adopted solutions to achieve them. Appropriate adaptive sampling strategies for energy efficiency, along with data resulting from CO2 monitoring are described. Emphasis is put on embedded sensor integration into the electrical design and methods for on-board data acquisition and proce...

The present invention relates to distribute and self-configuring instrumentation in home and offi... more The present invention relates to distribute and self-configuring instrumentation in home and office environments. The object of this invention is to obtain a reduced cost distributed building automation instrumentation system in home and office environments with distributed autonomous operation capabilities, including support for modifying and adapting system operation to user preferences, assuring assembly security. To that end, the present invention proposes using commonly used components for designing a non-proprietary instrumentation network (1,3,7) and constructing terminal nodes (2) for the instrumentation (4,5,9,10) which facilitate connecting generic devices (10). The present invention proposes mechanisms aimed at improving the installation, configuration, operation, security and autonomy of the instrumentation network, as well as a central node (6) as support in network initialization, configuration and management tasks.

The initiation phase of a mixed reality simulator that is being used for training autonomous Unma... more The initiation phase of a mixed reality simulator that is being used for training autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is presented. The simulator aims to adjust the UAVs controllers and their collaborative strategies. The model for the physical phenomena under analysis is a key aspect of the virtual reality environment. This model should be accurate, but also simple and easily configurable. The use of an initiation phase in the application of this mixed reality framework can result in a simplification and an increase in accuracy of the physical model. The monitoring of a smoke plume exhausted by a stack is used to illustrate the application of this technique.

Sensors, 2020

The nonlinear problem of sensing the attitude of a solid body is solved by a novel implementation... more The nonlinear problem of sensing the attitude of a solid body is solved by a novel implementation of the Kalman Filter. This implementation combines the use of quaternions to represent attitudes, time-varying matrices to model the dynamic behavior of the process and a particular state vector. This vector was explicitly created from measurable physical quantities, which can be estimated from the filter input and output. The specifically designed arrangement of these three elements and the way they are combined allow the proposed attitude estimator to be formulated following a classical Kalman Filter approach. The result is a novel estimator that preserves the simplicity of the original Kalman formulation and avoids the explicit calculation of Jacobian matrices in each iteration or the evaluation of augmented state vectors.

International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning

A framework based on a mixed reality simulator for coordinating teams of autonomous Unmanned Aeri... more A framework based on a mixed reality simulator for coordinating teams of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is been developed. This framework would serve as a tool to facilitate crossing the reality gap for different applications; particularly when using these UAVs teams for air pollution monitoring and measurement. The system is built on a co-evolutionary simulator that makes use of data transmitted from some real UAVs to integrate them within a team of simulated UAVs. The system allows the progressive increase of the number of real UAV in the team. This facilitates the setting-up of a single UAV control system and also of the UAV collaboration schemes for different scenarios. A specific implementation of this system focussed on mapping the pollutant dispersion of a plume in the atmosphere is presented. Implementing an appropriate pollution dispersion model within the simulator is a key aspect of the system. This model should require few computational resources, should be easy to adapt in real time to ambient changes, and it should have a fair accuracy.

Sensors

UAVs often perform tasks that require flying close to walls or structures and in environments whe... more UAVs often perform tasks that require flying close to walls or structures and in environments where a satellite-based location is not possible. Flying close to solid bodies implies a higher risk of collisions, thus requiring an increase in the precision of the measurement and control of the UAV’s position. The aerodynamic distortions generated by nearby walls or other objects are also relevant, making the control more complex and further placing demands on the positioning system. Performing wall-related tasks implies flying very close to the wall and, in some cases, even touching it. This work presents a Near-Wall Positioning System (NWPS) based on the combination of an Ultra-wideband (UWB) solution and LIDAR-based range finders. This NWPS has been developed and tested to allow precise positioning and orientation of a multirotor UAV relative to a wall when performing tasks near it. Specific position and orientation control hardware based on horizontal thrusters has also been designe...

Sensors

A new methodology for the estimation of tyre-contact forces is presented. The new procedure is an... more A new methodology for the estimation of tyre-contact forces is presented. The new procedure is an evolution of a previous method based on harmonic elimination techniques developed with the aim of producing low cost dynamometric wheels. While the original method required stress measurement in many rim radial lines and the fulfillment of some rigid conditions of symmetry, the new methodology described in this article significantly reduces the number of required measurement points and greatly relaxes symmetry constraints. This can be done without compromising the estimation error level. The reduction of the number of measuring radial lines increases the ripple of demodulated signals due to non-eliminated higher order harmonics. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the calibration procedure to this new scenario. A new calibration procedure that takes into account angular position of the wheel is completely described. This new methodology is tested on a standard commercial five-spoke car wheel. Obtained results are qualitatively compared to those derived from the application of former methodology leading to the conclusion that the new method is both simpler and more robust due to the reduction in the number of measuring points, while contact forces' estimation error remains at an acceptable level.

This work presents the developing of a self-propelled scale ship model aimed to perform resistanc... more This work presents the developing of a self-propelled scale ship model aimed to perform resistance and parametric roll tests in towing tanks. The main characteristic of the proposed system is that it doesn’t have any material link to a towing device to carry out the tests. This ship model has been fully instrumented in order to acquire all the significant raw data, process them onboard and communicate with an inshore station. This works presents a description of the proposed model as well as some results obtained by its use during a towing tank testing campaign.

2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2009

2011 Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing, 2011

This paper proposes swarm intelligence based approach for the real time coordination of groups of... more This paper proposes swarm intelligence based approach for the real time coordination of groups of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in tasks where values that are sensed from the aerial platform can be used to qualify the individuals. In particular, as an example application, here we consider environmental monitoring UAV teams. Their function is to monitor an area and when some undesired environmental condition arises, coordinate themselves to find the source as fast as possible. The swarm based algorithm has been extensively tested using a 3D simulation platform and validated with real UAVs flying over an industrial area.

Neurocomputing, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper introduces and studies the application of Constrained Sampling Evolutionary A... more ABSTRACT This paper introduces and studies the application of Constrained Sampling Evolutionary Algorithms in the framework of an UAV based search and rescue scenario. These algorithms have been developed as a way to harness the power of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) when operating in complex, noisy, multimodal optimization problems and transfer the advantages of their approach to real time real world problems that can be transformed into search and optimization challenges. These types of problems are denoted as Constrained Sampling problems and are characterized by the fact that the physical limitations of reality do not allow for an instantaneous determination of the fitness of the points present in the population that must be evolved. A general approach to address these problems is presented and a particular implementation using Differential Evolution as an example of CS-EA is created and evaluated using teams of UAVs in search and rescue missions. The results are compared to those of a Swarm Intelligence based strategy in the same type of problem as this approach has been widely used within the UAV path planning field in different variants by many authors.

2013 IEEE 7th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems (IDAACS), 2013

ABSTRACT This paper presents the work done for developing a self-propelled scale ship model for t... more ABSTRACT This paper presents the work done for developing a self-propelled scale ship model for towing tank testing, with the main characteristic of not having any material link to a towing device to carry out the tests. This model has been fully instrumented in order to acquire all the significant raw data, process them onboard and communicate with an inshore station, and all this for both seakeeping and resistance tests. In order to illustrate the applicability and advantages of the proposed model, some results obtained by its application on a towing tank test campaign, aimed at developing a parametric roll detection system, are also presented.

2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2014

A mixed reality simulation framework is being developed as a tool to facilitate the elaboration, ... more A mixed reality simulation framework is being developed as a tool to facilitate the elaboration, testing and deployment of control and collaborative strategies for teams of UAVs. The virtual world within the framework must contain a model of the phenomenon under analysis. It has been shown that, for complex cases, the use of real UAVs in an initiation phase could serve to simplify this model while increasing its accuracy. In a second step, a subsequent intermediate phase is implemented now. In this phase the virtual model is first scaled and then used to provide measurement data to the real planes that are equipped with virtual sensors in an augmented reality scenario. This way the cost and time of checking the coordination strategies and communications when several real planes are flying simultaneously can be greatly reduced. Once everything is tuned and adjusted within this intermediate phase, the whole system could be implemented in the full size real environment. An application ...

2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), 2015

This paper presents the strategies used to develop a speed control system for a ship model. This ... more This paper presents the strategies used to develop a speed control system for a ship model. This speed control is a part of a larger control and data acquisition system on board of an autonomous ship model that is being specifically developed to perform towing tank testing. Taking into account the requirements for this speed control system, and that the speeds to be measured are about one meter per second, a Laser Rangefinder is used as mean for measuring the speed of the model. This is quite unusual because these devices are just intended to measure distances between motionless objects. Various approaches used for setting up the controller are also presented.

En el presente proyecto, se muestra el trabajo realizado por el autor en la competición Imagine C... more En el presente proyecto, se muestra el trabajo realizado por el autor en la competición Imagine Cup'09, en su modalidad de Robótica y Algoritmos. Durante este trabajo se realizarán tareas de adquisición de conocimiento, pues la herramienta de programación ...

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2019

A positioning system based on the combination of various measurements is being developed in order... more A positioning system based on the combination of various measurements is being developed in order to allow precise UAV navigation on GPS denied environments. In the case of study, the task is developed near walls in a closed fully metallic environment with nearly homogeneous floor and walls. This led up to some interesting challenges. The first one regarding RF signal transmission on a metallic environment. Secondly, the difficulty of using SLAM or other computer vision navigation solutions due to the homogeneity of the walls and floor. Finally, a working place located near walls, where positioning systems tend to offer worst accuracy. To overcome these challenges, the proposed positioning method combines an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) based system, for global location, with unidirectional laser range finders, for very precise near-wall measurements. Moreover, RF transmission on various frequencies and results of the proposed positioning precision experiments performed are shown and results analyzed.

Robotics in Education, 2019

Teaching robotics in secondary school is common nowadays, although with heterogeneous approaches ... more Teaching robotics in secondary school is common nowadays, although with heterogeneous approaches in different countries, mainly in the specific technology that is used. Even with such lack of standardization, there are many common elements in these early stages of educational robotics, focused on basic assembling, simple sensing, and locomotion, which are a consequence of the simplicity of the robots that are used. In this paper, we aim to go one step ahead, and propose an approach of how the next stage in educational robotics should be. To this end, we analyze the current situation of this subject in reference to the robotics market and society, and then we propose a structure for the curriculum development. This approach is based on the use of the Robobo robot, as a clear example of the type of device that allows to perform such update of the subject, and on the use of a STEAM methodology, where a global view of how to face a robotics problem is presented.

Wireless gas sensor networks (WGSN) offer the potential of high spatial and temporal resolution m... more Wireless gas sensor networks (WGSN) offer the potential of high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of target areas in both critical and non-critical scenarios. We describe the design and evaluation of an electronic expansion module, MICARES, suitable for gas sensing applications with wireless sensor networks. The module is intended for use with the MICA family of motes through the 51-pin connector. Proper housing assured, the device is applicable to both indoor and outdoor gas sensing for buildings, commercial and industrial spaces. Challenges lay in sensor selection, analytical and experimental power budgeting and field testing. We present the design goals at the network and node level and the adopted solutions to achieve them. Appropriate adaptive sampling strategies for energy efficiency, along with data resulting from CO2 monitoring are described. Emphasis is put on embedded sensor integration into the electrical design and methods for on-board data acquisition and proce...

The present invention relates to distribute and self-configuring instrumentation in home and offi... more The present invention relates to distribute and self-configuring instrumentation in home and office environments. The object of this invention is to obtain a reduced cost distributed building automation instrumentation system in home and office environments with distributed autonomous operation capabilities, including support for modifying and adapting system operation to user preferences, assuring assembly security. To that end, the present invention proposes using commonly used components for designing a non-proprietary instrumentation network (1,3,7) and constructing terminal nodes (2) for the instrumentation (4,5,9,10) which facilitate connecting generic devices (10). The present invention proposes mechanisms aimed at improving the installation, configuration, operation, security and autonomy of the instrumentation network, as well as a central node (6) as support in network initialization, configuration and management tasks.

The initiation phase of a mixed reality simulator that is being used for training autonomous Unma... more The initiation phase of a mixed reality simulator that is being used for training autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is presented. The simulator aims to adjust the UAVs controllers and their collaborative strategies. The model for the physical phenomena under analysis is a key aspect of the virtual reality environment. This model should be accurate, but also simple and easily configurable. The use of an initiation phase in the application of this mixed reality framework can result in a simplification and an increase in accuracy of the physical model. The monitoring of a smoke plume exhausted by a stack is used to illustrate the application of this technique.

Sensors, 2020

The nonlinear problem of sensing the attitude of a solid body is solved by a novel implementation... more The nonlinear problem of sensing the attitude of a solid body is solved by a novel implementation of the Kalman Filter. This implementation combines the use of quaternions to represent attitudes, time-varying matrices to model the dynamic behavior of the process and a particular state vector. This vector was explicitly created from measurable physical quantities, which can be estimated from the filter input and output. The specifically designed arrangement of these three elements and the way they are combined allow the proposed attitude estimator to be formulated following a classical Kalman Filter approach. The result is a novel estimator that preserves the simplicity of the original Kalman formulation and avoids the explicit calculation of Jacobian matrices in each iteration or the evaluation of augmented state vectors.

International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning

A framework based on a mixed reality simulator for coordinating teams of autonomous Unmanned Aeri... more A framework based on a mixed reality simulator for coordinating teams of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is been developed. This framework would serve as a tool to facilitate crossing the reality gap for different applications; particularly when using these UAVs teams for air pollution monitoring and measurement. The system is built on a co-evolutionary simulator that makes use of data transmitted from some real UAVs to integrate them within a team of simulated UAVs. The system allows the progressive increase of the number of real UAV in the team. This facilitates the setting-up of a single UAV control system and also of the UAV collaboration schemes for different scenarios. A specific implementation of this system focussed on mapping the pollutant dispersion of a plume in the atmosphere is presented. Implementing an appropriate pollution dispersion model within the simulator is a key aspect of the system. This model should require few computational resources, should be easy to adapt in real time to ambient changes, and it should have a fair accuracy.

Sensors

UAVs often perform tasks that require flying close to walls or structures and in environments whe... more UAVs often perform tasks that require flying close to walls or structures and in environments where a satellite-based location is not possible. Flying close to solid bodies implies a higher risk of collisions, thus requiring an increase in the precision of the measurement and control of the UAV’s position. The aerodynamic distortions generated by nearby walls or other objects are also relevant, making the control more complex and further placing demands on the positioning system. Performing wall-related tasks implies flying very close to the wall and, in some cases, even touching it. This work presents a Near-Wall Positioning System (NWPS) based on the combination of an Ultra-wideband (UWB) solution and LIDAR-based range finders. This NWPS has been developed and tested to allow precise positioning and orientation of a multirotor UAV relative to a wall when performing tasks near it. Specific position and orientation control hardware based on horizontal thrusters has also been designe...

Sensors

A new methodology for the estimation of tyre-contact forces is presented. The new procedure is an... more A new methodology for the estimation of tyre-contact forces is presented. The new procedure is an evolution of a previous method based on harmonic elimination techniques developed with the aim of producing low cost dynamometric wheels. While the original method required stress measurement in many rim radial lines and the fulfillment of some rigid conditions of symmetry, the new methodology described in this article significantly reduces the number of required measurement points and greatly relaxes symmetry constraints. This can be done without compromising the estimation error level. The reduction of the number of measuring radial lines increases the ripple of demodulated signals due to non-eliminated higher order harmonics. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the calibration procedure to this new scenario. A new calibration procedure that takes into account angular position of the wheel is completely described. This new methodology is tested on a standard commercial five-spoke car wheel. Obtained results are qualitatively compared to those derived from the application of former methodology leading to the conclusion that the new method is both simpler and more robust due to the reduction in the number of measuring points, while contact forces' estimation error remains at an acceptable level.

This work presents the developing of a self-propelled scale ship model aimed to perform resistanc... more This work presents the developing of a self-propelled scale ship model aimed to perform resistance and parametric roll tests in towing tanks. The main characteristic of the proposed system is that it doesn’t have any material link to a towing device to carry out the tests. This ship model has been fully instrumented in order to acquire all the significant raw data, process them onboard and communicate with an inshore station. This works presents a description of the proposed model as well as some results obtained by its use during a towing tank testing campaign.

2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2009

2011 Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing, 2011

This paper proposes swarm intelligence based approach for the real time coordination of groups of... more This paper proposes swarm intelligence based approach for the real time coordination of groups of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in tasks where values that are sensed from the aerial platform can be used to qualify the individuals. In particular, as an example application, here we consider environmental monitoring UAV teams. Their function is to monitor an area and when some undesired environmental condition arises, coordinate themselves to find the source as fast as possible. The swarm based algorithm has been extensively tested using a 3D simulation platform and validated with real UAVs flying over an industrial area.

Neurocomputing, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper introduces and studies the application of Constrained Sampling Evolutionary A... more ABSTRACT This paper introduces and studies the application of Constrained Sampling Evolutionary Algorithms in the framework of an UAV based search and rescue scenario. These algorithms have been developed as a way to harness the power of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) when operating in complex, noisy, multimodal optimization problems and transfer the advantages of their approach to real time real world problems that can be transformed into search and optimization challenges. These types of problems are denoted as Constrained Sampling problems and are characterized by the fact that the physical limitations of reality do not allow for an instantaneous determination of the fitness of the points present in the population that must be evolved. A general approach to address these problems is presented and a particular implementation using Differential Evolution as an example of CS-EA is created and evaluated using teams of UAVs in search and rescue missions. The results are compared to those of a Swarm Intelligence based strategy in the same type of problem as this approach has been widely used within the UAV path planning field in different variants by many authors.

2013 IEEE 7th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems (IDAACS), 2013

ABSTRACT This paper presents the work done for developing a self-propelled scale ship model for t... more ABSTRACT This paper presents the work done for developing a self-propelled scale ship model for towing tank testing, with the main characteristic of not having any material link to a towing device to carry out the tests. This model has been fully instrumented in order to acquire all the significant raw data, process them onboard and communicate with an inshore station, and all this for both seakeeping and resistance tests. In order to illustrate the applicability and advantages of the proposed model, some results obtained by its application on a towing tank test campaign, aimed at developing a parametric roll detection system, are also presented.

2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2014