Andalusian Foundation For Aerospace Development
www.catec.aero
Short description of the organization
The Andalusian Foundation for Aerospace Development (FADA) is a non-profit organization that takes care of the management of CATEC research centre. The main goal is R&D on aerospace related technologies in coordination with industries, universities and other research centres. FADA-CATEC has currently 45 researchers and was awarded with a 21 Million Euros Grant for laboratories and equipment in 2008. The departments involved in this project would be the Avionics and Unmanned Systems and the Robotics and Automation ones. They include more than 20 researchers working on aerial robotics technology and it has a large experience in developing solutions and application with aerial robots.
Role in the project and main tasks
FADA-CATEC will lead the design and development of the multi-rotor aerial robot including the manipulator device. Also, FADA-CATEC will lead the integration activities for the multi- rotor system and will have an important role on the validation experiments of this system in an industrial environment.
Relevant previous experience
AWARE (FP6) on the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles with ground infrastructure, PLANET (FP7) on the application of unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensor networks to environment conservation and airport automation, including the developing of a HMI for multivehicle control and monitor, EC-SAFEMOBIL (FP7) on the development of methodologies applied to distributed control and estimation techniques applied to multi-vehicle systems, ARCAS (FP7) on the cooperation of aerial robots with robotics arms for assembly tasks, and so on. In fact, FADA-CATEC is the coordinator of the two IP projects ARCAS and EC-SAFEMOBIL just mentioned. Also, FADA-CATEC is an associated partner of the CONET Network of Excellence on Cooperating Objects (FP7), and is participating in the Galileo project FieldCopter in the use of EGNOS to improve the navigation reliability and precision of UAV helicopter applied to precision agriculture applications. Furthermore, FADA-CATEC carries on internal projects related to multivehicle control and user interfaces as ANIMO, devoted to the development of an interface to monitor several quadrotors. In addition of the above mentioned FP7 projects, all of them dealing with Unmanned Aerial Systems, FADA-CATEC has many other projects dealing with UAVs, including contracts with companies and projects in all the main Spanish R&D programmes, like for example the CENIT projects, SINTONIA (UAVs with minimal environment impact) and PROMETEO (forest fire fighting) and the INNPRONTA projects ADAM (Automation of Autonomous Mobility), and especially, PERIGEO where its main topics is the development and initial validation of space technologies using UAV.
Key publications before the project
- A. E. Jimenez-Cano, J. Martin, G. Heredia, A. Ollero and R. Cano, “Control of an aerial robot with multi-link arm for assembly tasks”, International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2013): 4916-4921.
- R. Cano, C. Pérez, F. Pruaño, A. Ollero, G. Heredia, “Mechanical design of a 6-DOF aerial manipulator for assembling bar structures using UAVs”, RED-UAS 2013.
- D. Santamaría, F. Alarcón, A. Jiménez, A. Viguria, M. Béjar and A. Ollero, “Model-based design, development and validation for UAS critical software”, in: Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems. January 2012. Volume 65, Issue 1-4, pp 103-114.
- F. Alarcon, A. Viguria and A. Ollero, “Real-time rapid prototyping environment for navigation solutions”, presented as poster in: the 8th International ESA Conference on Guidance and Navigation Control Systems (GNC 2011). June 2011. Prague, Czech Republic.
- First manipulation operations in the world with a multi-dof manip”ulator on an indoor aerial robot (see this video )