Farnborough Air Show

Just back from exhibiting at Futures Day at the Farnborough Air Show.  Among the people we met, it was encouraging to bump into so many Bristol graduates in the aerospace business.  Now, watch this space as we work on our autonomous mini-Blades display team...

Congratulations Gillian

Gillian Clare (nee Keith) has passed her PhD viva with only minor corrections to be done.  Gillian's work on aircraft taxi optimization, supported by Airbus, identified a possible saving of total delay time of 56% at London's Heathrow Airport.  Gillian now moves on to work at BAE Systems in Filton.

Graduation

Congratulations to all our graduates this year.

Special mention to Alison Eele, who completed her PhD with me earlier this year and graduated with the other PhDs on Friday.  Alison's work developed a novel path optimization technique combining global search with nonlinear dynamics constraints for obstacle avoidance.  Alison has now moved on to a postdoctoral research post at Cambridge working on air traffic management.

IMAV at RAF Waddington Airshow

I attended the RAF Waddington Airshow to exhibit research work on the DSTL stand in the UAV hangar.  In particular, the Intelligent Micro Air Vehicle (IMAV) was on static display (right).  (The cable and hanging wire were just for the exhibition - normally it is wireless and free-flying.)

The IMAV project combines Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (VSLAM) with guidance and control techniques to provide an autonomous indoor surveillance capability.  Users such as fire and rescue responders or police would use it for first investigations in hazardous situations.  It navigates solely by its own vision, making it independent of GPS, and does not require a skilled pilot.  Ince the research is focussed on the algorithms for control and navigation, the development hardware is deliberately simple: we use a modified radio-controlled toy helicopter and a commercial Wi-Fi webcam, again modified to suit SLAM.

As well as discussing UAV technology and research with a diverse audience, the airshow gave an opportunity to get up close with some UAV hardware.  For example, here's a picture of my car next to Watchkeeper (left).  Not much street cred I admit, but it's always difficult to get a sense of scale from UAV photos.

Thanks to Chris Jones from DSTL for giving us the opportunity to exhibit.

Background: IMAV is a joint project between the Departments of Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bristol.  It is funded by PhD studentships from the Faculty of Engineering with initial support from DSTL.  PhD students John Bartholemew (CS) and Kieran Wood (AE) are supervised by Drs. Andrew Calway (CS), Walterio Mayol-Cuevas (CS), Tom Richardson (AE) and Arthur Richards (AE).